Increasing the Representation of Women

In the light of the recent initiatives worldwide and nationwide to empower women and increase participation of women in every field, let us analyze exactly what prompted women in outvoting men in the recent elections in the last few years in India?

India has a rather mixed track record when it comes to the matter of women’s participation and representation in politics. Indian women were given equal vote on the day this country achieved Independence, something which developed countries like USA or UK took 144 or 100 yrs to achieve. Women in India have held many powerful positions in the past in state as well as national levels and continue to do so at present. The 73^rd Constitution Amendment ensures that minimum one-third of India’s 3.2Mn elected representatives are women by reserving seats for women in gram panchayats. The quota for women seats was initially 33% which was later on increased to 50% on 27^th August 2009. Since then many states have implemented gender parity in representation of municipal entities.

The “right to vote” itself is not sufficient to ensure gender parity in voting throughout the country as a result of which during the 1^st 2 decades after the Independence participation of women in the voting process was lagging behind by almost 20 points in comparison to that with men. But in the last few years participation of women has picked up with the average where women have outvoted men in as many as 17 states of the country.

What prompted to increase women’s participation in elections?

The credit for women outvoting men in 17 states nationwide goes to the initiatives taken by the Election Commission (EC) which has not only improved the whole process of elections with strict regulations but also encouraged women participation.

• Getting the Women Voters to register – India suffers from various problems like low sex ratio (among the top 10 populous countries in the world, India ranks 9^th with 940, ahead only of China with 926) and low literacy rates. The EC took numerous steps to ensure that women were not left out from the democratic process.
• Encouraging Women’s Participation in the voting process – a major challenge faced by the EC was to convince women to go out and place their votes on the day of the polls. In many places there were separate queues for women and men, keeping in mind the socio-cultural prejudices. In 2012 Uttar Pradesh, for every 1 man allowed to cast their vote, 2 women were allowed to cast theirs. This helped in moving the queues much faster and as a good motivation for women. The EC had also a standard norm to staff at least one woman staff in the polling team so as to avoid violating cultural sensitivities while identification process of females.
• Conducting Pre-Election Surveys – some of factors which kept the women away from voting includes dependence and approval from family elders especially men, lack of adequate toilet facilities, security concerns, etc. So the EC came up with awareness programs to address these issues whereby the brand ambassadors for the program, leading folk singers Sharda Sinha in Bihar and Malini Awasthi led thousands of females to the polling booth.
• Increased Women Voters Turn-outs – continuing efforts by the EC resulted in tremendous success over the last few years. For example in the case of 2014 Lok Sabha Elections the turnout of women voters increased to 65.53% from 55.82% against an increase of 8% in case of male voters turnouts. This in turn helped in lowering the gender gap in voting to an all-time low of 1.46%.
• Encouraging participation of Women as Candidates – even though the participation of women in the voting process have increased to a great extent, the participation of women in legislature is surprisingly low which is evident by the presence of a mere 12.15% of women in Lok Sabha. This number is nothing but humiliating when compared to several conservative Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

What else can be done to encourage women participation in the voting process?

Even though the EC has improved the condition of female participation in the country, there is still scope for major improvements –

• Ease in the voting process – as many citizens travel from one place to another for various purposes like jobs or studies, it becomes difficult to travel to one’s place of origin just to cast one’s vote. Help of IT can be taken to facilitate some measures that will enable to cast their even if they are residing outside their hometown, provided they can show valid reason.
• Good candidates to look up to – political parties across the country should put up candidates who possess good quality and with whom the common people can relate to.
• Role of women in decision making – women must be made to feel that their views matter, some portion of the fate of a political party rests in their hands too. Women must be given equal access to the decision making process. This can be addressed by incorporating gender inequality issues in the political agendas of the parties.

Conclusion

50yrs ago, any political party, in any part of the country could easily choose to ignore the women voters with full confidence. Not only were the number of female voters registered back then were very few, but out of those who were registered a handful would show up to cast their votes on the polling day. Fast forward to 70yrs after the Independence, the situation is quite the opposite where women’s participation is on the upswing and no party has the courage to demean the value of female voters in the election process. Initiatives by the EC were targeted with awareness programs at groups like the Kathi Darbar community in Amreli district in Gujarat who believed that women should not play any part in the democratic process of the nation. Recent trends have shown that political parties are increasingly targeting the female voters with issues of safety and prohibition. Women voters seem to be playing the role of “swing voters” in the elections. So it can be said that today women are exercising their “franchise” and it depends upon the political parties whether they will rise up to the challenge and offer women with the right opportunities like offering them tickets to contest in the elections.