Dipanita Malik, a Junior Research Fellow at the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, and a Teaching Fellow for the Department of Political Science, Ashoka University, for her article in ‘Women for politics Asia’ found out that as of July 30, 2022, Nagaland and Manipur have women as their national representatives only once in their state’s entire history.
Her data analysis showed that the experience of an adequate representation of women in the House of the People has been seriously missing in India’s trajectory for a long time.
“India currently has eighty-one women as Members of the Parliament, two women as Cabinet Ministers, nine women as Union Ministers of State, three women as Governors, and one as Lieutenant Governor. Across states, there is only one woman Chief Minister – Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal. Recently, a woman was elected President of the Republic of India – Droupadi Murmu. Since 1950, the country has seen only two women Presidents, no woman Vice-President, and only one woman as a Prime Minister (elected twice in that position). 41 women have occupied Governor or Lieutenant Governors positions, against 796 men, since 1947,” she writes.
She mentions that publicly available interviews of women contestants reveal that they continue to find the need to seek permission from their male counterparts, including toddlers, to join politics.
“They are expected to prioritize their family and household chores and treat all other affairs – local, regional, national – as matters that men are capable of addressing better. While it is true that this conversation is not about women competing with men, patriarchy’s resilience only exacerbates men’s dominance in the public space,” she pointed out.
She believes that the systematic assignment of gendered roles in positions of power must be challenged and an effort to raise awareness of the issue of women in varied positions of power must be everyone’s effort.
“As society and politics closely interact with each other, women’s roles in places where power resides need to be transformed from passive characters to active actors,” she continued.
“To be sure, it might take courage to admit that the social legitimacy of discriminating norms often trumps the legal legitimacy of equality of access and public opportunity. However, India’s claim to be the world’s largest democracy will always sound partly hollow as long as half of its population does not get seen or heard in places of power,” she concluded.