A fluke accident gave Nick Marshall — alpha male, Chicago advertising executive, and hero of What Women Want, the 2000 American romantic comedy the ability to hear what women think. Alas, for India’s political strategists, in real life, there’s no such luck. As we inch closer to the 2014 general elections, however, there is no getting away from that pivotal question — what do women want?
There is no easy answer. Much depends on which group of women one is thinking of, and where. In the days ahead, expect party leaders of various hues to recalibrate and give finesse to their pitches aimed at women. Unsurprisingly, on election eve, empowerment of women is a buzzy phrase. In January this year, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s incantation of the need to “empower women” during a 90-minute television interview set twitterati on fire. The poll results will tell if women found his message equally scorching.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, Mr Gandhi once again reminded us that India can never aspire to be a superpower without empowering its women. Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) alpha male and prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, has also gone public with his thoughts on women: “If India has to increase its GDP, we have to increase the participation of women in our economy.” All the gifts he gets as chief minister are auctioned and the proceeds go towards educating girls, Mr Modi said.
The race for the female vote has led to imaginative strategies. In Chandigarh, the local BJP unit is reportedly zeroing in on women attending kitty parties and kirtans. Women activists, meanwhile, have mounted the “Power of 49 campaign”. The aim is to awaken women, who form nearly 49 per cent of India’s voter base, and egg them on to make an informed choice in the coming polls. The campaign has come up with “Womanifesto”, a six-point plan critical to the freedom, safety and equality of India’s women and girls. The Aam Aadmi Party was the first to publicly commit to the six-point “Womanifesto” which asks voters to demand that their elected representatives commit the necessary resources and political will to end generations-old violence and suppression that confronts millions of girls and women in India today.
Candidates for the 2014 Lok Sabha are urged to make specific commitments in six areas — plough resources for long-term public education programmes to end gender-based discrimination and violence; support Women’s Reservation Bill in the Lok Sabha; ensure women’s representation in all councils, committees and task forces; implement police reforms, fast-track justice and make existing laws count and a host of other measures which will help women, both in the organised and unorganised sector, to thrive economically.
If political parties are wooing women with such vigour, it is because women are delivering votes. In the last 50 years, one of the most arresting changes has been an uptick in the sex ratio of the electorate. While male voter turnouts have remained more or less the same, the number of female voters has surged. In 16 of the 20 states in India that went to polls after 2010, women’s voting percentage outstripped that of men’s. Most significantly, the two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, recorded more women votes. Between them, these two states have 120 of the country’s 545 parliamentary seats and can decisively change the fortune of any political party.
Dr Shamika Ravi and Dr Mudit Kapoor, two academics at the Indian School of Business, who have studied the data on Indian elections over the last 50 years and explored the role of women voters, have described this as a “silent revolution.” Their research reveals that the sex ratio of voters — the number of women voters for every 1,000 men voters — has improved from 715 in the 1960s to 883 in the 2000s. Fascinatingly, even the traditionally backward Bimaru states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh have recorded this trend in recent years.
Does increasing women voter participation in elections impact political outcomes? Research by Dr Ravi and Dr Kapoor is revealing: when the Assembly election was held in Bihar in February 2005, no political party emerged as a winner to form the government. As a result, re-elections were held within eight months. Comparing the outcomes of all 243 Assembly constituencies in Bihar for both the elections, the researchers found that in 35 per cent of the constituencies, there was a change in poll outcomes. This, the researchers say, was fundamentally brought about by the women voters. The outcome was a new political party taking up the reigns in Bihar. It will be interesting to see how women vote this time in Bihar. Incidentally, the women’s vote was a key factor in the resounding victory of the JD(U)-BJP combine during the 2010 Assembly elections.
The interesting point about the surge in women voters across the country is that this change did not happen as a result of more women registering to vote compared to men, but because among those who were already on the electoral roll, more women actually turned up at the polling booth and voted.
This is wonderful news. But when every political party talks about its commitment to “women’s empowerment”, it is important to also acknowledge the elephant in the room — India’s abysmally skewed sex ratio. According to Census 2011, the population ratio in India is 940 females per 1,000 males — worse than not just the global average, but the sex ratio in neighbouring countries as well.
What does all this mean in electoral terms? “We accept the power of 49 as a given, but in a normal situation, if there was no neglect of women, it would be 50,” says Dr Ravi. “Even if we have a woman representing a constituency, the chances of her targeting males rather than females is more because there are more men than women in most constituencies,” she adds.
Women matter, numerically, politically, economically and every which way. They are emerging as an electoral force, despite the adverse sex ratio in the country. Imagine what is possible if female foetuses were not aborted, little girls were not abandoned and the full potential of the female vote could be realised.
