In 21st century India, women struggle for political representation

Among the 13 women who won, nine belong to BJP and four to Congress. The parties had fielded 10 and 12 female candidates, respectively. In the 2012 Assembly election, both parties had fielded more female candidates--19 from BJP and 14 from Congress.

While Congress’s president-elect Rahul Gandhi recently announced he is going to push for an early passage for the long-due Women’s Reservation Bill in the parliament, his party reduced the number of women they put in the fray.

The Bill, which has been introduced several times in the Lok Sabha since 1996, is still pending approval. It proposes to reserve 33 percent of all seats for women in the Lok Sabha and the state legislative assemblies to improve their under-represented status in politics and governance. But it has suffered from a lack of political will among major parties to pass the bill.

The parties often justify fielding fewer women candidates with a notion of women having low capacity to win elections. However, nine women out of the 12 candidates fielded by BJP have won this year, showing a 75 percent success rate. The success rate for male candidates is in fact down at around 50 percent.

On the other hand, out of 1,828 candidates only 6.8 percent or 126 were women this time compared; this is marginally better than last time when there were 91 of them. The total number of women fighting the polls went up despite the two major political parties shrinking their numbers because most female candidates were from smaller regional parties or independent.

Hence, their chances of winning also remained low corresponding to the voter base of their respective parties.