Women in Electoral Politics

Women comprise roughly about half of the world’s population. According to population Reference Bureau, 2004. (World Population Data Sheets, The United Nations) out of 3209 millions women living in the world, the share of Indian is 531.9 million. This amounts to nearly half of India’s total population. As per 2001 Census, the ratio of females per thousand males is 933. Nearly seventy percent of the women are living below the poverty line and two-third of them are illiterate. According to the UNDP’s Human Development Reports 1995, “Poverty has a women’s face; of the 1.3 billion people in poverty, 70 per cent are women”.

Women constituting half of the population of our country have been an integral part of our social structure principally due to their contributing to the socio-economic spheres of life, notwithstanding the fact that women in India have been discriminated because of gender bias prevalent in the patriarchic value of the Indian society. The dominant patriarchy has been denied women equality of status and opportunities in socio-economic and political spheres. Amidst such patriarchic bias, women in India can not be treated as a homogeneous unit in view of the differences based in terms of class, caste, status, space (rural-urban divide) etc. Several studies have shown that the social, economic and political empowerment of Indian rural women is comparatively much lower than of their urban counterparts, Rural India women have still been treated as “Object” of development rather than the “Subject” of development.

The involvement of women in the development process and political decision making process has always been advocated by social and political thinkers. The report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, which is considered as a significant document on the socio-economic conditions of India women says that “though women’s participation in the political process has increased, their ability to produce an impact on the political process has been negligible because of the inadequate attention paid to their political education and mobilization by both political parties and women’s organizations. Parties have tended to see

women voters as appendages of the males. Among women, the leadership has become diffused and diverse having sharp contradictions with regard to inequalities that affect the status of women in every sphere – social, economic and political.”