Women voters: Hard to get

Mandate 2014 will see political parties wooing the woman vote like never before. Rahul Gandhi is already at it for the Congress with determined chants of “women’s empowerment’’. Narendra Modi is busy selling his “chaiwala’’ roots to the electorate but his party is mulling suggestions to push women-specific poll promises in the BJP manifesto including, according to one report, the distribution of subsidized sanitary napkins.
Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party has publicly signed on to a radical six-point “womanifesto’’ prepared by left-wing feminists although his short-lived government in Delhi was mired in controversy over a midnight raid that led to allegations of misbehaviour with African girls. Then there are, of course, the regional satraps who are getting ready to shower the women of India with post-poll sops like free mixer-grinders, pressure cookers and gold jewellery.
There is a strange paradox here. Much like democracies the world over, women in India are emerging as an important voter constituency and political parties are eager to cultivate it. The street protests that followed the brutal gang-rape of a young paramedic in Delhi in the winter of 2012 gave momentum to this recognition. Yet, no party seems to know quite how to go about it, trapped as they are in patriarchal notions of what women really want. Can a free pressure cooker, for instance, tempt a woman to vote for A, B or C candidate or party? Or is she looking for measures that will substantially change her life by giving her economic freedom and rescuing her from abuse at home and rape at work? Has she earned the right to exercise independent voting choices in the 21st century? Or does she still remain a slave to the diktats of the men in her family and community?
Women are showing up on the electoral landscape as a statistic that can no longer be ignored. The number of registered women voters is growing, slowly but surely. Where there were once just 715 listed female voters for every 1,000 male voters in the 1960s, today there are 803. And they are voting in huge numbers, often more than the men. According to figures quoted by former chief election commissioner S Y Quraishi, in 17 of the 22 states that went to polls in the past two years, women outvoted the men by far. This was true even in a state like Uttar Pradesh where 60.29% women exercised their franchise in the 2012 assembly elections as against 58.82% men.
Increasingly, they are also deciding for themselves which way to vote. This is particularly true in urban areas, says pollster G V L Narasimha Rao who has been tracking election data for several decades. For instance, in the 2013 Delhi state polls, Kejriwal’s AAP attracted more women voters than the BJP or the Congress, which ironically was led by Sheila Dikshit.
One of the chief reasons for this declaration of semi-independence by women, says Rao, is the growth of the electronic media. Television, he reasons, has allowed women to access information in a way they never could earlier. Consequently, they no longer have to depend on their menfolk to make choices.
The penny is dropping but political parties are still grappling to comprehend the emerging trend. They are so steeped in the politics of patronage that they continue to see women as vote banks to be lured with freebies and crumbs. “There is no serious engagement with women as a constituency,’’ says feminist and activist Lalita Ramdas. “This is why political parties are unable to figure out how to harness the woman vote. They get into action only at election time. They don’t bother with longterm political citizenship education to help them think through issues that concern women or help women decide what kind of representation they are really looking for.’’
The converse is also true. Women themselves are yet to understand their power as a voter bloc. They are divided on multiple levels: rural-urban, upper caste-lower caste, educated-illiterate, rich-poor, etc. Few women’s groups have attempted to reach out across the various divides to craft a common platform. The first time women from different sections came together was during the anti-rape protests in Delhi in 2012 but the movement didn’t amount to much beyond pressuring a panicked political class into passing a tougher law against rape.
“The challenge is to engage with this new trend and take it forward,’’ says Ramdas. “Feminist networks tend to be radical and engage with only a small section of women.’’ And the women’s wings of political parties are voiceless adjuncts.
India is a country of strange contradictions and the paradox of the woman vote shows up in another disturbing statistic. The latest data from the Election Commission reveals that just 41% of the new voters registered on the rolls are women. This is lower than even the skewed gender ratio. It is also estimated that as many as 65 million women voters are missing from electoral rolls across the country. It could be sheer sloppiness. Or it could be related to orthodox beliefs about the position of unmarried women in families and their right to property.
If these missing women voters were part of the electorate, think of how much more influential the woman vote would be. Women have come a long way, but there’s a long, long road ahead still.