Mapping Women's Political Journey

India’s women-centric policies were conceived mostly under global influence, until the rising women voter turnout in the country changed the trend

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

AFTER the Election Commission (EC) of India’s analysis of the 2019 Lok Sabha election’s voter turnout revealed 67.18 per cent of the women electorate turned out to cast their votes as against 67.01 per cent of the male electorate, Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra hailed it as a historic moment. 

Historic it was, indeed. In the 1962 Lok Sabha election, for every 1,000 men who cast their votes, there were only 675 women who voted. The 1967 election recorded a quick rise in women’s participation in voting —there were 766 women voters for every 1,000 men who voted. It then stagnated and took another 47 years for the ratio to rise to 929 women voters per 1,000 men voters, recorded in 2019. This figure puts the women voters’ turnout above men’s’, as the electoral rolls had only 926 women per 1,000 men. 

In a country where the sex ratio of 940 females per 1,000 males (as per the 2011 census) stands significantly lower than the global average of 984 females per 1,000 males–owing largely to discriminatory social practices —more women than men participating in electoral democracy is a indeed a feat. 

Nevertheless, only 9.01 per cent of the candidates, and 14.36 per cent of the elected MPs, were women. This, too, was the result of a significant improvement that happened largely over the past decade, as women’s participation in both voting and candidature remained mostly stagnant from the time of the Constituent Assembly of 1946 to the first years of the new century.