Women’s representation skewed, olls fail on gender equity front

NEW DELHI: The Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh elections have failed to deliver on the gender equity front. Fewer women were elected overall and major parties did not increase women representation among their candidates in any significant way.

- Gilles Verniers [e-mail]

In Gujarat, the three major contesting parties fielded only 37 women out of a total of 542 candidates. The Bharatiya Janata Party BJP) nominated 17 women candidates 9%), against 14 for Congress 8%) and only 6 for Aam Aadmi Party AAP) 3%). Only 15 of them won, all but one on BJP tickets. Of these 37 candidates, 31 were first time candidates, which means that there were only six women contesting on a major party ticket with prior state election experience. The veteran female politician in the Gujarat assembly is Thakor Geniben Nagaji from Vav, North Gujarat. She is the lone woman elected on a Congress ticket.

In 2017, fourteen women were elected and five years later, only four of them were allowed to re-run. This points to the problem that the small number of women representatives are not even given a chance to pursue a career or to build political experience beyond their first election.

These numbers place Gujarat only slightly above the national average of women’s representation in Vidhan Sabha, which is currently at 7%. Women’s representation in Gujarat in 2022 is only twice what it used to be 70 years ago.