Women crucial as labharthi but not as elected MLAs in polls

State Assembly elections show rise of women as beneficiaries and voters, but struggle for representation in politics continues.

Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand are among State Assembly elections that turned on the vote of women, and on the strength of direct benefit transfer schemes specifically targeted at women. These schemes have created a vote category of women labharthi (beneficiaries) over and above caste and community considerations, but with few women candidates and fewer still winning in these very elections, are women to be just beneficiaries and not representatives?

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For example, in Madhya Pradesh, in 2023, an election that was won by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because of the Ladli Behena income support scheme, the number of women elected as MLAs went down from 30 out of 230 seats in 2013, to 27 out of 230 seats. In Maharashtra, even on the back of the Laadki Bahin scheme, the representation by women saw a decline from 24 seats in 2019 to 21 this time around. Clearly, women as a voting category are on a high, but not so much as getting a seat at the decision-making table. 

Political scientists and politicians, however, are finding hope in the newly clear Women’s Reservation Act, 2023. According to political scientist Professor Ashwani Kumar, whose forthcoming book Last Mile Welfare in India tackles just such a subject, the rise of women as beneficiaries and a category of voter that subsumes other categories, only means “from a standard economic perspective, we can’t predict women empowerment and representation in India”.

“Unlike Mandal reservations and the BJP’s non-Yadav OBC (Other Backward Classes) politics or Mandal 2.0, representation of women is being negotiated through universal and secular maternal welfare benefits. Thus, once the Women’s Reservation Act, 2023 mandating 33% reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies is implemented, I expect a kind of Keynesian social multiplier effects of maternal social welfare in India in terms of women’s representation,” he added.

Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, BJP leader and former Rajya Sabha MP, is of the view that direct benefit transfers to women are not “entitlements” but “empowerment”, and that “assertions will rise because of it as women will seek greater participation on the back of this empowerment”.

“As part of the Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini (a think tank affiliated with the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS), we did a study in 1995, on women local body representatives after the then Sharad Pawar government in Maharashtra had brought in reservations for women in local bodies in 1991. We found that the first batch of women representatives were drawn from families where the male members were in politics, but since, in a vacuum, this can happen, it was not something that prevented a larger spread later. Secondly, women started asserting their identity, starting from their names, rather than as a reference to how they stood in relation to their male relatives who were in politics, and one of our recommendations was that men should get reverse reservation on committees like women and child welfare, in order that there is an even spread in all committees,” Mr. Sahasrabuddhe said.