India has experienced a decade of political churning. With the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014, India’s conservative movement has found new wind in its sails. This rejuvenation has sparked a wave of cultural revivalism, reshaped party systems, altered caste equations, and prompted a shift toward mercantilist economic ideologies.
Adding to these winds of change, the past decade-and-a-half has witnessed a remarkable increase in women’s political participation, which has led to a scramble among political parties to consolidate the “women’s vote” with varying degrees of success. Most notably, the BJP has worked tirelessly to incorporate women into political spaces by propagating politics through the moral concept of seva, or selfless service. This strategy, among others, has helped reverse the party’s historical deficit with women.
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Reversal of fortune: Women’s political engagement
Globally, the political sphere has largely been the domain of men, with women trailing in terms of electoral turnout, political candidacy, activism, and engagement. In “first-wave democracies” (1828–1926), where democratic expansion led to male but typically not female suffrage, women faced innumerable arduous battles to secure their right to vote; suffrage movements were thus a critical first step in women’s mobilisation.
In contrast, universal adult franchise was enshrined in the Indian Constitution and ensured political equality for women from the moment of the country’s independence in 1947. Yet lived experience has not always measured up to that promised equality. When it came to voting, for instance, women’s turnout was significantly lower than men’s. In the 1962 elections, the first election for which voter data were disaggregated by gender, only 47% of eligible women voters cast their ballots, in stark contrast to 63% men. Furthermore, even when women did vote, they were likely to be influenced by male family members. For instance, in the 1996 national elections, survey data revealed that 86% women heeded their families’ advice when voting.
However, there are clear signs of cracks appearing in this gendered narrative. Historically women’s voter turnout paralleled men’s fluctuations, but a divergence occurred in 2009: women’s participation increased even as men’s decreased. Since then, women have continued to exercise their right to vote in increasing numbers, with the gender gap vanishing in the 2019 general elections.
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Furthermore, the assumption that women simply vote in tandem with men is also coming under scrutiny. In the 2014 general elections, only 61% women said they followed their family’s advice when making their voting decision — a sharp decline from the past. Similarly, in 2021, I surveyed 1,457 pairs of men and women living in the same household in Rajasthan and found that, although overall levels of support for the BJP and the Congress were comparable among men and women, there was notable diversity within households. Only 65% percent of women shared the same political allegiance as the men living in their households, indicating significant intra-household heterogeneity.
BJP’s emerging advantage among women
Much of this heightened engagement on the part of women has a partisan tilt. In recent state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh (2022) and Madhya Pradesh (2023), exit polls conducted by Axis-MyIndia showed that the BJP received a larger share of votes from women than its opponents did. In Rajasthan, my research found that when women deviated from men in the political realm, women tended to lean toward the BJP.
In BJP-aligned households, 73% women reported that they were also aligned with the BJP. However, in Congress–aligned households, only 68% of women followed men’s political preferences, with 25% aligning themselves with the rival BJP instead. Men’s ability to consolidate the household vote diminished further when they did not exhibit a clear preference; in these homes, the BJP was again the biggest gainer — with 48% of women aligning themselves with the party.
Although the findings were tentative, there are strong indications that women’s escalating political assertion poses a challenge for political parties in the Hindi heartland, especially those organised around caste lines. While caste has been the traditional lynchpin of the Indian polity, the BJP is attempting to leverage gender as a vertical cleavage to counter traditional caste-based mobilisation. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s acknowledgment of this strategic approach was evident in a recent proclamation that for him, rather than traditional caste identities, women constituted one of the “biggest castes” alongside the poor, young, and farmers.
There are signs that this strategy is paying off. For instance, in the 2020 state assembly elections in Bihar, 99 of the 125 seats (79%) secured by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) were won in constituencies where women’s voter turnout exceeded men’s. The BJP’s traction among women was also pronounced in Uttar Pradesh, as evidenced by community-specific, gender-disaggregated patterns from exit polls conducted by Axis-MyIndia in that state’s 2022 assembly elections..
Among upper caste groups, the BJP’s advantage over the Samajwadi Party (SP) aligns with expectations given that upper castes have long constituted a core element of the BJP’s support base. Here too, the BJP gains more from women than men. Similarly, the BJP’s disadvantage among Muslims and Yadavs — the latter forming the key base of the SP — is also unsurprising. But what is remarkable is the BJP’s advantage over the SP among women belonging to smaller but electorally significant caste groups, such as Jats, Kurmis, non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and non-Jatav Scheduled Castes (SCs). Even among Jatavs, members of the Dalit community who have long supported the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the BJP has an advantage over the SP when it comes to women.
From turnout to active participation: Women within political parties
While the BJP has found some success in its attempts to mobilise women, other parties have not thrown in the towel. The preferred approach of nearly all parties, including the BJP, to solicit the women’s vote has largely been through targeted “pro-women” policies. The list of such offerings includes the Janata Dal (United)’s implementation of prohibition in Bihar, the Trinamool Congress’s Kanyashree conditional cash transfer programme, and the BJP’s Ladli Behna unconditional cash transfer (in Madhya Pradesh). Yet there is little evidence about the effectiveness of any one welfare programme since competing parties often make similar promises.
Moreover, parties face hurdles in communicating these policy platforms to women because of disparities in political knowledge, networks, and socialisation. Bridging this gap necessitates investing in a cadre of activists capable of engaging and mobilising women through personal contact. While this investment can reap dividends for all parties, it is particularly crucial for parties rooted in social movements such as the BJP, whose success relies on garnering broader support for its cultural and ideological objectives.
At the same time, gender mobilisation presents a challenge for parties whose organisations are typically populated by male activists. In particular, the sex-segregated nature of social interactions means that male activists are typically restricted to interacting with other men in public spaces or living rooms of homes. Women, on the other hand, as I was told — and observed first hand — several times, could access the chulha (private spaces) to speak with women voters. Thus, gender-based outreach requires parties to invest in recruiting women.
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Against this backdrop, the BJP’s inextricable association with Hindutva is often perceived as a masculine and muscular manifestation of religious nationalism, which may seem at odds with the party’s emerging success in recruiting women. However, my analysis of survey data from Lokniti-CSDS suggests that women’s affinity for the BJP transcends mere voting preferences. Despite Hindutva’s association with masculine imagery, women who support the BJP exhibit levels of engagement in electoral activities comparable to or even surpassing those of women aligned with other political parties. In recent years, this trend has become increasingly pronounced, with the BJP outpacing its rivals in mobilising female supporters. What, then, can explain the BJP’s seemingly paradoxical success in recruiting women and engaging them in the public sphere?
Domesticating politics through seva
To understand why the BJP successfully mobilises women voters, one must acknowledge the barriers that women face in entering political life, which is viewed as dirty, immoral, and unsuitable for women. This perception is ingrained in patriarchal societies, where women are often tasked with upholding family honour and social status. Consequently, any deviation that women pursue from established norms may incur reputational or social costs for themselves and their families, prompting household heads to gatekeep women’s political involvement.
But at the same time, when Indians are asked about what politics should be, a different narrative emerges — one centering on moral ideals rooted in the concept of seva, or selfless service. Here, seva not only connotes the material provision of goods and services but also embodies traits that citizens desire in their representatives — being accessible to constituents, empathising with them, and supporting them in their hour of need. This narrative reverses the lived hierarchy between citizens and politicians.
Drawing on these moral conceptions, the BJP, particularly since 2014, has strategically framed its political discourse around the principle of seva. Modi has appealed to voters’ moral sensibilities, including by pronouncing himself as a pradhan sevak (prime servitor), celebrating his birthday through a seva saptah/pakhwara (service week/fortnight), and conducting coronavirus relief campaigns under the banner of seva hi sangathan (organisation is service) and seva aur samarpan abhiyan (service and dedication mission). Through these policies, the BJP is positioning itself as a crucial interface between state and society.
At the same time, seva is also a descriptively gendered norm portraying a hierarchical relationship characterised by women’s caregiving duties within the home. Although seva is not innately gendered, women bear a disproportionate share of the physical and emotional labour of caregiving in India, rendering seva a feminine-identified trait. Indeed, an aptitude for service (seva bhav) is often used as an informal gauge of a woman’s character.
And here, the BJP’s emphasis on seva frames politics as role-congruent for women. Activists in the BJP mahila morcha, the party’s women’s wing, often described their motivations for joining politics in the norm-compliant terms of seva, portraying their own engagement and mobilisation efforts as social service. Their organisational outreach methods — organising medical camps, blood donation and cleanliness drives, and cultural and moral education — mirror the seva frame. Moreover, these activities are carefully aligned with local cultures and historically revered women figures, with the goal of creating an affective connection with communities and helping draw women into the fold. In my survey of 128 women activists in Rajasthan, BJP activists classified 51% of events they organised within the seva rubric, compared to 37% for the Congress.
Crucially, this norm-compliant framing helps portray politics as an extension of women’s domestic roles and renders it acceptable to families that might otherwise be opposed to women’s transitions into the public sphere. In a discrete choice experiment conducted in 2021 with 1,457 pairs of women and male gatekeepers in the same household, I found that women preferred norm-compliant seva as a means for political engagement compared to public meetings or norm-undermining protests.
Simultaneously, women’s families and particularly men were also far more accepting of women’s political participation when it was framed as seva. This was evident not only in the discrete choice experiment, where men were more encouraging of women’s political participation when partisan engagement was framed in norm-compliant terms, but also in qualitative interviews, where seva was presented as a channel to access the public sphere, a conduit for party recruitment, and a lever to obtain familial acquiescence by downplaying personal ambition.
The way forward
As women’s political significance grows, parties are updating their engagement strategies. The BJP’s 2024 campaign, for instance, is strategically aiming to integrate itself into preexisting nonpartisan women’s mobilisation channels by announcing initiatives such as lakhpati didi to encourage women in self-help groups to grow their earnings. But will mobilisation lead to greater agency and representation? Much will depend on women’s ability to advocate for their own interests, not to mention the responsiveness of their representatives. In an initial move toward addressing these concerns, the government last year passed legislation reserving one-third of state and national legislative seats for women.
Notwithstanding this progress, the BJP’s tenure has been marked by contentious policies, including notifications that married women require their husbands’ consent to keep their maiden names and an indefinite delay in the actual implementation of women’s reservation across the country’s legislatures. The outcome of these developments remains uncertain, but considering how parties should adapt to women’s evolving roles — while accounting for domestic and social constraints that inhibit them — is critical for the prospects of political parties going forward.
Anirvan Chowdhury is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. In the weeks ahead, the Carnegie-HT “India Elects 2024” series will analyse various dimensions of India’s upcoming election battle.
