At the lower booth levels, where women are adept in the door-to-door approach, having lived the reality of the voter, they are considered resourceful assets. (File photo)
Dec 1, 2024 18:03 IST First published on: Dec 1, 2024 at 16:17 IST
There has been a silent political revolution in Jharkhand powered by its women. The newly-elected Jharkhand Assembly has a dozen women MLAs, the highest ever, besting its 2019 tally of 10. No matter what affirmative action is taken to ensure women’s representation, winnability is political capital. The fact that the 12 legislators from across the political spectrum — five from Congress, four from BJP and three from the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) — won with significant margins shows that women in Jharkhand have collectively pushed for a stake in governance.
In fact, Kalpana Soren, wife of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren, has emerged as a changemaker in recent months not only because she took her husband’s crusade against the BJP forward, but because she made sense to women, even the youth. While pushing the Maiya Samman Yojna — the JMM’s welfare scheme which provided Rs 2,500 per month to women aged 18 to 50 — Kalpana explained how she could get the money. Voters were convinced she didn’t make an empty promise. As for the tribal youth, she addressed their insecurities about identity, wrongful arrests for seeking autonomy and local issues that impact their livelihood. She drove home the practical logic, deliverability and workability of each of her poll promises, rather than relying simply on emotion and rhetoric.
That grassroots understanding is not unique to Kalpana and others like her. That has come courtesy the women’s self-help groups in this tribal state that have broken through the patriarchal chokehold on decision-making over time. Be it micro-finance, forming cooperatives to scale up home businesses, skilling, retailing everything from produce to crafts or rehabilitating women who are stigmatised as witches, women have realised the virtues of helping themselves. Not only have they found their independence, they have found social acceptance and won their right to leadership in the community.
Yet, this victory must be seen in the larger context, which is not quite so encouraging. According to an ORF report published in January, India is a leader when it comes to women’s participation in local government, and as per the 2023 Global Gender Gap report, 44.4 per cent of all elected local government representatives are women. But women are still only about 14 per cent of the Lok Sabha. This divergence shows a disturbing trend of women leadership being trusted enough for local-level governance and micro-dot excellence but being overlooked when it comes to the national legislature. This is true not only of India but of most advanced nations. According to data portal Statista, as of December 2023, women constituted 61.3 per cent of the Rwandan parliament, making it the country with the highest share of women in parliaments worldwide. Cuba had the second highest share with 53.4 per cent, followed by Nicaragua. The European country with the highest percentage of women in their parliament was Andorra with 50 per cent. For Canada, France, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the US, the proportion of women legislators hovered around 25 per cent.
This gendered disparity is not because of flaws in the democratic system but because of people who institutionalise it in the first place. How else can one explain that the higher percentage of women legislators happens to come from countries which are not known for the robustness of their political systems? Smaller nations have seen a rapid rise in women’s leadership at the national levels simply because their concerns are more about their domestic scenarios than global geopolitics, traditionally presided over by the big powers and their male leadership.
Somehow, the muscularity of leadership has coalesced around the image of a man and while women are prying the door open as they bubble up from the ranks, they tend to be replaced by men at the higher levels. But at the lower booth levels, where women are adept in the door-to-door approach, having lived the reality of the voter, they are considered resourceful assets.
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Leaving quotas and proportional representation aside, the decision on women’s representation sadly continues to be a male-dominated preserve with the top leadership of most parties being concentrated around male members. Very few qualified women leaders have been able to fight their way up and earn their space — most have been elevated by the recommendation of their male predecessors. Most survive by dint of aligning themselves with the vision of their peers rather than challenge the status quo in governance. Quotas have also resulted in many women becoming proxy candidates of their male relatives, thereby turning a positive action into a disempowering tool. Little wonder then that they are controlled or prevented from undertaking critical executive tasks.
Lip service to correcting the historical exclusion of women from power cannot mean their political exclusion from policy-making. And in a system that seldom asks how qualified a male representative is to answer to his constituency, women are constantly tested for their eligibility across different parameters. Such shifting goalposts cannot lead to equity in polity.
Going back to Jharkhand, history remembers the Santhal brothers Sido, Kanhu, Chand and Bhairav for leading the 1855 Santhal uprising. Few remember the sisters Phulo and Jhano, who led the Hul (rebellion) against the British and fought to retain their right over forest land. They were martyred and remain unsung. Kalpana Soren and her kind are certainly no pushovers, fired by the same spirit.
rinku.ghosh@expressindia.com