India’s new cadres of equality

As women become a powerful voting bloc, they are instilling new democratic norms through a grassroots activism of substance over symbolism.

The Monitor's View

In a year of consequential elections in many of the world’s major democracies, one of the most consequential may also be the least climactic. India appears poised to reelect Prime Minister Narendra Modi this spring.

That prospect fuels broad concern for the welfare of global democracy. Already in power for a decade, Mr. Modi has eroded many of India’s constitutional norms such as judicial independence, freedom of the press, and secularism. Along the way, however, he has also been nurturing – perhaps inadvertently – a new democratizing force in Indian politics: women.

Female voters are on course to outnumber their male counterparts within a few years, yet their growing political influence is more than demographic. It reflects a deepening claim by women to their dignity and equality, irrespective of social rank or entrenched patriarchal norms.

Casting a ballot is “the only occasion that a woman voter feels herself to be an equal citizen and takes pride in that,” Annie Raja, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, told Frontline, an Indian magazine. “She literally sees that equality with both men and women standing in lines.”

Two factors show how women are building political influence and independence. One is Mr. Modi’s promotion of initiatives based on a concept of service called seva. By equating politics to service, notes Anirvan Chowdhury, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, the prime minister has given political activism a more feminine hue. The local women’s wings of the Bharatiya Janata Party organize health care clinics, tree-planting projects, and cultural celebrations.

“The BJP has seemingly shed its traditional image embodying a muscular and masculine form of Hindu nationalism to gain a significant edge among women voters,” Mr. Chowdhury wrote Wednesday in The Indian Express. “The seva narrative aligns with traditional expectations of women as selfless and self-sacrificing, downplaying the potentially disruptive aspects of increased political agency.” Men, he noted, have been more apt to accept female political participation when it is framed as service.

The other factor relates to political quotas. Last September, India’s Parliament passed a law requiring that a third of all seats in the lower house be reserved for women. It mandates the same level of representation at the state level.

The new quotas must still be passed by the 29 state legislatures and won’t come into effect until at least 2029. A 1993 law that required that women lead local councils in a third of all villages nationwide, meanwhile, has had only a slow upward trickle effect. Women still hold just 14% of seats in Parliament and accounted for only 12% of the candidates in the five state races last month.

But quotas have helped cultivate a sense among women of their right to participate in politics by creating networks of activism that cross India’s social classes. Parties see an advantage to female political activism because women are able to talk more freely than men in more intimate social settings such as homes. That activism is changing perceptions.

“Women politicians need not change deeply entrenched beliefs to mobilize women into politics,” Tanushree Goyal, a political professor at Princeton University, wrote in a paper last fall. Their political activism, she noted, is shifting focus “on what women do when they are in politics, not only what women symbolize.”