By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Nov 20 2003 (IPS)

For more than five years now, India’s Parliament has seen the spectacle of major political parties closing ranks to thwart a bill that seeks to reserve a third of its seats for women. Still, women are steadily making inroads into the overwhelmingly male preserve of electoral politics.

Two of the favourites for the Dec. 1 elections in four major states are women. First, there is Sheila Dixit who is seeking re-election as Congress party chief minister of Delhi state. Second, there is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Uma Bharti who, pre-poll surveys say, has an edge over rival Digivjay Singh who hopes to win a third successive term as chief minister of central Madhya Pradesh.

The other two states going to the polls on Dec. 1 are the largely tribal Chattisgarh state in central India and western Rajasthan. All four states are now ruled by the Congress party, the arch rival of the ultra-nationalist BJP of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

”There is still no political will to share power with women and this is reflected in the way seats have been distributed for the current elections,” Ranjana Kumari, chief of the independent Centre for Social Research (CSR) told IPS in an interview.

But in Delhi state, important as much for its 14 million-strong population as for the fact that it houses the national capital, a new confidence among women candidates and political activists is clearly discernible.

Of the 77 contestants for seats in Delhi’s assembly, 22 are women. This falls short of the one-third that the CRS and other groups fighting for gender parity consider ideal, but it is a considerable improvement from the 57 women who were given tickets to contest by their parties in 1998 and the 58 in 1993.

The Congress party could claim to be more ‘woman friendly’ given that it has fielded 12 female candidates against the BJP’s seven. But both parties have a line-up of politically savvy women politicians who can hold their own in the rough and tumble world of Indian politics.

Dixit, popularly called ‘Aunty’ for her benign though no-nonsense approach, expects to win because she counts on a citizenry grateful for her uncompromising stand on banning polluting fuels like the smoky diesel used in buses and taxis and replacing them with environment-friendly, compressed natural gas (CNG).

That was no mean task, considering that Dixit found herself up against a powerful lobby of bus fleet owners and taxi drivers. They were in no mood to make investments in engines that would run on CNG and had the staunch backing of Madan Lal Khurana, the BJP’s candidate for chief minister in Delhi – one of the world’s most five most polluted cities.

Dixit also enjoys the confidence of Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, who uses every opportunity, especially her crowd-pulling, political rallies, to make it known that her party is keen on improving the lot of India’s women who suffer immense social discrimination.

Gandhi has overcome the vulnerabilities of her Italian birth by emphasising her role as a traditional Indian wife, mother and most importantly ‘bahu’ or daughter-in-law to the formidable Indira Gandhi, who ruled India with an iron hand for nearly two decades until her assassination in 1984.

But whether Gandhi herself, who wears saris, speaks Hindi and could easily pass for a fair-skinned Indian, will contest for the prime ministership in the general elections that are due in September next year is an open question – and one that is extremely sensitive at the moment.

To counter Gandhi’s undeniable appeal among the masses, a challenge to Vajpayee himself, the BJP has trundled out its own ‘bahu’ – the popular television actress Smriti Malhotra Irani, who plays the role to perfection on primetime soap.

Irani invariably begins her speeches at election rallies in Delhi with treacly words that translate as: ”This youngest ‘bahu’ of your family has come to greet you and seek your blessings.”

Despite its overtly traditionalist, patriarchal image, the BJP does not lack for feisty, independent-minded women like Purnima Sethi who do not necessarily fit the ‘bahu’ mold.

Sethi, one of the BJP’s six candidates for the Delhi assembly, had no qualms about declaring in an affidavit stating her assets – mandatory from the current polls onwards – that she holds joint bank accounts with her live-in companion and party colleague Sunder Singh Bhandari.

”Women, especially those who enter politics, are easy targets for people who cannot handle the idea of women being independent,” Sethi told IPS.

According to Ranjana Kumari, negative attitudes toward women proceed from the fact that too few of them make it up the ladders of political power and to decision-making positions. ‘This in turn marginalises important, gender-related issues like rape, domestic violence and dowry,” she said.

”It is hard to understand why all political parties are adamant about fielding male candidates and use the pretext of winnability to deny good women candidates tickets,” she said.

The CRS has carried out studies in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan states that show that if the changes of winning were really the criterion, then many more women would have been given a chance to contest the current elections by their parties.

”Statistically, in the 1998 elections to these states, male candidates showed an 8 percent chance of winning while 15.78 percent of the women candidates who were fielded won,” she said.

In 1992, India legislated to reserve a third of all seats in at the local body level for women. However, attempts to extend similar quotas at the assembly and parliament levels have been systematically thwarted by parties across the political spectrum.

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