Anurag Kumar
On September 19, Union law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal introduced a bill to reserve one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, state legislative assemblies, and Delhi legislative assembly for women, 27 years and one week after the first such bill was introduced in parliament on September 12, 1996. In the past 27 years, there has been an organic development in women’s representation, according to the data. However, even in 2023 (failed attempts were made in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2008), such a law will be a significant and rapid advance for women’s representation, and more so for state assemblies than the Lok Sabha, according to HT’s analysis of data.
The measure introduced on Tuesday also attempts to address the concern that women elected to Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs)-reserved seats will not belong to SCs and STs. It accomplishes this by recommending reservations for General, SC, and ST constituencies. Intriguingly, data indicates that the proportion of women in the latter two categories has increased since the 1990s.
In India’s first two elections, 4.5% of the winning candidates were female. This number progressively increased even without women’s affirmative action. 14.4% of Lok Sabha election winners in 2019 were women, the greatest percentage ever. However, as of September 1, this proportion (which has increased to 15.2% due to byelections, fatalities, and other reconfigurations) was ranked 141st out of 185 countries for which Inter-Parliamentary Union maintains this data.
As evidenced by the data presented above, India’s women’s representation in the Lok Sabha continues to lag behind the global average. State legislatures have fallen even further behind. Assuming that the composition of the Lok Sabha and state assemblies remains constant between elections, they can be compared annually. This demonstrates that women’s representation in state assemblies has also increased, but has always lagged behind the Lok Sabha. Certainly, not all state legislatures are identical. The proportion of women legislators in Tripura, Chhattisgarh, and the West assembly was comparable to that of the Lok Sabha after the 2019 election: 15%, 14.4%, and 13.3%, respectively.
Similarly to how some individual state legislatures have performed comparatively better, some parties in the 2019 Lok Sabha performed better than others in giving women tickets. At least one-third (33%) of the candidates fielded by parties with more than 10 candidates, including the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, the Naam Tamilar Katchi, the All India Trinamool Congress, and the Biju Janata Dal, were female. Certainly, none of these parties ran more than 62 candidates, whereas the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress ran 436 and 421 candidates, respectively (55 and 54 of them were women). Clearly, the impact of tiny individual parties’ affirmative action on women’s overall representation is minimal.
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This indicates that the law introduced on Tuesday is essential for increasing the proportion of female legislators. Since the 1990s, in both the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, the proportion of women legislators in SC and ST reserved seats has consistently been higher than in non-reserved seats. Therefore, unreserved seats will result in a greater increase in the representation of women compared to their current status.
Chart 1
This does not diminish the overall significance of the measure. As HT explained on the 25th anniversary of the 1996 legislation, women continue to be underrepresented in state and national legislatures because the bar is higher for them. In every election for the Lok Sabha and the majority of elections for state assemblies, they have had a higher strike rate than men. This implies that only winnable female candidates are granted tickets, whereas this is less true for male candidates. As one expert explained at the time, affirmative action is the only method to increase women’s representation in India’s legislative bodies.
