Party-Wise & 15th Lok Sabha: Numbers Of Women MPs State-Wise
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"Woh to houselady hai, madam, houselady," said the Uttar Pradesh bureaucrat over the phone, clarifying the background of a woman MP from his state, fielded by none other than UP's First Behenji, Mayawati, in the just-ended elections. Her Bahujan Samaj Party's four women MPs (all first-timers) make up an impressive 19 per cent of the BSP's strength in the 15th Lok Sabha, almost double the all-India average for women's representation in the House—not surprising, you would say, for a party headed by a woman.
What is a revelation, though, is the kind of women this fiery, feisty self-made woman politician has catapulted to Parliament: political wives, all of them, riding piggyback on a powerful husband. Raj Kumari Chauhan, the one described memorably as a "houselady" by my informant, is the politically untried wife of state minister Jaiveer Singh; Seema Upadhyay, who felled actor Raj Babbar in Fatehpur Sikri, the spouse of another Mayawati minister, Ramveer Upadhyay; and Tabassum Begum, the widow of a powerful Muslim BSP MP. And the new MP from Sitapur, Kaiser Jahan, is (how convenient is that) the wife of Sitapur's sitting BSP MLA.
It is facts like these, lurking behind nice-sounding statistics, that take the shine out of the rah-rah stories on the representation of women in the new Lok Sabha having, for the first time, crossed the 10 per cent mark. Some cynical old habits die hard when it comes to sending women to Parliament—and parties headed by women are clearly no exception. Even within a broader culture of 'dynastic politics', as the shorthand phrase goes, political scientists reckon that women MPs are more likely to be from political families than their male counterparts, and clearly, more than one dynamic is at work here. You reward a lieutenant by giving a seat to his appendage, as Mayawati has done, and at the same time ensure he pours in the money, manpower and clout needed for her success. For a political player, it means consolidating power in safer ways than most—who, for instance, would you trust more than your wife? "It's about keeping the circle of power limited and controllable, and this happens much more in the case of women," says Prof Niraja Gopal Jayal of the Centre for Law and Governance at Delhi's JNU. Another important criterion, Jayal points out, is 'winnability'—women from political families or elite backgrounds are considered more 'winnable' than the rest. "Class trumps every other identity when it comes to women—it is the most important criterion in their selection as MPs," says Jayal. (And as ministers too, it seems, given that a majority of the female appointees to the new council of ministers are 'wives' or 'daughters'.)
Annu tandon, Unnao. Wife of a top Reliance exec with a well-endowed trust
Outlook's background checks on the 58 women MPs who have made it to the new House bear that out. At least 36 of them—that's close to a depressing two-thirds—are close relatives of male politicians ranging from national leaders and chief ministers to lower-level politicos like MLAs and RSS pracharaks; and of personages described colourfully as "cooperative mafia leader" and "mining baron's political aide". This is a Lok Sabha with many new female faces and younger ones, too, but a dismaying 17 of the 29 "fresh faces" are in the hallowed-by-proxy, biwi-beti-bahu-behen category. But even these figures don't tell the whole tale—a few other women MPs have more convoluted family connections, like Helen Davidson from Tamil Nadu who is related to the DMK clan through Azhagiri's daughter. Or they come with backing from influential male patrons not related to them.
UP is a good case study. It may want to pat itself on the back for having got the largest number of women into the House—12—but who are they? Three political widows, two bahus, three wives, one daughter. Of the remaining three, one is a film star (Jaya Prada) with the rock-solid support of the redoubtable Amar Singh, the other Annu Tandon, a high-profile wife of a top Reliance executive with a well-endowed family trust that has spread largesse in the Unnao area, and who had the clout to have film stars like Salman Khan campaign for her. That leaves just one MP, the Samajwadi Party's Sushila Saroj, and alas, one discovers with a bit of digging that she too is not free of connections (despite her party's noisy protests against the Women's Reservation Bill on the grounds that more elite women would come into politics). Saroj is the wife of an ex-IPS officer close to Mulayam Singh Yadav. The same patterns have played out across several states, pre-eminently Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and even Maharashtra.
