Politicians Have Still Not Realised What Women Voters Want

It’s that time of the electoral cycle, when women voters are aglow with glittering promises of wealth raining down on them like tinsel. Often, these promises prove as insubstantial as those bits of shiny metal foil. What’s more, they speak volumes for the patriarchal mindset of political parties.

Increased electoral participation has led to the recognition of women voters as an influential category that could decide outcomes. The women’s vote has become the holy grail for all political players, and every party claims to know “what women want”.

They are correct in determining that women want economic security and physical safety. Logically, that should have translated into strenuous efforts to close the gender gap: increased participation of women in the labour force, pay parity, incentivising employment of women, entrepreneurship support, access to financial services, mandatory childcare facilities in the workplace, cracking down on gender discrimination and zero tolerance of gender crimes.

Instead, we have promises of dole. Delhi Chief Minister Atishi announced this week that she intends to give Delhi’s women voters a handout of Rs 1,000 per month — a nice little carrot ahead of the assembly elections in 2025. The Aam Aadmi Party, which Atishi represents, had dangled the same carrot in Punjab before the 2022 Assembly polls. The scheme wasn’t implemented, but CM Bhagwant Singh Mann doubled down on the promise and said handouts of Rs 1,100 a month would commence after the 2024 general elections.

Do voters fall for such schemes? Despite Mann’s promise, he won only 3 of the 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab. Nothing further has been heard of the dole. Likewise, Himachal Pradesh CM Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu had issued a notification ahead of the general elections, granting Rs 1,500 per month to working age women in his state and thereby fulfilling his 2022 promise. But he failed to win even a single seat.

Perhaps the delay in fulfilling promises had angered women voters in the north, but in Karnataka, the payout of Rs 2,000 per month to some 12 million women (Gruha Lakshmi scheme) was initiated well ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. Even so, the ruling Congress secured just nine of 28 seats, with the lion’s share of 19 seats going to the NDA. However, the Congress pointed out that it had improved its position vis-a-vis 2019, so perhaps the scheme did have some impact!

During the Lok Sabha campaign earlier this year, the Congress distributed ‘guarantee cards’ to women with the promise of Rs 1 lakh per year to every woman from the economically weaker sections. Post-election, women lined up at Congress party offices to demand the money, waving their guarantee cards. Perhaps Congress leaders had neglected to specify that the money was to come from the public exchequer, and not from party funds.

The fact that the electoral benefits of giving handouts to women are debatable doesn’t stop parties from making promises. The competition for the women’s vote in Haryana is fierce. If the Congress is promising a direct cash transfer of Rs 2000 per month, the BJP has upped the ante to Rs 2,100 per month.

Hard questions on whether these schemes are sustainable in the long run, or whether the state has the fiscal space for such massive payouts even in the short term, are never asked. For instance, while Atishi as CM has said that 5 million women will benefit from an annual per capita payout of Rs 12,000, Atishi as FM allocated only Rs 2,000 crore for the scheme. Do the math. The scheme will cost the taxpayer Rs 6,000 crore a year, about as much as the estimated fiscal deficit.

Karnataka has allocated Rs 28,600 crore towards its Gruha Lakshmi scheme, but registration has already gone up to 13.6 million women, so more resources will have to be found. What happens when still more women become eligible for the scheme, given the state’s ballooning burden of debt? The state government delayed payment for several months earlier this year, so it may already be feeling the pinch.

Needless to say, these schemes are fraught with barriers aimed at restricting the number of beneficiaries while allowing the ruling party to take full credit. There is a plethora of documentation, visits to the district welfare office and exclusion of numerous categories. For eg, in Himachal, the scheme does not apply to migrant workers or women whose family members include “central/state government employees/pensioners, contract/outsourced/daily wage earners/part-time, etc”.

Politicans peddle the argument that these schemes are ‘empowering’ for women, because it makes them financially less dependent on men. In other words, it substitutes dependence on politicians for dependence on men. Either way, the woman is dependent.

Thus, doles for women stem from the patriarchal notion that they need to be protected, and do not have the capacity to make it on their own in a ‘man’s world’. It denies their productive capacities outside the domestic sphere. Breaking the cycle of dependence by providing opportunities for employment doesn’t figure in the politician’s discourse, with rare exceptions.

There is no field in which women, given the opportunity, have failed to shine. Yet, on the pretext of “empowering” women, politicians continue to deny them participation in political and economic decision-making processes, and absolve themselves from having to engage with the uncomfortable truth — that women need a level playing field, not handouts.

Bhavdeep Kang is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author