Women in Politics

The world is being deprived of a huge untapped resource. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes.

Something which has negligibly changed over a period of time is the number of women in the political sphere of India. Though persistent efforts are being made to push the number by providing one-third reservation for women in various legal bodies including Parliament , the percentage of women is just 5-10% across all political parties in India. However the problem is not lack of government support, the problem is related to the role of women in society and attitude of male towards females. Every political party in India and across the world has more number of males than females as its members.

In India, there is no change in this ratio since independence. Even after passing the Bill related to the reservation of women, it has changed insignificantly .Even the state of Kerala with the highest female (1,079) is to male (1,000) ratio show astonishingly low number of females in politics. It has also been seen that women reaching at the top of any political party and taking part in decision making process is very less. Even if they are given a chance to prove their worth , they are given the responsibility of handling the women’s wing of the party to tackle the issues related to women in the society such as rape and dowry but never inflation and economy etc. Hence women are again defined and their role is confined to women related issues not the issues in general.

The cause of concern is the under-representation of women in the political field and decision making. They are not able to express completely and shred themselves from taking part in the development process. To change the position of women in politics, they must stand out as an independent winner. They should be well educated and versed with all the facets of politics. Women must be confident to take the necessary decisions apart from handling just women related issues.  A lot more is required to be done for the political empowerment of the women in India.

~Tarini Jhamb