Turn of tide in women votes? How BJP wins over women voters

With the percentage of women voters crossing the percentage of men voters for the first time in the 2019 General elections, women's votes hold the key to power. And despite being considered as a conservative party, BJP seems to be winning that bloc. Given the primary opposition party INC is led by a woman, this is interesting. There are two angles to it - the politics and the policy. This article tries to explore the political side of how BJP wins over women votes.

Thanks: The New BJP by Nalin Mehta . Most of the content of this article is taken from the book.

Background:

The shift in women voters in key states towards the BJP is a recent political development. The data scientist Rukmini S. found that, between 1996 and 2014, successive rounds of CSDS-Lokniti National Election Studies showed that the BJP generally had a ‘2 to 3 point disadvantage among women voters as compared to the Congress Party’. This state of affairs was ‘broadly similar to the situation in the United States, where women have historically leaned more toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.’

Yet, by 2018, the BJP had ‘largely shed its gender disadvantage’. As Rukmini S. pointed out, the CSDS-Lokniti’s May 2018 survey found that virtually all of the modest increase in the BJP’s vote share between 2014 and 2018 came from women voters. In May 2014, 33 per cent of men and 29 per cent of women preferred the BJP. Four years later, male support remained at the same level, but women’s support had risen to 31 per cent. Many BJP leaders attributed this rise to the government’s numerous welfare schemes. This process reached its culmination in 2019 with more women voting for the BJP than men.

PM Modi's focus on women:

Narendra Modi’s speeches as prime minister reveal that he speaks more about women than he does about core BJP issues like defence, security, terrorism, Hindutva, or Pakistan. (The author Nalin Mehta had used a dedicated index called NARAD index to measure this).

Moreover, Modi’s focus on women has increased over time. Examining all of his speeches between 2014 and 2019, the focus on women went up substantially each year. Between 2014 and 2019, mentions of women increased by 114 per cent in Modi’s speeches.

In 2020, Modi broke a longstanding taboo by addressing the issue of menstrual health in his August 15 Independence Day speech. He declared “Through 6,000 Jan Aushadhi centers, about 50 million women have got sanitary pads at Rs. 1".

Seat on the table for women:

Starting with the women heading the table, the fact that BJP facilitated the second ever woman president of India Droupadi Murmu is not accidental.

Between 2004 and 2019, the BJP became far more accommodating of women candidates than it had ever been before. Until the early 2000s, it had a low representation rate for women it fielded for the Lok Sabha: only 8.2 percent in 2004.

The thirty women candidates fielded by the party that year were substantially lower than the Congress’s forty-five (10.8 percent of all its candidates). By 2019, the BJP had radically improved its representation of women. In the 2019 Lok Sabha poll, it fielded more women than any other political party in India: fifty-five. It narrowly pipped the Congress, which fielded fifty-four women. In proportional representation terms, the BJP’s share of women candidates (12.6 percent) was only marginally behind the Congress’s (12.8 percent). And the party did not just field more women candidates, it fielded strong women candidates who had a substantially higher success rate than women candidates from all the other parties. Two out of every three women who fought on the BJP banner got elected. The result was that the party had the largest number of women MPs in Parliament in 2019: forty-one.

Representation in party organisation:

Under Modi and Shah, the BJP instituted important course corrections on the representation of women in the party’s central organisation. These leadership changes ensured for the BJP the highest proportion of women among national office-bearers in India when compared with other major outfits that had ‘national party’ status. The BJP had as many as 16.9 percent women as central officer-bearers in October 2020. This was more than women’s representation in the central leadership of the CPI(M) (14.7 percent), Trinamool Congress (13 percent), CPI (11.1 percent), NCP (10.8 percent) and Congress (8.5 percent).

When BJP President J.P. Nadda announced his new central leadership team in September 2020, as many as five of his twelve party vice presidents—a whopping 41 percent—were women.

The proportion of women in the Congress’s central leadership is half that of the BJP. The primary difference between the two parties on this issue is that the BJP embraced a wider social coalition of women as part of a methodical growth plan. The Congress did not. Similarly, in the Left, in 2020, the CPI(M)’s all-powerful Politburo had only two women members: Brinda Karat and Subhashini Ali, both from an older generation of leadership. In Maharashtra’s NCP too, while Supriya Sule, Sharad Pawar’s daughter, is the anointed heir, the overall representation of women in leadership positions is way lower than in the BJP.? BJP systematically broad-based its leadership in terms of gender representation after 2014 in a way that other parties did not.

Women cadres mobilisation:

In 2009, the BJP held women-only meetings in eighteen Indian states over a six-month period. These state-level meetings focused on the eighteen to thirty-two age group and culminated in a large Veerangana Mahila Sammelan in Delhi. They were provided training and groomed to become leaders.

The Mahila wing of BJP gets special attention and training. PM Modi makes it a point to attend the women cadres meets and advise the women cadres of the party.

Twenty-five percent of posts were reserved for women in BJP executive councils (karyakarani) set up in each booth and district in Uttar Pradesh and other states. In these twenty-one-member councils, five seats were reserved for women and two each for SCs and OBCs, at every level of the party. This was a big turning point for the party. Initially, the party found it very difficult to fill these women’s quotas, so it relied on relatives of local leaders. As a BJP district general secretary explained, ‘If you want to fill five women, then you make someone’s wife, someone’s sister and so on. If we had to choose five women, then four we did only to fill the quota, but one woman that was genuinely new. That one woman turned into ten, but those ten new ones came from that first one. They came slowly. They did not come together.’ Just as with Dalits and OBCs, however, this reservation forced local party leaders to reach out to families that had never before voted BJP.

PR activities:

Needless to say, BJP does PR well. An example would be the instance when PM Modi announced that he was signing off from Twitter causing a huge buzz for a few days and then on March 8 (Women's Day) he announced that his Twitter account would be handled by 7 'inspiring women achievers' who will share their stories.

PM Modi pointed out two photographs from the China-hosted Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which had gone viral on social media at the time. ‘In both photos,’ Modi said, ‘among all the men you can see only two women. Everybody else was a man. This photo was of Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

Earlier, in 2018, Modi had devoted the year’s first episode of his Mann Ki Baat program entirely to the theme of women’s achievements.

Thus, through talk and walk, through rhetoric and representation, the BJP ensures the support of women voters, overcoming its historic disadvantages. But all is not well. The representation is still far too low. The crimes are still high. The structural unfairness remains. The issues like women wrestlers vs BJP MP could potentially cause harm.

What do you think about this? Did I miss anything? How can other parties rise above the challenge? Comment your valuable views.

Will cover the policy side of things in the next article.

As I already argued in a previous article regarding criminality in Indian politics and the reasons behind it, the election ecosystem is also analogous to a marketplace. If there is an unsatisfied demand, it will be filled by a player in due time. And that player wins, for quite some time. The poor representation of women in parties and legislatures and poor attention to women's issues was an unsatisfied demand in the electoral marketplace which the BJP satisfied to an extent and took the profits promptly. As proponents of the free market love to quote, Father of modern economics Adam Smith said "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest". Is democracy such a beautiful free market, even with all its flaws and imperfections?

#india #indianpolitics #bjp #modi #congress #elections #women