Shruti Kapila on Women as a Vote Bank

Mountainous Albania was a patriarchal, traditional, society with a tradition of merciless vendetta. This meant that some elderly women were accepted as men for the purpose of giving representation to a sept whose men had been killed or who had gone into hiding. Indeed, even the most feudal of patriarchal societies featured some women in political roles because they were treated as notional men in that they represented a particular lineage which lacked adult male heirs. 

The transition to parliamentary, more or less representative forms of government featured a decrease in such formal exercise of political power by women. Why? This was part and parcel of an increased specialization and division of labor which undermined traditional sources of authority while increasing the power of the market. 

As parliamentary seats gained in importance, competition for them increased with the result that women and vulnerable minorities tended to lose, not gain, representation. This led to a paradoxical situation where more backward polities had greater female and minority participation precisely because this was a token type of representation. Indeed, 'reserved seats'- e.g. for Dalits in India- lowered the prestige of Parliament and thus gave the aristocracy an excuse not to stoop to membership in such Assemblies. On the other hand, even the most blue-blooded might allow a young Princess, more particularly if she had married in from a lower status family, to kick up her heels in Parliament. Such was the case with the glamorous Gayatri Devi who got into the Guinness book of world records for winning her seat with the largest landslide ever.

No doubt, crazy Lefties identified women as 'proletarians' on the basis that the word means 'giving birth' and women do in fact go into labor when having babies. There was some silly notion that women and minorities would vote for the Left. Sadly, the Left was shite at least partly because it believed that the role of women in the revolution was to just lie back and think of Marx. 

Shruti Kapila, whose first degree was from Punjab University, writes in Print India- 

Even young undergraduates reading Indian politics with me, in distant Cambridge, have been quick to notice that Indian democracy strikingly has had a slew of women leaders.

Clearly 'young undergraduates' reading a worthless subject are normally very slow to notice things. Still, Kapila says that her very very special little flowers with very special educational needs have noticed that India- like Britain- has some women leaders. True the UK has had two female Prime Ministers while India only had one- the daughter of a previous PM- but does Britain have anyone comparable with Mamta- apart from Nicola Sturgeon? 

Perhaps. But who cares? The thing doesn't matter in the slightest.  

A few years ago, when Hilary Clinton failed to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, it showed the stark distinction between women’s leadership in India and America or — as the cliché goes — between the world’s largest and most powerful democracies respectively.

But Clinton did get the nomination second time round. What exactly is the stark distinction between women's leadership in India and America? Surely, it is that India is very rich while America is as poor as shit. That must be it- right? 

It is indeed a fact that women have held and continue to hold major offices of political power and routinely lead big and small parties alike in India — from Indira Gandhi to Mamata Banerjee and Mayawati to J. Jayalalithaa.

Hillary had a good shot at the top job. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have all had successful female leaders. But so has Britain and Germany and New Zealand and so forth. Of course, politics in the subcontinent is more personalized and dynastic and so political parties have less salience. On the other hand. Trump seems to have turned the Republican Party into a personal fiefdom.  

It is tempting to say that more affluent countries might see more gender dimorphism- e.g. Sweden having fewer women in STEM subjects than Iran- but politics doesn't seem to be a field where this happens. 

Yet, and this is the key paradox noted not least by my undergraduates, it is hard to escape the stark reality of gender disparity (and not merely inequality) in India.

It is indeed hard to escape India unless, like Kapila, you actually get a Visa to leave India. The stark reality is that the vast majority of Indians are as poor as shit because they have very very low productivity. Only about 15 million Indians pay Income tax- the figure in the UK is twice that though the tax threshold is double what it is in India. Thus there is very little scope for redistributive taxation. Furthermore the poorest Indians are the farthest from 'demographic transition'. Inequality increases when the poor reproduce faster than the comfortably off.  

The gender disparity is widely documented in statistics and everyday experience, as this disparity takes diverse forms of violence from female infanticide that has given a skewed sex ratio to rape and poor health indices, to say nothing of inequality of work opportunity, mobility, security and all manner of other challenges.

Is Kapila saying abortion is a crime? If 'female infanticide' is a form of violence what about male fetuses which are aborted? It may indeed be true that more women then men are raped. However the most prolific perpetrators of statutory rape in India are the prostitutes who service middle school kids during their lunch-breaks. On the other hand, it must be admitted that job opportunities for people who are constantly being raped might be fewer or less remunerating than those for equally skilled people who don't got vaginas.  

Why women emerge as leaders

Given all the odds stacked against her, what then explains the now-assured arrival of women political leaders?

They got raped or their mothers got raped or their daughters got raped. Indira Gandhi's maternal ancestors were subject to statutory rape which is how she became the daughter of Pundit Nehru and thus got to become Prime Minister herself. 

Kapila began her article thus- 

Declaring Asha Singh, mother of the 2017 Unnao rape survivor, as a Congress candidate in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh elections, is certainly a symbolic move.

Sadly, it may symbolize stupidity and a crass attempt to woo women voters by the promise that if they are too busy getting raped then their Mummy can run for electoral office. 

One obvious answer would be that women derive their leadership credentials as members of already influential families.

Especially if the male members of that family are in jail. I suppose Kuldeep Singh Sengar's wife, now her husband is in jail for the Unnao rape, will move from panchayat level politics to the Legislative Assembly.

From the local zila parishad level to the office of the prime minister, women have emerged as political leaders if their families are already invested and secured in politics.

This is also true of men. In India people join politics so as to spend more time with their families. They quit when their brother or cousin or Mummy or Aunty kicks them out of their way. Indira, it is said, only entered politics after Shastri threatened to put in her aunty if she didn't step up. The main reason Indira, like Sonia, stayed in power was so as to pass on power to her son. 

But a more speculative and tentative answer is the opposite. Politics offers the best exit path from India’s deeply entrenched patriarchal society.

Unless, like Kapila, you can just can just get on a flight to Blighty or any other country which aint an utter shithole. 

Which woman 'escaped patriarchy' by entering politics? None at all. The fact is a woman in Indian politics has to maintain an image of either nun-like chastity or else that of the 'pativrata' loyal and faithful wife even if (as in the case of Feroze Gandhi) the husband is a philanderer or (in the case of Sonia) her religion does not frown on widow remarriage. 

The fact that the cretin Rahul, not the charming Priyanka, remains the Congress Party's candidate, shows that Indian politics isn't an 'exit' from Hindu patriarchy even for an Italian Catholic lady. 

If not to exit it entirely, then, at the very least, to step aside and preferably to sit on top of this iniquitous social structure.

Getting rich or getting hitched to someone rich, or just being a great big gangsta, would work better. Otherwise, you could just emigrate. 

The reason segmentary societies have dynastic politics is because the joint-family works as a favor-bank. Individuals may rise up as 'market makers' or arbitrageurs but if they don't have a family then they can't go out on their own. On the other hand there are cadre based Parties and some- like Modi- have risen on merit.  

True individual autonomy is possible for women especially if they emerge as political leaders, and you don’t have to look further than Mayawati, Jayalalithaa, or Mamata.

They were not able to have a normal family life. Mamta may be able to pass power to her nephew and that is why her TMC has some credibility. Jayalitha wasn't able to pass power to her friend Sasikala. Mayawati looks like an extinct volcano. Unlike Mulayam, she doesn't have a son or daughter to carry her party forward.  

To be sure, political office will not insulate even the most powerful female leader against misogyny.

Mamta says she was bitten by her own top cop. I'm not kidding. The guy sank his fangs into her- albeit while she was in opposition.  

By the same token, there seems to be no direct or deep relationship between greater gender equity and political leadership.

Nonsense! Where there is gender equality, political leadership is less likely to itself involve great political inequality. This is because gender inequality arises from the socio-economic aspects of gender dimorphism which themselves relate to the degree of specialization and division of labor in a Society relative to the openness of markets- i.e. the possibility of rent capture. 

In short, while Indira Gandhi, no doubt, was one of India’s most powerful prime ministers despite some targeted schemes and efforts, it is nevertheless hard to argue — much less remember her government — as one that made life significantly better for women.

Because her economic policies were shitty- but that was the fault of mainly male mathematical economists and Lefty cretins of various sorts. 

Indira worsened things for women in North India because she relied on the police. Thus when a drunken off-duty cop put his hand through a car window to fondle a woman's breasts and her husband and brother returned to thrash him, the guy got a bunch of his fellow cops to shoot the men and then take the lady off for a prolonged gang-rape session. Maya Tyagi was then charged with various crimes. Mrs. G only very reluctantly intervened. Then she was shot. Women wept their eyes out. 

Consider the 'Nirbhaya' atrocity. Kiren Bedi, a former top cop, appeared on TV to explain how Delhi could very easily be made safe for women after dark. But this would have made Delhi safe for men as well and thus Delhi's women refused to vote for Bedi as C.M. The truth of the matter is that women think rape is fine so long as it happens to other women. 

Parties and women as a vote bank?

It would, though, be a mistake to surmise that since the woman’s question is pervasive, it is free of partisanship otherwise marked by either generalised neglect or pure symbolics.

This is an utterly foolish sentence. If something is 'pervasive' it would must also be partisan- unless there partisanship does not exist. 

In India’s hyper-political society, why should the woman’s question remain non-partisan?

It is partisan. Every party claims that it will do wonderful things for women while its rival will kill and eat anyone of the female sex. 

On the other hand, it is true that some old rustic geezers vociferously opposed the Women's Reservation Bill. But nobody seems to be talking about reviving that now.

If anything, over the last decade, distinct stances across the political spectrum have become increasingly evident. The Congress — as with the latest declaration — seems to be primarily focussed on violence against women and women’s representation in legislature. This is evident from its leadership’s personalised support to rape victims like 2012 Delhi gangrape victim and her family,

but that shit went down on their watch! Shiela Dixit was all like 'my own daughter can't go out at night' while the TV showed that girls in Modi's Ahmedabad were roaming around freely at 11 o'clock at night.  

and more recently, the Unnao rape survivor’s family.

 Has your daughter been raped? Have a Party ticket as a consolation prize. You won't win but then being a political prostitute requires more than just a history of abjectness. 

Meanwhile, powerful regional leaders, notably Nitish Kumar and Mamata Banerjee, are doing better with their women voters in comparison to the male vote.

Targeting benefits at women has this effect.  

The relatively new entrant of the Aam Aadmi Party seems to be po-faced at best and at worst, overwhelmingly male — at least in terms of women’s representation in its sole cabinet in Delhi.

Because Kiren Bedi's CM campaign bombed.  

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has arguably made the most audacious move. In criminalising triple talaq and making the Uniform Civil Code a central promissory issue, the BJP seeks to flatten or indeed ostensibly make and treat women as a uniform entity, at least before the law. It is audacious because it seeks to render minority identity as sectional or segregative in contrast to the woman as a universal and aggregative identity. This is to say nothing of polarisation, communalism, and majoritarianism that all feed directly into this viscerally divisive debate. The BJP has, in short, clearly staked the woman’s question in precisely this aggressive context of competing identities.

The thinking here is that Muslim personal Law is more favorable to demographic growth. Actually, only education and the participation rate matter.  Get rural girls into big factory dormitories. Bangladesh is doing so and thus has overtaken Pakistan and now parts of India. 

The upcoming long season of mini and mega elections, starting with UP and extending till the general elections in 2024, will test each party’s imagination and tactics on the women’s vote.

Thinks nobody at all. Either you pay a little money into the accounts of poor women to buy their vote or they vote for the other guy.  

What is clear is that there is a distinct gap and disconnect between female political leadership and effective gender justice in India.

What is even clearer is that people who talk of 'effective gender justice' are as stupid as shit.  

The party that can close that gap will succeed in not just creating, but also capturing that all-too elusive thing called the women’s vote bank.

Nonsense! This isn't what Prashant Kishore is saying at all. But then he studied engineering rather than stupid shite of the sort that Kapila teaches.