[Still, no speech could begin without explaining that she had the blessing of the party patriarch — though he is in jail with four more years to serve — and his son. And more of the crowd chants of “long live!” featured their names than hers.]
By
Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj
 |
|
A candidate for India’s
Parliament, Swati Yadav addressed residents of Siwani
village in the northern state of Haryana last week. Credit
Smita Sharma
for The New York Times
|
GAINDAWAS,
India — Swati Yadav had lost
count of the number of village campaign stops she had made since her morning
began — was it 27, or 28?
She was doggedly stumping for a parliamentary
seat through 100-degree temperatures in the northern Indian state of Haryana
this month. But the biggest struggle in many places for Ms. Yadav, 30, was to
get the crowd to focus on her own campaign as much as on the political fortunes
of the men at the top of her party, Jannayak Janta.
“I am not asking for your vote because I am
young, or because I am a woman,” she would repeat to the crowds after
explaining her stand on critical issues. “I have an engineering degree, I have
been running a company of thousands of people.”
Still, no speech could begin without
explaining that she had the blessing of the party patriarch — though he is in
jail with four more years to serve — and his son. And more of the crowd chants
of “long live!” featured their names than hers.
For most of the few hundred women running for
Parliament — results are due on May 23 — the campaign is a repeated exercise in
playing up the protection of male politicians and shouting their names in stop
after stop.
Even then, female representation in
Parliament, at just over 11 percent now, is unlikely to increase much this
election, if at all. (India’s poorer neighbors fare better: Nepal’s Parliament
is 33 percent female, Pakistan’s is 21 percent and Afghanistan’s is 28
percent.)
This year, among the candidates that India’s
political parties have fielded, only 8.8 percent have been women — a rise of
about one percent over the 2014 elections, according to the Trivedi Center for
Political Data.
It is a perplexing reality, as women in India
have made it into leadership positions much earlier than in many Western
democracies. The country has women in some of the most prominent roles. Women
are key drivers of social movements, thrive in local village governance and are
expected to vote in record numbers this year.
Yet they are still struggling to win
representation in Parliament.
The imbalance is stirring discontent among
women within political parties. Calls for finalizing legislation that would
give women a minimum 33 percent quota of seats has picked up in recent weeks.
Shaina N.C., a spokeswoman for the governing
Bharatiya Janata Party, recently told the local news media she was “upset and
appalled” by how parties treat women, which she described as “lip service to
our cause, manifesto after manifesto.”
“There is a male chauvinistic mind-set in
political parties,” she said, “so whenever a woman’s name comes up as a
candidate, there are questions about winnability, about funding, unless it is
somebody’s daughter, somebody’s daughter-in-law.”
Amrita Basu, a professor of political science
at Amherst College in Massachusetts, noted that in the 2009 parliamentary
elections, 11 percent of all women who ran won as opposed to 6 percent of male
candidates.
“When women are nominated to run for national
elections, they actually do well,” Professor Basu said. “The question is why a
larger number is not nominated. I think it is some combination of societal
prejudice, but also the growing criminalization of politics. To contest
parliamentary elections is to be often subject to slander and abuse. Election
campaigns have just become more violent, more corrupt, more dangerous.”
If it were not for women from political
dynasties, local or national, the number of women in India’s Parliament would
be even worse. Nearly half the women contesting seats in the current election
are dynastic candidates, according to initial data from the Trivedi center.
But not even a prominent family name grants
women immunity from attacks.
Shruti Choudhry, one of Ms. Yadav’s main
opponents in Haryana and the only other woman out of the 16 candidates
contesting the seat, inherited her father’s political fortunes when he died.
The party elders put a turban on her as the sign of transfer of power.
Ms. Choudhry said the patriarch of Ms.
Yadav’s party, Ajay Singh Chautala, recently claimed at a rally that Ms.
Choudhry was “tying a stole around her stomach” as some sort of ploy to look
pregnant and get sympathy votes.
Mr. Chautala is serving a 10-year sentence on
corruption charges that his party supporters, including Ms. Yadav, say were
politically motivated. His sentence ends in 2023, but he was out of jail on a
monthlong furlough and on the campaign trail for his son and scion, Dushyant
Chautala, and other party candidates.
“He said all this only because I am a woman,”
Ms. Choudhry said. “Talk about my work! Expose me if I am dishonest!”
“It sickened me,” she added.
Asked for comment, an aide to Mr. Chautala
said the party leader could not respond because he was back in jail.
If they want to win, women like Ms. Yadav
know they have to play the game. For her, the campaign is a mix of tapping into
the family wealth (they run a chain of private schools), the backing of the
Chautala political dynasty, and her own credentials. Her father is also a local
leader of the party and has contested elections before.
Ms. Yadav spent 10 years in the United
States, earning an engineering degree and a master’s in business administration
before starting work as a management consultant. She decided to return home and
become active in politics after a horrific 2012 gang rape in New Delhi.
“That case made feel that I needed to come
back,” Ms. Yadav said.
Ms. Yadav said that the entry barriers into
politics are such that many women outside political dynasties are virtually
shut out. Her wealth and her family’s stature gives her an advantage over many
others.
“Only few step into it, even fewer are taken
seriously and even fewer actually make it,” she said. “If I do well, it will
send such a good message everywhere — that if you are a nobody and you want to
enter politics you can, and you can make a difference.”
Many of the hopefuls from the coalition of
smaller parties that she belongs to are banking on what is a local wave of
disappointment with the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Prime
Minister Narendra Modi is still popular, but his party’s star has faded enough
that others think they can regain seats the B.J.P. swept in 2014.
In Haryana, Amar Singh, 72, said he voted for
a B.J.P. candidate in the last elections because he was fed up with what he
described as the Congress Party’s corruption. Now he is campaigning for Ms.
Yadav.
“Modi’s promises, they were all lies. He is
now acting like a dictator,” Mr. Singh said. “She has the energy to work. She
is young, she is well-educated.”
At every village, Ms. Yadav’s routine was
largely the same. As dozens, sometimes hundreds, of villagers gathered around
her car, she pressed the button to open the sunroof and popped out, pressing
her palms together in respect before being handed a microphone.
Every speech began with her declaring that
she had the blessings of Mr. Chautala, the veteran politician, and his son
Dushyant. She promised to address water shortages and improve education and
pension delivery. She spoke about her degrees from the United States and her
leading a company of thousands.
And she ended with a wish that the younger
Mr. Chautala becomes the chief minister of Haryana. It seemed to matter little
that the local elections deciding a chief minister are not until October.
Athar Singh, 63, was among the thousands
gathered at Ms. Yadav largest rally of the day, in Bhiwani. The men, and some
women, chanted slogans of “Long live brother Ajay Chautala!” Occasionally, they
chanted “Long live sister Swati!”
Mr. Singh, a farmer, said he knew nothing
about Ms. Yadav. When pressed, he said he had heard that she was a “good,
educated girl.”
But his real motivation had less to do with
Ms. Yadav herself. “I am voting for her because Dushyant Chautala is a good
man,” he said.
