India’s parliament is still a considerable distance from a reasonable measure of gender equality, but undoubtedly, it has made strides.
India’s parliament is still a considerable distance from a reasonable measure of gender equality, but undoubtedly, it has made strides.
At 14%, or 77 of all 542 seats, the 17th Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) will have the highest representation of women ever, according to Lok Dhaba, a repository of election results based on data from the election commission of India (ECI).
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The share of sitting women members of parliament (MPs) is up from 5% in the first Lok Sabha way back in 1952.
Priyanka Chaturvedi, a Congress spokesperson who joined the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s ally Shiv Sena only a few weeks before the elections, observed that women had a better winning streak than men during the recent polls.
In 2019, up to 715 women candidates contested the Lok Sabha elections versus 7,334 males—10% of women won as opposed to 6% of the men.
Some of the larger states saw a higher number of women winning, Quartz’s analysis of Lok Dhaba data shows. India’s most populous state with 80 seats, Uttar Pradesh elected the most number of women (11).
The profiles of 700-plus female candidates contesting the 2019 general elections, according to an analysis by the Association for Democratic Reforms, are as follows:
Smriti Irani, who beat Congress president Rahul Gandhi on his traditional home turf, Amethi, is being heralded as the biggest winner of them all. Pragya Thakur, the Malegaon blast-accused who called Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse a patriot, is perhaps the most controversial among them.
