According to a 2024 report 151 sitting MLAs and MPs face charges related to crimes against women. This statistic is even more horrifying when combined with the Supreme Court’s verdict on implementing the POSH Act in political parties. “It would open a Pandora’s box,” the two-judge bench said. With more women set to enter politics post the census and delimitation, this is a problem that needs immediate attention.
The aggrieved woman cannot continue to be ignored for the sake of a political ‘VIP’.
Party hierarchies create their own centres of power—informal, discretionary, and often decisive for careers—even when the individuals involved hold no formal public office. If sexual harassment occurs within that ecosystem, what is the woman’s clear, enforceable institutional remedy—our laws and Supreme Court verdicts notwithstanding?
That is the question our law still avoids.
The party’s power structure
Political parties are not government departments, but they are the principal gateways into government. Within them, organisational authority is real authority: It determines who gets opportunities, who advances, who is sidelined, and who is publicly protected. That is precisely why the absence of an internal, enforceable sexual-harassment redressal mechanism is indefensible.
Existing law protects women most clearly where relationships are formal and contractual, yet leaves them most exposed where power is more potent but informal, personalised, and retaliatory.
When women party workers do speak, they pay twice—first through harassment, then through disbelief. Complaints are quickly reduced to motives, factions and “politics”, with the woman cast as an opportunist, a blackmailer, or a plant of an opposing party. Partisanship supplies an entire toolkit of deterrence—online abuse, insinuations, whisper campaigns, threats, and organisational exclusion. Silence becomes, for many, the only strategy that does not invite social stigma and professional ruin. A legal regime that offers no credible internal pathway inside parties does not merely fail women; it conditions them to endure.
Dignity beyond contracts
The Supreme Court’s Vishakha principles were anchored not in payroll formalities but in constitutional dignity—equality and the right to live with dignity and without humiliation.
The guidelines therefore mandated institutional prevention and redressal mechanisms so victims are not forced into hostile external arenas at crushing personal cost. Parliament carried this logic into statute through the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013—the POSH Act—by acknowledging that modern work includes interns, trainees, apprentices and others who operate under unequal power, and by requiring external representation on complaints committees to curb internal cover-ups.
Political parties reflect exactly the kind of hierarchical vulnerability Vishakha and POSH sought to remedy, yet they usually escape the discipline of the law by describing political work as “voluntary association”.
Supreme Court’s approach
The Supreme Court’s refusal to entertain a PIL seeking to bring political parties under the workplace sexual-harassment framework, arising from a Kerala case, rests on a narrow formalism: Party engagement is not “employment”; therefore parties are not “workplaces”. In declining to examine this, the Supreme Court Bench of Chief Justice BR Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran, by its order on 1 August 2025, allowed that reasoning to stand—and to be cited as precedent.
But this approach mistakes legal labels for lived power. A party is an organised institutional space, not a private drawing room; it is where careers are built, access is rationed, and vulnerability is exploited. The answer to fears about factional misuse is not exemption, but process: Safeguards, confidentiality, penalties for malicious complaints, and genuine independence in complaint redressal.
Also read: With no PoSH, is Advocates Act an adequate substitute for legal fraternity? What lawyers have to say
The next wave must not enter unprotected
India has now constitutionally promised one-third reservation for women in Parliament and State Assemblies, with implementation linked to a Census-and-delimitation cycle. If women’s participation expands while party ecosystems remain exempt from enforceable anti-harassment duties, we will be inviting new entrants—often young, often without protective networks—into spaces where coercion can be normalised as “the price of entry”.
The entertainment world provides us an example of how harmful this can be. The “casting couch” thrives where gatekeepers control access and victims fear being labelled “difficult”. Kerala’s Hema Committee, and the complaints and FIRs that followed, underline a simple truth—informality is not innocence, and the absence of neat contracts does not erase coercion.
Treat parties as workplaces
A responsible democracy does not outsource women’s safety to good intentions. The solution is not pious advice, nor another “code of conduct” to be waved around at election time and quietly waived off when complaints become inconvenient. What is required is enforceable law.
The POSH framework must be amended—or a short, targeted statute enacted—to bring registered and recognised political parties within the sexual-harassment prevention and redressal regime.
The “political workplace” must be defined in its widest sense to match political reality: Party offices and meetings, training camps, campaigns, official travel, and—crucially—selection and appointment processes. Protection must extend to the entire political workforce, not merely salaried staff, because vulnerability in politics often lies precisely outside formal employment.
Parties must be legally compelled to establish independent complaints committees at national and state levels with credible external members—including women with prior experience in the judiciary, civil services, or comparable public institutions—operating with strict confidentiality and time-bound procedure, backed by strong anti-retaliation safeguards. Compliance must carry stringent, time-bound consequences.
Institutions that enjoy public recognition, electoral privileges and regulatory benefits must also meet and ensure minimum standards of dignity and accountability for women within their rank and file.
The question we must ask
When a “VIP” is mentioned in a political scandal, the public instinct is to demand a name. The mature democratic instinct should be to demand a remedy—and an expeditious one. If harassment occurs within the party ecosystem, the woman must not be told that the law sees no workplace, and therefore no protection.
A democracy cannot applaud women’s representation in legislatures, while tolerating legal invisibility for women inside political parties. If political opportunity remains outside the reach of workplace dignity, equality becomes conditional—available in offices, uncertain in politics, and dependent on discretion. That is the contradiction India must now correct.
Whether the major political parties support such reform will be a litmus test: Are they merely paying lip service to women’s dignity, or are they willing to back effective legislative measures that actually secure it?
KBS Sidhu is a former IAS officer who retired as Special Chief Secretary, Punjab. He tweets @kbssidhu1961. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)