Gurugram: Even as both houses of Parliament have passed the women’s reservation bill, a close look at Election Commission of India (ECI) data shows that only six women have been elected to the Lok Sabha from Haryana since the state’s creation in 1966. The numbers for the neighbouring states of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, too, are similar.
Of Haryana’s six women MPs to date, Chandrawati was elected from Bhiwani, Sudha Yadav from Mahendragarh, Shruti Choudhry from Bhiwani-Mahendragarh, Kailasho Devi from Kurukshetra, Sunita Duggal from Sirsa, and Kumari Selja from Sirsa and later Ambala.
Voters in six of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats, namely Karnal, Sonipat, Rohtak, Hisar, Gurgaon, and Faridabad, have never elected a woman MP. Three of these parliamentary constituencies — Sonipat, Rohtak and Hisar — make up the Jat heartland of Haryana, where disputes are often decided by Khap panchayats.
According to Reicha Tanwar, a professor of women’s studies at Kurukshetra University, the data for Haryana comes as no surprise, given how pronounced patriarchal norms are in much of the state.
In a chapter she contributed to the book Women in State Politics in India: Missing in the Corridors of Power, Tanwar attributes women’s low level of participation in Haryana’s politics to a “lack of knowledge and awareness about elections and the electoral process”.
“Elections in India, as in all other modern democracies, have become very complicated, violent, dirty, and expensive, inviting many legitimate and many not-so-legitimate ways of funding and managing them. Women cannot obviously fit into this matrix of elections,” writes Tanwar. A former director of Kurukshetra University’s Women’s Studies Research Centre, she adds that participation costs are “very high” and violence has come to “dominate elections” in many areas.
“As a consequence, women lack the required skills and confidence to contest elections on their own might.”
The book, edited by Pam Rajput and Usha Thakkar, was released in January this year.
Tanwar also writes that with Haryana being a “rural agrarian state where patriarchal norms are more pronounced, the decision-making powers and positions are considered a male domain”.
“However, things are changing gradually now, and women have now started exercising their powers on their own,” she tells ThePrint.
Meanwhile, Kavita Jain, who was a minister in Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s Cabinet from 2014 to 2019, says one cannot downplay the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was able to secure a consensus among political parties on the women’s reservation bill.
Passed in the Lok Sabha on 20 September and in the Rajya Sabha the next day, the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — The Constitution (128th Amendment) Bill, 2021 — seeks to reserve for women one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha, state assemblies and the Delhi assembly.
Woman MPs from Haryana
Chandrawati became the first woman Lok Sabha MP from Haryana after she, as a Janata Party candidate, defeated Bansi Lal in Bhiwani in 1977. He was then defence minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet.
Born in 1928, Chandrawati was also the first woman to be elected to the state assembly in 1968. After Haryana was carved out from Punjab, she was elected to the state assembly on a Congress ticket in 1968 and then again on a Janata Dal ticket in 1991.
She also served as a minister in the Punjab government from 1964 to 1966, and in the Haryana government from 1972 to 1974. In addition, she was lieutenant governor of Puducherry from February 1990 to December 1990. Chandrawati died in November 2020 at the age of 92 after battling Covid-19.
Selja, meanwhile, is the only woman to have been elected to the Lok Sabha from Haryana four times — from Sirsa in 1991 and 1996, and Ambala in 2004 and 2009. A Congress Working Committee (CWC) member, she also served as a Rajya Sabha MP from 2014 till 2020.
Besides them, Kailasho Devi was elected to the Lok Sabha from Kurukshetra in 1998 and 1999 on an Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) ticket, BJP’s Sudha Yadav from Mahendragarh in 1999, and the Congress’s Shruti Choudhry from Bhiwani-Mahendragarh in 2009.
Yadav, who holds an MSc in chemistry and a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, was a lecturer when her husband, a deputy commandant in the Border Security Force, was killed in the Kargil War. She is currently a member of the party’s Central Parliamentary Board and Central Election Committee.
Kailasho Devi was also a college teacher before the INLD — then known as Haryana Lok Dal (Rashtriya) — fielded her from Kurukshetra parliamentary seat in 1998.
Meanwhile, Sunita Duggal of the BJP, who won her seat in 2019 with a comfortable margin, is the sitting MP from Sirsa. An Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer, she took voluntary retirement in 2014 to contest the general elections from Sirsa on a BJP ticket.
After the seat went to Kuldeep Bishnoi’s Haryana Janhit Congress as part of its seat-sharing arrangement with the BJP, Duggal instead contested the assembly elections later that year from the Ratia seat on a BJP ticket, but lost by a narrow margin.
Of these six women, Kumari Selja and Shruti Choudhry belong to political dynasties.
Selja’s father, Chaudhary Dalbir Singh, was elected to the Lok Sabha from Sirsa four times (1967, 1971, 1980 and 1984), while Choudhry’s grandfather Bansi Lal represented Bhiwani in the Lower House from 1980 to 1989. Her father Surender Singh won this seat in 1996 and retained it in the 1998 general elections.
According to Tanwar, districts in Haryana where Jats are the dominant community have never elected a woman to the Lok Sabha since male dominance is more pronounced within the community. This, she says, includes Jatt Sikhs, which explains why not many women have been elected to the Lower House from neighbouring Punjab.
“Why talk about Lok Sabha alone where people’s votes matter? Even in the Rajya Sabha where party leaders have to decide the candidates, only four women have been elected from Haryana to date: Sushma Swaraj (1990-1996), Vidya Beniwal (1990-1996), Sumitra Mahajan (2002-2008) and Kumari Selja (2014-2020),” Tanwar tells ThePrint.
The patriarchal mindset in Haryana, she adds, can be gauged from the fact that even when women were elected to panchayats in the state, the men in the family rarely allowed them to exercise their powers. The men would sit as a proxy in panchayat meetings in place of the elected women, irrespective of the woman’s educational qualifications.
Emphasising the importance of reservation for women in politics, she says women understand several policy issues better. As an example, she says that even after 76 years of Independence, several state governments have not been able to provide piped drinking water, because “women have to carry pitchers filled with water from distant places”.
“Had this been a man’s job to carry water from distant places, drinking water would have been provided to every household much earlier. But this was never a priority for the legislatures having men in a disproportionate majority.”
Women MPs from Punjab, Himachal
On this count, Haryana’s dismal record is matched by neighbouring Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.
Voters in six of Punjab’s 13 Lok Sabha constituencies have never elected a woman MP, while those in the remaining seven have elected only nine women to the Lower House to date.
Similarly, no woman has won a Lok Sabha election from two of Himachal Pradesh’s four Lok Sabha seats — Shimla and Hamirpur. At the same time, three women have been elected to the Lower House from the remaining two seats, Kangra and Mandi.
In the case of Punjab, Nirlep Kaur of the Akali Dal (Sant Fateh Singh) won from Sangrur and Mohinder Kaur of the Congress from Patiala in the 1967 general elections.
Congress’s Preneet Kaur, the sitting MP from Patiala, first won this seat in 1999 and retained it in 2004, 2009 and 2019.
Similarly, Sukhbans Kaur Bhinder of the Congress was elected to the Lok Sabha from Gurdaspur seat in 1980, 1984, 1989, 1991 and 1996. There were also the Congress’s Gurbinder Kaur Brar, who was elected to the Lok Sabha from Faridkot in 1980, and Rajinder Kaur Bulara of the Shiromani Akali Dal (Mann) who won the Ludhiana seat in 1989.
In 2009, voters in Punjab elected two women to the Lower House — the Akali Dal’s Paramjit Kaur Gulshan (Faridkot) and the Congress’s Santosh Chowdhary (Hoshiarpur).
Meanwhile, the Akali Dal’s Harsimrat Kaur Badal, the sitting MP from Bathinda, first won this seat in 2009 and retained it in 2014 and 2019.
Of the three women elected to the Lok Sabha from Himachal Pradesh — all on Congress tickets — Rajkumari Amrit Kaur won from Mandi in 1951, and Chandresh Kumari Katoch from Kangra in 1984. Pratibha Singh, the sitting MP from Mandi, won this seat in 2004 and then again in a bye-election held in 2013. In November 2021, she was elected to the Lok Sabha from this seat for a third time in a bypoll.
Quota by 2029 or 2039?
On the women’s reservation bill, Jagmati Sangwan, national vice president of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) — the women’s wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — says the abysmal number of women MPs in the Lok Sabha shows why a quota for them is necessary. It allows women to participate in the democratic process and influence policies that are crucial for half the country’s population, she adds.
Sangwan, however, has doubts about the delimitation rider in the women’s reservation bill. “The way the government wants to implement this law after the census and delimitation, it is unlikely to come into force before 2039, as delimitation is a long process and there is no word when the process of conducting a census will begin,” she says.
On the other hand, Duggal, the BJP MP from Sirsa, says women will be able to avail of the quota from 2029 onwards. “Our party president J.P. Nadda ji has announced among BJP MPs that reservation for women will begin from the 2029 Lok Sabha polls. The census exercise was delayed due to Covid-19. It is due and this can begin soon.”
She adds that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led BJP has “always given due representation to women”. The BJP today has 41 women MPs, besides 11 women ministers in the Union cabinet, says Duggal.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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