The Politics of Access: Narratives of Women MPs in the Indian Parliament
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Author | Shirin M. Rai |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00915.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
The Politics of Access: Narratives of Women MPs
in the Indian Parliamentpost_915195..212
Shirin M. Rai
University of Warwick
Based on extensive interviews with Indian women Members of Parliament,this article suggests that analysing subject
narratives is an important method to understand the various routes taken by these women into parliamentary politics.
This article pieces together life stories of Indian women MPs to reveal the complex layersof negotiations that women
make to be successful.In making such an analysis, the article focuses on four avenues of access – family networks,social
and political movements,the party system and the struggle over quotas for women. The article concludes that through
narrative analysis we can understand better the importance of different strategies of political access in specific and
embedded political, social and economic contexts and develop methodological insights into the broader issues of
gendered access to politics.
Keywords: gender; representation; narrative analysis; Indian parliament
This article addresses the issue of the politics of recruitment of women to parliamentary
politics in India and how we might study this.1There is a complex literature arguing for a
greater presence of women in political institutions (Dahlerup, 2005; IDS Bulletin, 2010;
Jonasdottir,1988; Lovenduski, 2005; Mansbridge, 1999; Phillips, 1995; UNDP, 2005).While
we cannot assume that more women in public offices (descriptive representation) would
mean a better deal for women in general (substantive representation),2this literature
suggests that there are at least four reasons for continued insistence on and analysis of greater
representation of women in political life:
(1) the politics of presence – without being sufficiently visible a group’s ability to influence
either policy making, or indeed the political culture of institutions, is limited;
(2) the politics of institutional practice – once members of political institutions, how do
women negotiate institutional practices and norms on an everyday basis? This helps
us understand the gendered nature of representative politics ‘in their institutional
settings’ allowing us to ‘show how the constraints of real political situations affect
the capacities of actually existing women politicians and vice versa’ (Lovenduski,
2005, p. 9);
(3) strategies for accessing politics – the successful strategies that women employ to access and
function effectively in political institutions could be useful for others wanting to
participate in institutional politics. The problem here is, of cour se, precisely that
political women are an elite group – and might possess characteristics and abilities that
are not widely shared. We can, however, examine whether some strategies, such as
socio-political movements, open up new spaces where women might transcend their
social positioning (Basu, 1992; Goetz and Hassim,2003; Gopal Jayal, 2006; Kudva and
Misra, 2008; Rai, 2007);
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00915.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012 VOL 60, 195–212
© 2011The Author.Political Studies © 2011 Political Studies Association
(4) connecting institutional and grass-roots politics – is there a transfer of women from
grass-roots politics to parliamentary politics? If so,how might the strengthening of one
lead to higher representation of women in the other? If not, what can be done to
change this? This, after all, was the hope of Indian feminists and policy makers when
the quota for women in village councils (panchayats) was introduced in 1993 (Baviskar
and Mathew, 2009; Rai et al., 2005).
India is a bicameral parliamentary democracy. The more powerful lower house is called the
Lok Sabha (People’s Assembly) and has 543 members. The upper house is called Rajya
Sabha (States’ Assembly) with 233 members. Representatives to the Lok Sabha are chosen
on a first-past-the-post basis by single-member constituencies for the lower house, which
is seen by some feminist analysts to be least conducive to the representation of marginalised
groups in society. In the Rajya Sabha a single transferable vote system is used by state
(provincial) assemblies (Vidhan Sabhas). Just over 10 per cent of MPs in the Indian
parliament are women; the world average is 19.2 per cent and the regional average (Asia)
is 18.5 per cent; this puts India at 96 out of 186 in the Inter-Parliamentary Union league
table for women’s representation in parliaments and 122 in the UNDP Gender Inequality
Index (2008).3India has been a good testing ground for assessing gender and representation
where, on the one hand, social indicators point to women’s subordination and exclusion
and, on the other, vibrant women’s movements struggle successfully for democratic routes
to women’s political representation. The Indian example is also useful because of its
diversity – regional,institutional and cultural – which encourages us to use a var ied political
palate and where the issues of scale become critical: the relationship between national,
provincial and local state formations is overlaid with that of ethno-linguistic, religious and
regional party politics, making strategising for change highly complex.India also for ms part
of a region where struggles of women’s representation have been strong and where histories
of colonialism and post-colonial development have resulted in sometimes unpredictable
outcomes for gender equality in politics (Rai et al., 2005). The Indian example therefore
allows us to addressVicky Randall’s prescient query:‘Why have gender quotas been adopted
in these [Latin American, East Asian and African parliaments] ... but not in politically
progressive India?’ (Randall, 2006, p. 65).
The arguments presented in this article are based on a study of 23 women MPs4in the
Indian parliament, conducted over a ten-year period in two parliaments – 1994 (the 10th
Lok Sabha) and 2004 (the 14th Lok Sabha); a third of these were interviewed at least twice.
The selection criteria for this sample were based on party political affiliations, religious and
regional diversity,class and professional background and the generational span, both in terms
of age and the time served in parliament (see Table 1). Most of the interviews were
conducted at the MPs’ homes – the senior MPs have an office attached to their government-
provided bungalows – thus blurring the spatial politics of my research. The public and the
private often overlapped when I talked to these women as they went about their daily
lives – answering endless phone calls, giving orders to servants,keeping constituents waiting
while they spoke to me at length – while at the same time often presenting a decidedly
thought-out political response to my questions.I interviewed the MPs in the languages they
were comfortable in (and which I could speak) – English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.
196 SHIRIN M. RAI
© 2011The Author.Political Studies © 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012, 60(1)
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