Parties fail to capitalise on woman power

The participation of women contingent of troopers in the 66th Republic Day parade drew the attention of many including US President Barack Obama, who was the chief guest at the mega-event. Obama’s praise for such a spectacle of woman power may assist policy-makers to think about changing more laws with enhanced focus on the fairer sex. The change in law will only be mooted when there would be more women representatives in Parliament or state assemblies, which seems to be a distant dream as the size of women candidates’ list is shrinking in every political party with every passing day.

The issue of women’s security is a major poll plank for all the major as well as minor political outfits but the ground reality is that parties have not fielded as much women candidates for the February 7 poll as they had in the last assembly election. Shockingly, for the upcoming election, parties have fielded only 63 women nominees in comparison to the December 2013 polls. During the last assembly election, there were a total of 71 women candidates who tried their luck.

Interestingly, no party has followed the 33 per cent formula for pitting women candidates in the contest. For the February assembly poll, a total of 924 candidates had filed their nomination papers, out of which the papers of only 693 nominees’ candidature were found to be valid. Out the final valid lot of nominees, there were 20 candidates who withdrew their nominations, making the final figure of candidates in the race to 673 for 70 assembly seats. Out of 673, there are 610 male candidates while only 63 nominees are women in the political battle.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has taken a lead in fielding more number of women candidates. The Amit Shah-led party has fielded as many as eight women candidates including its Chief Ministerial contestant Kiran Bedi from Krishna Nagar and former Union minister Krishna Tirath from Patel Nagar. On the other hand, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) have each fielded as many as six women candidates. AAP had also given the same number of tickets in the last general election too. It is worth mentioning that all the winning women candidates in the December 2013 election were from AAP.

The Congress party, headed by Sonia Gandhi, has fielded only five women candidates, while CPI has pitted only one. There are 20 independent women candidates in the race this time.