History through Her Eyes

In January 1937, Punjab had its first ever purdah polling booths installed in the old city of Lahore, for the benefit of the first-time female voters. The passing of the Government of India Act 1935, two years ago, had granted 6 million Indian women the right to vote. Women over the age of twenty-one, who were either literate or owned property, or whose husbands or sons qualified for other franchise requirements, were permitted to exercise their newly-acquired voting rights.

The 1937 elections for the newly formed Punjab Legislative Assembly were done on the basis of separate electorates, where a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian or a Scheduled Caste voter voted for a candidate from their own specific group. In addition to religion and caste-based electorates, there were also reserved seats for women candidates, and this made the voting process a bit complicated.

In the Punjab Legislative Assembly, four seats were reserved for women, representing four constituencies: Lahore City (General), Lahore (Rural), Lahore (Outer) and Amritsar. In this weird inter-mixing of gender and religion-based electorates, Amritsar and Lahore City (General) were reserved for Sikh and Hindu candidates respectively, while the other two constituencies were reserved for Muslims. In this way, two Muslim women and a Hindu and Sikh woman each were to be elected to the reserved women’s seats in the Punjab Legislative Assembly.

The voting process itself wasn’t straightforward. Each female voter in Punjab, just like the male voter, could exercise only one vote. But this was not the case in the four reserved women’s constituencies. In these four areas, women not only voted for the female candidate running in the reserved seat, but also voted for the male candidate running on the normal seats. This resulted in the female voters in the reserved constituencies getting two votes.

This wasn’t the case with some male voters in women’s constituencies. While Muslim women had two votes, Muslim men were forbidden to vote for female candidates. This special concession to Muslim women was due to the fact that a large number of them still observed purdah of some kind. This slight twist to the rule was thought to not only give impetus to more women to register as voters, but also saved purdanashin candidates from the need of having to canvass around male voters.

As opposed to this, all Hindu and Sikh voters, men and women, in reserved women’s constituencies voted for both male and female candidates and retained their two votes.

In the days leading up to the polls, Punjab’s female candidates began their election campaign and propaganda work. At Amritsar, there was a ‘feverish anxiety’ as Sikh women went from door to door to get their nomination papers signed before the due date. At Lahore, Muslim candidates debated their mandate in a purdah meeting and emphasized the importance of women in politics so as to ‘safeguard their interests and rights’ and to ‘regain the rights, which had been taken away from them’.

Finally, when the election days arrived, a sea of women found their way daily into the polling stations set up for them, which were closely monitored by women polling officers. Rival parties hired old women to stop each tonga or car and influence the potential female voter towards their own candidate. There were incidents of women supporters from rival groups being involved in ‘hand to hand fights’, snatching ballot papers from one another, pulling veils and hurling abuses at each other. The Punjab press concluded: ‘The first experiment in polling in “Purdah” shows that women voters need police control no less than men voters do.

On 1 April 1937, the first ‘autonomous cabinet of the Punjab’ was sworn into office under its first Premier, Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, the president of the victorious Unionist Party.

The winner of the Sikh women’s seat in Amritsar was Raghbir Kaur, a leftist Congress candidate and a staunch anti-imperialist, who had previously served time in jail. Clad in a khaddar sari with a pallu covering her head, Raghbir came from a poor agrarian family and was known for her dramatic Punjabi oratory and sharp retorts. She was well known amongst labour and student unions in Punjab, and only within a few months of being elected, she was seen picketing outside Khalsa College, shouting ‘Union zindabad’ and ‘Principal murdabad!’ to protest a police crackdown on students.

As a member of the opposition, Raghbir’s criticism of the loyalist Unionist government was very sharp. She criticized the government for ‘squandering away’ public money for official darbars, and reminded them that the money was the outcome of people’s hard work. She taunted them stating that since most ministers surrounding her were ‘big landlords’, who had neither ploughed the fields nor irrigated the lands, it was difficult for them to realize how much difficulty the peasantry had to face in order to pay their land revenues. ‘Instead of holding the Viceregal darbar,’ she said, ‘it would have been much better if they had taken His Excellency the Viceroy to the villages and brought to his notice the miserable plight of the half-naked and underfed children of the villages’. She criticized the crackdown on political protestors and activists by the Unionist Party even as they organized lavish darbars for British administrators saying, ‘These are the glorious deeds of this zamindar Government. They honour those who are the cause of the poverty of this country and oppress and expel the sons of the soil.’

When a pompous minister told Raghbir that she was exaggerating, she blasted him, ‘This whole system is a lie, this whole administration is based upon lies. You are a liar and we all of us are liars.

Raghbir appealed for free education of children with the government giving free books to poor students and focusing more on girls’ education to help them in ‘building the national character’. When the Punjab government considered the creation of high-salaried posts, she retorted, ‘How dare they waste public money when the public itself was starving?’ She regularly raised individual cases of political prisoners in the Punjab Assembly, and questioned the government on it.

(Excerpted with permission from Harleen Singh’s The Lost Heer; published by Penguin)