From the Opinions Editor | Women's empowerment and the politics of benevolence |
In Women and Power, the British classicist Mary Beard asks, “how and why do the conventional definitions of ‘power’, (or for that matter, of ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’)… exclude women?” Beard goes on to explain that this exclusion, from “politics in its widest sense, from office committees to the floor of the House”, is not a prejudice that crept into Western civilisation. It was one of its founding gestures.
As the Assembly elections across Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal reach their culmination with the final phase in Bengal on April 29, and in the aftermath of the uproar over the stalled Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, which attempted to yoke delimitation to the implementation of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, it is tempting to extend Beard’s hypothesis to the the Indian context to examine, yet again, how political parties look at women’s agency beyond its immediate electoral appeal.
At first glance, India appears to complicate Beard’s formulation. From the Independence movement to the Constituent Assembly debates to the Panchayati Raj reforms to their overwhelming participation in the electoral process, women have registered their presence in the nation’s public life. Their marginalisation has evolved not through erasure but through formal barriers, becoming subtler and more durable thanks to a political imagination that has traded the idea of parkati mahilayein for a benevolent framing of........