The Gender Turn in Indian Elections: When Mobilizing Women Changes Party Competition

In recent elections in India, attitudes regarding females as “dependent” voters have changed and females are now viewed as a decisive portion of the electorate. The general election of 2024 seals this change as females voted in parity with men, and all the parties in the contest sought to win the pseudo political prize of “women’s welfare” and then continued to act in a way that promoted women’s welfare as a political objective. This paper argues that India is now experiencing a gender turn in electoral politics, which is far more complex than simply being a rise in women’s turnout. The gender turn is extending the scope of party competition and is reshaped around three interrelated shifts; 1) the construction of proximate and supportive mobilization infrastructures for women’s enfranchisement (facilitation by the Election Commission, self-help groups, and dense women’s networks); 2) a paradox i.e. women as “beneficiary-citizens” of the targeted welfare of married women that compels parties to compete on the politics of women’s everyday governance (food security, household infrastructure, cash transfers, and service delivery); and 3) the enduring representation paradox being a steep increase in the electorate’s women voters with no corresponding increase in women’s descriptive representation in the ranks of the party contestants and of the parliament. By employing feminist political theory, the study interprets the participation of women in elections not as a simple turn out by a statistic; rather, it is a multidimensional struggle of woman for empowerment, voice, and recognition. Using electoral sociology, it shows the ways women’s collective networks and welfare ties influence t salience of issues, coalition construction, and campaign tactics. The author places these networks and ties on the Viksit Bharat @2047 scenario: official development discourse has placed these “Mahilayen” in the center of the development of the nation, but a Developing India discourse requires a change in movement from women being the only targeted recipients to women being the only agenda-setters and decision-makers of development. An out-of-the-box insight is that India’s gender turn is best understood as a transition from identity only competition to everyday state competition, where women’s votes compel parties to demonstrate effective governance - however this same process can reproduce paternalism is there is no sufficient closure in the system regarding the representation and political voice.