Vol.1: Women, Power and Politics in South Asia
Money, Dynasty and Violent Misogyny Keeping Women Out of Power
Thank you for subscribing. For our first issue, we touch upon this week’s news in South Asia, look at the history of women in power in South Asia, barriers to their entry into politics, and why breaking the glass ceiling doesn’t lift everyone up. Lastly, this issue delves into gender quotas and their effectiveness in increasing female representation on the subcontinent.
News from South Asia
[Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault] Protests have erupted across India after a 19-year-old Dalit girl was gang-raped by four upper-caste men in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh and succumbed to her injuries this week. Despite statements by the victim and her family, the police and leaders of the BJP government have been trying to claim that the woman was not raped, because no sperm was found on the body. Women from marginalized communities in India are at an increased risk of sexual violence. According to one report, four Dalit women are raped every day. The Hathras victim’s body was hastily burnt in the middle of the night by the UP police without the family’s consent. The police also tapped into the phone of India Today reporter Tanushree Pandey who had broken the story on the forced cremation.
UN predicts that the COVID-19 pandemic will push 47 million more women and girls into extreme poverty by 2021. In South Asia, the pre-pandemic female poverty rate was projected to be 10% in 2021 but is now expected to reach 13%.
The Nepalese government has introduced new laws to increase the punishment for acid attackers to up to 20 years in prison and to control the sale of acid.
In Afghanistan, data shows that more men than women contract COVID-19. Alisha Haridasani Gupta and Fatima Faizi from the New York Times write that this is likely due to women’s limited access to healthcare in Afghanistan.
Ewelina U. Ochab estimates that more than 1000 women and girls from Hindu and Christian communities are abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and forced to marry their captors every year in Pakistan. This ideologically motivated sexual abuse is not only because of sexual predation but to “conquest’” the woman or girl from a religious minority and “claiming” her for the majority religion, she adds.
Deep Dive: Politics and Power in South Asia
Sixty years ago, Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, became the first country to ever democratically elect a female head of state worldwide. Sirimavo Bandaranaike went on to serve three more terms as the Prime Minister. She was soon followed by the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1966 - the second female head of state globally. In 1988, Benazir Bhutto was elected as the first female prime minister of Pakistan and became the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim majority nation. Female prime ministers Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have been in power for a majority of Bangladesh’s political history.
However, it is not enough to break glass ceilings if you don’t extend a ladder to the women behind you. The paradox remains that women’s overall political participation in most South Asian nations remains woefully low despite being a region of many firsts for women politicians. Research shows that women have to constitute at least 30% of the decision-making body - “the critical mass” - to exert influence and promote pro-women policies. In South Asia, except Nepal, no other country comes close.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say we broke the glass ceiling with Sirimavo and Chandrika. They don’t represent the average women who aspire to enter politics. They had strong pedigree politics. Their families, their husbands, fathers, the men in their lives, were deep-rooted in politics.”
Sathya Karunarathne, research executive at Advocata Institute, on women’s low political particiation in Sri Lanka and dynasty politics.
While not a part of formal politics, South Asian women have been ensuring that their voice is heard through protest movements this year. In India, women like Bilkis, an 82-year-old grandmother, became the face of women-led resistance in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Bilkis is the only South Asian woman to be featured on TIME magazine’s list of 100 most influential people for 2020. Among the diaspora, Indian-American Kamala Harris, the Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate, also makes the TIME’s list. The women in Pakistan led another Aurat March (Women’s March) this year after the gang rape of a woman in front of her children on the motorway in Lahore sparked national outrage. In Sri Lanka, the Mother’s Front has been protesting for years for answers on the whereabouts of their loved ones who were kidnapped during the civil war and never heard from again.
Barriers to Women’s Entry into Politics
Sexism and Violence. Earlier this year, Shiva Maya Tumbahamphe, one of Nepal’s most senior female politicians, was forced to stand down as parliament speaker. Tumbahamphe stated that she was a “victim of patriarchy.” Women not just face social and cultural restrictions, but the cost of not conforming is also very high. Politics in South Asia has always been violent - even more so for women. One study found that psychological violence including sexist remarks has affected 81.8% of female parliamentarians globally. One in four were subjected to physical violence.
An Amnesty study found that one in every five tweets to a female politician in India was sexist or misogynistic and one in every seven tweets was problematic or abusive. A paper in the IDS bulletin found that men increasingly use sexual harassment to resist women’s presence in political spaces in Pakistan. The authors worry that this problem “may only increase when women achieve more prominence as politicians.” They find that women’s coping strategies range from avoiding the political arena altogether, accepting the harassment, a mixed experience of Caucus support, to rare instances of confrontation.
Money and Political Gatekeeping. A U.N. Women study found that over 80% of respondents identified the lack of access to funding as one of the biggest challenges to women’s entry into politics worldwide. Lax campaign financing laws and high costs of elections in South Asia, alongside reluctance of political parties to front female candidates, keep many women out of politics.
Dynasty and Networks. Family ties trump any gender prejudices in the region. Among the female heads of state, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and Sheikh Hasina had fathers who served as the Prime Ministers or Presidents of that nation and Khaleda Zia and Sirimavo Bandaranaike were both married to past Prime Ministers. The reluctance of political parties to fund and nominate women means that without men’s extensive networks and patronage, the handful of female politicians enter politics largely through dynasty politics and their relation to male politicians. A 2016 book on India finds that 43% of the women elected to Lok Sabha came from political families - only 19% of male MPs were from dynastic families.
For more country-specific analysis, you can also read my detailed pieces in The Diplomat on women in politics in India and Sri Lanka.
Why Elect More Women?
Research shows that women are better legislators than men. They sponsor more bills, pass more laws, and send their districts more money.
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab observes that women political leaders in Indian villages were more likely to invest in priorities for women like drinking water and road improvement because they understand and share them. In the United States, political scientist Michele Swers also finds that women in Congress shift the focus on bills and policies that relate to women, like increasing paid leave or prosecuting violence against women.
Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, and Petia Topalova, find that the gender gap in aspirations of girls and boys between 11-15 closed by 32 percent for girls and by 25 percent for their parents in Indian villages with reserved quotas for women leaders.
Chandan Jha and Sudipta Sarangi’s cross-country analysis of more than 125 countries finds that greater female representation in politics leads to less corruption, greater transparency, and better practices.
Patricia Funk and Christina Gathmann find that Swiss female politicians are more likely to favor spending on health, unemployment, and social security than their male counterparts.
Gender Quotas: Good, Bad, and In-Between
Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, have all introduced quotas on local and/or national levels to encourage more women to enter politics. While effective in increasing women’s representation, there are two major criticisms against political quotas in South Asia. One, gender quotas often reinforce other caste and class hierarchies. Two, women elected through quotas are little more than male proxies.
A recent article in the Boston Review by Marie E. Berry and Milli Lake takes a nuanced look at gender quotas in post-war countries. In Nepal, the researchers found that while quotas appeased international advisors, they also facilitated the continued dominance of particular caste, regional, and class interests.
“Gender innovations that reinforce interlocking forms of market, class, and ethnic dominance will only ever serve to preserve rather than undermine patriarchal power.”
- Marie E. Berry and Milli Lake (2020), When Quotas Come Up Short.
In India where the government has implemented quotas on a sub-national level, Mona Lena Krook in her renowned book Quotas for Women in Politics, observes that while many women may start as proxies to husbands or other family members, they become increasingly effective and independent policymakers as they gain more experience. Once elected, women often run again for political office even after their constituencies have been de-reserved. Nonetheless, the women’s reservation bill for quotas for Indian women in the parliament remains stalled for nearly 23 years.
It’s neighbor Pakistan has 17% national quotas for women. In a recent paper, Ayesha Khan and Sana Naqvi find that women quota legislators in Pakistan resist classification as male proxies and view themselves as accountable to national voters, despite being indirectly elected. They find that women’s increased presence in politics since the quotas were reintroduced in 2002 has led to the introduction of a series of progressive new laws. However, they also note that the indirect mode of their election undermines women’s political empowerment and deepens resentment among male peers holding general seats, further reinforcing male hostility against female politicians in the political sphere.
Feminist Reading List
[Book] Caroline Criado Perez’s Magnum Opus “Invisible Women” looks into how gender bias affects our everyday world. Perez argues that data is fundamental to our world and when the default for what is human is a man, women often pay the price: from mildly annoying inconveniences like ill-fitting phones and shivering in cold offices to deadly consequences like the misdiagnosis of heart attacks because women's symptoms are "atypical" and a 47% higher risk of serious injury in a car accident because the testing dummy is built on male proportions.
“Gender data gap that is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male.”
- Caroline Criado Perez (2018), Invisible Women.
Read my full review of the book.
Postcards of Courage: Noor Inayat Khan
Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944) was an Indian princess born in Moscow to a Sufi musician father Hazrat Inayat Khan and an American mother Pirani Ameena Begum. In August, for her service during World War II, Khan became the first and only woman of South Asian descent to get a memorial Blue Plaque in London. Only 14 % of over 950 such Blue Plaques celebrate women.
In 1940, Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and trained to become a radio operator. Quickly rising above ranks, she was selected to go to Paris to join the Special Operations Executive, a secret British spy organization. When all other agents of her network were arrested within 10 days of their arrival, Khan built up her own network becoming a crucial link between the agents in Paris and London. Just as she was about to leave France, Khan was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau concentration camp to be tortured and executed. She gave away nothing to her torturers, not even her name.
For more on Noor’s life, read Shrabani Basu’s “Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan.”
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this issue, you can subscribe for free and share this newsletter. Our second issue will explore the low female employment participation rate in South Asia and its implications. We will look deeper into India’s first Time Use Survey after two decades that finds that women do ten times the household work as men; the impact of COVID-19 on Bangladesh’s rising female labor force; how Nepal has over 80 percent female labor force participation in the region; women's access to paid work in post-conflict societies like Sri Lanka; the legacy of gender discriminatory laws and more.
Wonderful and eye opener article..keep it up