Political Agency and Gender in India

This book explores the distinctive forms of women’s political engagement in democratic politics in contemporary India. It focuses on women from historically marginalised strata of society whose spaces for political participation opened up as a result of the explosion of low-caste identity politics in India since the 1990s, and the introduction of women’s reserved quotas in local governance bodies. The book draws on extensive fieldwork in the male-dominated political landscape of the large state of Uttar Pradesh. This includes research on women party activists of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), women activists in other political parties, women Members of the regional Legislative Assembly (MLAs), former women Members of Parliament (MPs), women elected in urban and rural local government bodies by virtue of reserved quotas, and women active in informal village politics.
The author presents a new comparative framework to analyse women in politics in settings where unfavourable living conditions and restrictive gender regimes are in place. She argues that issues of gender and politics raised by western political scientists need to be reassessed. Rather than considering Indian women’s political agency and performance as a poor imitation of those of women in more ‘advanced’ western democracies, she considered them as political subjects in their own right. Furthermore, the idea of an ‘idiosyncratic democracy’ – the encounter between political activities and South Asian political institutions – is put forward to show that the process of globalisation of politics and institutions might result in a different models of democracy in the Global South. The book provides an example of how women have adapted to the modern political climate in which underdevelopment and inaccessibility of state institutions often make this role essential in everyday life. It will be of interest to academics working on South Asian Studies, International Politics and Women in Politics.