Towards political representation: Women polling parties walk towards their designated polling stations after collecting EVMs and polling materials on the eve of Nagaland Assembly Elections 2023
Between 2019 and 2021, about 85% women in nagaland Had attended school for more than 5 years. India’s average was only 72%. Less than 6% of Nagaland women aged 20-24 are married before the age of 18. India’s average was over 23%. Only 29% of women in Nagaland were anaemic, compared to twice the Indian average. More than 99% of married women in Nagaland participated in major household decisions and only about 6% experienced marital violence – almost five times less than the figure in India.
And yet, in the 14 assembly elections held between 1964 and 2018, Nagaland has not elected a single woman legislator. In 2023 election, Nagaland gets first two women legislators, Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP)’s Hekani Jakhlu and Salhoutuonuo Kruse won from Dimapur-III and West Angami respectively.
The dearth of women legislators was not just because they did not win elections, but also because of poor representation among candidates. In none of the 14 state elections, the number of women candidates has crossed six. In fact, the number of women candidates remained zero in five elections. Of the two polls, it was just one.
In 2023 also only four of the 183 candidates are women. However, the number of women voters in the state is equal to that of men. Of the 13,17,632 voters, 6,61,489 are male and 6,56,143 are female. The four women candidates are Hekhni Jakhlu and Salhoutuonuo of the NDPP, Rosie Thompson of the Congress and Kahuli Sema of the BJP.
In 2018, NDPP’s Awan Konyak narrowly missed out on creating history in 2018 when his Naga People’s Front (NPF) rival defeated him in the Aboi assembly constituency by 905 votes (8%).
However, notably, Nagaland elected a woman MP in 1977; Rano Mace Shazia was elected on a United Democratic Party ticket. Last year, another woman entered Parliament from the state, with the BJP nominating S Phangnon Konyak as a Rajya Sabha member from Nagaland.
This trend of socially strong but politically under-represented can be seen in most of the northeastern states.
chart 1a Shows the female population over the age of 5 who ever attended school. chart 1b Shows women aged 15-49 who were anaemic. chart 1c Refers to women aged 20-24 who are married before the age of 18. chart 1d This reflects the share of currently married women who typically participate in major household decisions. chart 1e Shows the share of married women aged 18-49 who have ever experienced spousal violence. The data for all the charts was till 2019-21.
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In general, in Charts 1A to 1E, Nagaland stands out as the top performer in most cases, followed by other northeastern states. In fact, across all indicators, most of the northeastern states had better figures than the India average. These data suggest that women in the Northeast are relatively more socially empowered.
Table 2 shows the average share of women legislators in state legislatures over three 10-year periods between 1993 and 2022. In the three northeastern states, for which the 2023 state election results will be declared this week, the average share has not crossed 7%. any of the decades. Except for Sikkim and to a lesser extent Assam, all other states have had very low representation of women in their legislatures in all periods and are at the bottom of the table.
Whereas, states like Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal, which fared poorly on various women empowerment indicators in Charts 1A to 1E, are at the top in Table 2.
The data in Table 2 pertains to the elections held between 1993 and 2022
(With inputs from PTI)
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