Ruhi Tewari’s What Women Want explains how women are driving electoral change in India

Since the 2014 General Election, which propelled the BJP-led NDA to power to the Centre, the woman voter has emerged as a subject of great speculation and much pontification among political pundits and strategists — and not without reason. Between the General Elections of 1962 and 2024, the turnout of women voters increased by more than 41 per cent, compared to the male voter turnout that rose by a mere 4 per cent. The gender gap in voter turnout too has all but disappeared with 65.8 per cent for women and 65.6 per cent for men in the last Lok Sabha election. What Tewari traces in the book is the arc of this historic convergence, and the various forces that shaped its trajectory, from reforms that made elections safer to economic catalysts like the Self-Help Group movement and MGNREGA that gave women greater financial freedom. As women gained the confidence to step out into the public sphere, they also began expressing their political choices more assertively and independently of their family.

While it could have benefited from a more ruthless weeding out of repetitions and the excision of a whole chapter on women’s favourite politicians (most of its key observation could easily have been absorbed by the other chapters), Tewari’s book is interesting for the two questions at its heart. One, what is it that women actually want from those they vote to power? Two, do other aspects of their identity, primarily religion and caste, ever override their concerns as women? Regarding the first, Tewari says, women voters prioritise the concrete over the abstract, the practical over the rhetorical and think in terms of what the family as a unit can gain. This is why they respond so positively to what is often dismissed as “freebie politics”. Does this make them transactional? Tewari says yes, but she doesn’t allow this word to carry its usual pejorative weight; as she points out, it is pragmatism born out of real deprivation that shapes these “transactions”. What the world sees as “freebies” are, in other words, “a shot at dignity” for women voters.

The examples Tewari offers are instructive and should help correct the prevailing tendency to uniformly cast such schemes in negative light. To many today, Jayalalithaa’s mixer-grinder scheme for women may be synonymous with profligacy that masquerades as welfare, but for women from poorer backgrounds, it meant liberation from the kitchen and a “lifestyle upgrade”.

In other cases, cash transfers became the seed capital for small enterprises, and bicycles and free bus rides assured greater mobility, which in turn granted greater access to education and employment. Imaginative politicians like Jayalalithaa, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal have understood this crucial difference between mindless populism and a life-altering scheme, thereby earning the loyalty of large sections of women voters. But, Tewari shows, politics of this kind calls for nimbleness and original thinking. As needs change with improving circumstances, expectations evolve — and women voters begin to chafe at being seen as eternal labharthis.

On the second question, Tewari concludes that while a woman may prioritise gender when it is the most disenfranchised aspect of her identity, if her caste or religion feels more vulnerable, those parts of her identity play a greater role in her voting decision. So while upper-caste Hindu women generally tend to look beyond caste and religion because gender is their biggest disadvantage, for women from minority communities, especially among Muslims, the marginalisation of their religious identity becomes the decisive factor. And while ‘backward’ caste women increasingly look beyond their caste identity, Dalit women feel more torn by the competing claims of their caste- and gender-based deprivation. It is a reading that complicates the infuriatingly flat picture often painted of the woman voter as a single bloc and in doing so, enriches our understanding of one of the most remarkable electoral phenomena of the last decade.