TMC claims upper hand in breaking glass ceiling for women: 28% tickets in 2014 LS polls to 40% in 2019

In the 2021 Assembly polls, the TMC had given tickets to women candidates in 50 seats of the state’s total 294 seats, which came to about 17 per cent women candidates.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, 22 TMC candidates, including nine women nominees, emerged victorious. The seats from where the party’s women candidates were elected are Basirhat (Nusrat Jahan), Jadavpur (Mimi Chakraborty), Kolkata Dakshin (Mala Roy), Uluberia (Sajda Ahmed), Krishnanagar (Mohua Moitra), Joynagar (Pratima Mondal), Barasat (Kakali Ghosh Dastidar), Arambagh (Aparupa Poddar) and Birbhum (Satabdi Roy).

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, 34 TMC candidates got elected as MPs, nearly one-third of whom or 11 were women.

The TMC has been among the parties which have given relatively larger space for women’s representation in politics over the years – in the party organisation as well as in the list of candidates for elections at various levels. The TMC supremo and Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, is currently the only woman CM in the country.

Until the late 1980s, women barely accounted for 2% of Bengal’s legislators – a state of affairs to which both the then ruling CPI(M)-led Left Front and the Congress were charged to have “contributed equally”. But since 1992, which saw the enactment of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment legislation mandating the setting up of a three-tier panchayat system, women’s representation across the entire spectrum of elected bodies has risen steadily in the state.

In the existing Bengal Assembly, there are 41 women MLAs out of a total of 294 MLAs, which accounts for about 14 per cent women legislators.

Bengal Finance Minister, Chandrima Bhattacharya, who is also the chief of the state TMC’s women wing, said, “Our leader Mamata Banerjee always gives priority to women. Her projects also prove it. Lakshmir Bhandar project is only meant for women empowerment. Now, BJP is trying to win over women vote bank because they understood that their time has gone. But, they will not succeed.”

State BJP leader Samik Bhattacharya said, “Earlier many parties talked about women reservation but did not implement it. BJP is the only party which implement what they say. Women’s Reservation Bill again proves that.”

The CPI(M) state secretary, Md Salim, said, “We, the Left organisations are fighting for women reservation for more than two decades. The Left Front government implemented 33% reservation in the panchayat and local bodies elections. So, there is no question of opposing the Women’s Reservation Bill.”