UP: Priyanka's Gendered Approach

The Congress is nowhere in the contest in up. But at a time when caste is the leitmotif, it makes a virtue out of adversity: feminising politics with 40 per cent seats to women

- Prashant Srivastava

IT’S NEVER A GOOD IDEA TO prejudge an electoral contest. But to the naked eye, there appear only two players in the game: the ruling BJP, and a newly energised Samajwadi Party. Most smaller pieces on the chessboard cohere around these two—a bipolarity that apparently leaves no great room even for Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. Where does that leave the Congress, out of the reckoning in Uttar Pradesh for over three decades? Well, Priyanka Gandhi, helming the Grand Old Party’s desperate search for relevance, has chosen to try and extract virtue out of adversity by sowing a new crop in this tired, old soil.

At a time when everyone is talking caste, she’s seeking to get the debate to pivot on another axis altogether: gender. A full 40 per cent of the party’s candidates in UP will be women. Quite a bold figure—by comparison, even the demand for one-third seats made in the ill-fated Women’s Reservation Bill seems modest. An attempt to feminise Indian politics on such a scale is a strikingly novel manoeuvre. The AICC general secretary in charge of UP, still only learning to swim in the deep, can’t be faulted for her math. Women make up over 46 per cent of the population in UP. Can they be persuaded to vote as women? Over and above conflicting loyalties such as religion, caste and ideology?

This season’s harvest may doubtless be slim, but Priyanka has sallied forth on the conviction that these are good questions to ask for the future (see interview). The logic is impeccable. Parties have often tapped into this demographic—but only via tactically designed handout politics, “pro-women” policies like prohibition, or plain tokenism. No one has much talked the language of direct empowerment.