For much of India’s democratic history, the woman voter has either been invisible or ignored – at times she has been spoken for, but very rarely listened to.
A new book by the journalist Ruhi Tewari argues that this is no longer the case and seeks to understand why women have emerged from the political shadows.
What Women Want: Understanding the Female Voter in Modern India draws on years of journalism and field reportage to trace the rise of the woman voter from 1947 to the present day.
Ruhi is a journalist with nearly two decades of experience covering politics, policy and their intersection for leading Indian media organizations. She’s developed a reputation for being a savvy political reporter who spends quality time in the field understanding what makes voters, politicians, and parties tick.
Ruhi joins Milan on the show this to talk more about her new book. They discuss the “subtle but steady shift” in how women voters are perceived, the narrowing gender gap in voter turnout, and the distinctive voter behavior of India’s women. Plus, Ruhi and Milan discuss the proliferation of “pro-women” welfare schemes and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unique ability to connect with the woman voter.
Episode notes:
1. Milan Vaishnav, ed. How Indian Voters Decide (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2025).
2. Anirvan Chowdhury, “How the BJP Wins Over Women,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 26, 2024.
3. Rithika Kumar, “What Lies Behind India’s Rising Female Voter Turnout,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 5, 2024.
4.Milan Vaishnav, “Indian Women Are Voting More Than Ever. Will They Change Indian Society?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 8, 2018.
5. Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson, “Will Women Decide India’s 2019 Elections?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 12, 2018.
6. “Taking On India's Patriarchal Political Order (with Soledad Artiz Prillaman),” Grand Tamasha, October 22, 2024.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Milan Vaishnav: Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and The Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. For much of India's democratic history, the woman voter has either been invisible or ignored, at times she has been spoken for, but very rarely listened to. A new book by the journalist, Ruhi Tewari, argues that this is no longer the case and seeks to understand why women have emerged from the political shadows. What Women Want: Understanding the Female Voter in Modern India draws on years of journalism and field reportage to trace the rise of the woman voter from 1947 to the present day. Ruhi is a journalist with nearly two decades of experience covering politics, policy, and their intersection for leading Indian media organizations. She's developed a reputation for being a savvy political reporter who spends quality time in the field, understanding what makes voters, politicians, and parties tick. To talk more about her book, I'm pleased to welcome Ruhi to the podcast for the very first time. Ruhi, congrats very much on the book and thanks for taking the time.
Ruhi Tewari: Thank you so much, Milan. No, it's entirely my pleasure. Thank you very much.
Milan Vaishnav: I want to start by asking you a little bit about how this book came to be, and it's something that you addressed very early on. You talk about a series of trips that you took back in 2017, 2018. There were state elections going on in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Tripura. Those are three of the states you mentioned. And I just want to quote something that you say. You say, on these trips, “I found the female students that I was meeting with to more vocal, clear-headed, aware, and aspirational than the men. It was these young women that made me realize she, the female voter, had arrived as a voter.” Tell us a little bit about what these women said to you in these interactions that sort of first piqued your interest into this topic.
Ruhi Tewari: So, you know, Milan I covered my first election in 2008, in Rajasthan, in the winter of 2008. And Rajasthan, as we know, is a very conservative, traditionally conservative state where the Ghunghat culture, which is a veil culture, is very prevalent. You know, the instruction we were always given as journalists was to make your reportage as balanced to get every section's voice in, etc. But what we always struggled with the most was to get women's voices in because women weren't really either willing to speak or allowed to speak or interested or invested enough in the process to speak. Slowly of course things started changing, but the three instances, the four instances that I mentioned in the book, in about 2017 the Uttar Pradesh elections happened in February-March. I decided that I should go to colleges and speak to first-time voters, to young voters, because that's really the generation that's shaping a lot of thinking, and Uttar Pradesh is such a politically-charged state that even youngsters are interested in politics and interested in voting. And I noticed that in colleges, the female voters, the young students who were girls, were far more vocal, far more clear-headed than the men were. And something in me kind of ignited a little bit of this in my head about what it perhaps meant. And they knew exactly what they wanted, they knew exactly what the issues with the government were. They knew why they wanted the same government to continue or to have a regime change. They knew why they liked a certain politician. They know why they want somebody at the center, but perhaps somebody else in the state and so on and so forth. So, the level of clarity was extremely high and very, very fascinating because till then we had not really looked at women as a separate constituency or as a vocal constituency. And I distinctly recall, I've written about it in the book as well, this one college, girls' college, all girls' PG college, which is a postgraduate college that I went to in Kanpur. And it's a small, really old college and had a bit of a conservative feel to it. But I thought, may as well do a little classroom experiment and ask a classroom full of girls some questions. The staff was very, very helpful, and they, in fact, wanted the students to speak up. But I sought only 15 minutes. I thought, what? It can't take me more than that. And that conversation lasted me for over an hour because every single girl in that room raised her hand in response to questions, was clear as to why she was choosing a certain side or why she, you know, was answering the way she was. And each of them wanted to speak individually. I didn't have to force anybody to speak or cajole anybody into speaking. They were very clear. They knew exactly what they wanted and they were excited about going in voting. And that in me triggered the idea of perhaps somewhere a rising woman vote. Elections after that cemented it. As you said, Gujarat in December of that year itself, 2017, then Tripura happened I think in early 2018 and then Madhya Pradesh in the end of 2018, so from early 2017 till the end of 2018 there were four elections. After UP, I decided to make it a habit to go to colleges and not just in cities, in rural areas or in semi urban areas. And I would speak to young first-time voters. And I found that across these elections, girls were so much more willing to speak than they earlier were and perhaps more, you know, they had greater clarity of thought than men did. They weren't speaking so much on esoteric issues. They were very clear about everyday issues that were impacting them and why, you know, they would vote in a certain direction. And these conversations somewhere told me that something big was really happening and it did turn out to be something big a few years later.
Milan Vaishna: So let me just kind of pause on that for a moment, which is, I mean, obviously when you're showing up at these colleges and universities, even if your aim was to speak to young women, you were undoubtedly talking to a lot of young men. And most of the work which has been done on voters inevitably ends up relying on the voices of men, because as you say in the past, they have been the ones who have been most vocal, most outgoing, it's been harder historically to talk to women. What were some of the contrasts that appeared when you talked to men versus women? You said some of these issues that men focus on maybe were a bit more esoteric. Tell us a little bit about the contrast between these young first-time women voters and these young, first-time male voters.
Ruhi Tewari: So, you know, Milan, I don't think there is a difference between the young women voters versus male voters or the older women voters versus male voters. I think there are certain differences in approach to voting and in voting patterns which continue, which in fact are now even more stark now that women are becoming more vocal and more active in the electoral process. One is that women are... I mean, I'm not trying to make it seem like women are, you know, very virtuous, but women are far more pragmatic and have a far more connect with day-to-day existence and also because their vulnerabilities are more, right. They have faced, historically faced so much disadvantage, they've been on the margins, they've being disenfranchised to such an extent that for them, everyday issues and everyday survival is far more important than larger issues. Men on the other hand, again, it's not as if these are not absolutes, but these are just comparative conversations. Men, on the other hand, often tend to talk more about more esoteric issues like religion or faith or national security or nationalism or war and this and that and all of that. That is one very essential difference between how men think and how women think. The other difference that I see and that's particularly true, not perhaps so much for younger women, but for slightly older women or, you know, not the first-time voters, is that they tend to look at themselves as a unit, the whole family as a unit, right? Men, on the other hand, talk about themselves. So, women often talk about how there should be jobs for their children or better education for their children. Men on the hand talk largely about themselves, how they are not getting a job or, they have some issues, they have financial distress, etc. So, I think these two are very distinct points of differences between men and women as voters. Especially for the younger people, I think the first point holds more true. They are more clear about how what can improve their everyday existence, whether it's better secure safety, law and order, whether it's better infrastructure, better roads, whether it's, you know, scholarship schemes for them, whether it's easier employment for them. So, they are more concerned about how their lives can be improved and how they can be of greater value addition to their lives. Well, men tend to at times flirt a lot with issues of, you know religion, faith, etc., which really are not day-to-day issues as such.
Milan Vaishnav: So, I want to ask you a little bit about how the women's perspective is being kind of internalized and incorporated into the kind of political discourse, right? You write in the book that the importance the women voter today enjoys is often more strategic than sincere, still driven by a largely male perspective, given how women remain severely underrepresented in political decision making and policy making. Yet. Within this opportunism lies a subtle but steady shift. I want to ask you a little bit about both sides of this, right? Tell us a little about what the kind of strategic or instrumental logic is, as well as this subtle steady shift that you observe.
Ruhi Tewari: I think politicians who were clever and who were a little ahead of their times in terms of thinking realize that this was a very serious, untapped electorate, which could very well be, and it has turned out to be to a very significant extent, a cross-cutting constituency. Right? It can, sort of, glide over other demarcations, other identities sometimes. So, I think politicians who realized that tapped into this vote bank. Now, when they tapped into the vote bank or when they launched schemes, et cetera, I don't want to attribute it to philanthropic or altruistic purposes. I think it was entirely strategic. It was entirely political. They knew that, you know, this is where they were going to get numbers from, they were going to get votes from. And that became the major driving factor. I'm not saying everybody was like that. It's a more generic conversation. So, there was an understanding when this entire, you know, sort of focus on women voters kicked off about how this was an important vote bank in terms of numbers and how it remains so untapped and how it was never used as one constituency, right. It always fell under different brackets, whether it was youth, whether it was old people, whether there was farmers, whether it was poor, whatever, it fell under different brackets. So that's why I mean it was more instrumental, more strategic, more to further electoral politics and to sort of boost their chances electorally. But what happened as a result of that is that at least women became a part of total in electoral and political conversations. They became a part of policymaking. Politicians started talking about women and started addressing and talking to women directly. So in that whole process, women became more invested and they started feeling like stakeholders because when there are X number of policies targeted at you and directed only at you and politicians are going all out to tell you how great these policies are and if they come to power, they'll bring more for your benefit, it makes you invested in the process. You had so far been marginalized, you had been ignored, and suddenly, you were having a moment in the sun, and so much importance was being given to you. And that's why women started becoming more interested, more invested in this entire process and became stakeholders. And that is how that subtle shift happened. So, you know, it may have started off as more of an electoral exercise, exercise of convenience, exercise of political and electoral opportunism but in that lay a ground shift that you know sort of happened which was essentially women becoming part of the process and feeling like they were a part of the process.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, in some ways, Ruhi, I mean it sounds analogous to if you go back to the 50s and 60s, right, before the rise of backward caste politics, right? You started to see parties like the Congress use the language rhetoric around, you know, the need to cultivate OBCs or Dalits or what have you. Partially from an instrumental logic, these were still political parties driven by the upper castes, but over time then, obviously these interests became central and shaped the very platforms of political parties, even though it was totally instrumental at the outset.
Ruhi Tewari: Correct, absolutely, it's the same analogy, absolutely.
Milan Vaishnav: I want to ask you a little bit to just help us kind of trace the evolution, because when you talk about the rise of the Indian female voter, you kind of talk about these four phases, right? So, there was the kind of first phase, from the first general elections in 51-52 to about 1984, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, then a second period from kind of the beginning of Rajiv Gandhi's time to 2004, then there were the UPA years, 2004-2014, the government of Manmohan Singh. And then the kind of Modi, a rise of BJP phase in 2014 onwards, obviously we could go into a lot of detail here, but just give us like a broad sense of what each of these phases represents to you in terms of the role that the female voter has played.
Ruhi Tewari: Right. So, you know, Milan, when in ‘51, the electoral rules were being drawn for the first Lok Sabha election, there were millions of women who had to be, who had, who were actually left out because they refused to register under their names. They were registering under their husband's name, their father's names, their brother's names. And they refused to give their names, so the election commission was forced to remove them from the list. And that's how we started off. You know, even though there were, everybody had equal voting rights, the societal inequality was such that the first electoral roles were obviously very, very skewed. The election commission data for gender-wise voting starts from only ‘62, and that shows you the huge gender gap. I think it was about 16.7 percentage points between women and men in their voter turnout, and that was really massive. I think what happened in the sixties...
Milan Vaishnav: And there's two aspects to this, right, because the first aspect is there's a registration gap. In other words, women were not registered to the same extent, but even conditional on being registered, they were much less likely to turn out to vote.
Ruhi Tewari: Yes, so I think after, you know, after a point, registration numbers were not as imbalanced as turnout numbers were. And that's what tells us a story that, you know, what has happened today is not just about registration going up, it's actually women voting, you, know, willingly turning out and going to vote. So anyway, so in the 60s and 70s, I think, you now, there were so many different directions in which India was being pulled, right. It was officially independent, freshly partitioned country where the economy was a mess. So, you had to rebuild the economy, you have to rebuild the social fabric, which, you know, after partition, of course, had suffered a serious setback. Then there was an agrarian crisis, there were wars, the global order was in flux. So, India had to figure out which way to go. You know, and in the 70s, for instance, there was so much unemployment, so much youth anger so, somewhere down the line women were just not thought of as a separate group at all or as a priority at all by any of the political parties. So that's how essentially 50s, 60s, 70s happened. In ‘84, after Indira Gandhi was assassinated, we see that a huge turnout for women was witnessed and the gender gap, in fact the male turnout went down while the women turnout increased as compared to the previous election and the gender gap reduced to some 2.6 or something which was really for them very, very low.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, it was a historic convergence, right, at that time. Yes.
Ruhi Tewari: Right at that time. I mean, it had remained in the nine to 10 percentage point zone till then. And somewhere down the line, obviously, women perhaps turned up in sympathy for Indira Gandhi's assassination and as a mark of support for Rajiv Gandhi. And that's where I feel somewhere the seed was sown in the mind of political parties that this is a constituency. This is a powerful constituency which has so far remained ignored and remained on the margins. But of course, the next few years were all about, you know, mandal politics, which was caste politics and, you, know, backward caste liberation, as well as mandal politics, which was the rise of the Hindu right. And in that process, again, women were ignored and the ‘84 elections became a bit of a one-off because we went back to the nine to ten percentage point voter gap between men and women. But, however, because seeds had been sown, and this, by the way, I'm just talking nationally, states have a little bit of different trajectory, and so this is just more of a national picture. See, somewhere since seeds had been sown, in the 90s, there were certain policy decisions which were taken which in the long term helped empower women more politically and electorally. One, of course, were the was the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, which essentially recognized local tiers of government and gave them a one third reservation in both municipal corporations as urban local bodies as well as village panchayats. And initially, this was really mocked, you know, women were, you know, touted as rubber stamps and, you know, just, you know,
Milan Vaishnav: Kind of placeholders, almost.
Ruhi Tewari: Placeholders. They weren't taken seriously, and that perhaps was true initially. I mean, I'm not, I don't want to project a utopian picture that did happen initially, but over the years, as women kept getting elected again and again, they drew some power from that, right? You become more confident, you understand that this is a position of power and responsibility, and you start asserting yourself more. On the other hand, when you see, you know, some woman elected to a position of power. Other women start feeling more encouraged, they start feeling more invested in the political process. And that really somewhere nudged the whole idea of women as political participants from the grassroot level. The other thing that happened in the 90s was the self-help group movement, which is again, which is a very, very powerful tool. So, it essentially is, you know, about how a group of women come together. To become economically independent, they start a small business, you know, they get financing, etc, etc. So, it's a very interesting model and that worked very well because these were safe spaces for women to discuss politics. Also, they made women economically independent and with economic independence came a bigger role in the household. With the bigger role in household, it meant you were more independent to take your decision, including your voting decision and you weren't obliged to listen to the male member of family anymore. So, these two may not have shown an immediate impact, but I think they had a huge role to play eventually in the kind of figures that we are seeing now as far as women voters are concerned. 2004, when the Congress led UPA government came in 2006, they actually launched this rural employment guarantee scheme, which mandated a third of employment be provided to women. What that did and you know, I think that was very, very transformative it what that did was it gave women an avenue to go out and work. So, what happened in rural areas was it even if women wanted to work, they didn't know where to go. There weren't any jobs in villages and they weren't free or independent or allowed to go outside their villages to work. What this scheme, which is called MGNREGA, did was give them opportunities very close to their house. And it's, you know, the scheme actually tailored itself around women. They started having creches for children on work sites. So there was a lot that was done to encourage female participation. And there have been years when women have been over 50 per cent of the workforce of MGNREGA, which is a very interesting figure. So between 2004 and 2009, this boost gave rural women a lot of economic independence. And as I said, with economic independence, your importance in the household increases and your decision making power in the household increases. And you become more assertive, you become less scared, you become less obliged to listen to others and that I think showed in the 2009 election figures, the gender gap reduced to I think 4.42 or something of that sort, the percentage points, and that was really the lowest ever except for that aberration, which we saw in 84. And that really was a result of MGNREGA plus of course of the 90s, the two big policy decisions that I'm talking about. And in 2014, which is the phase that we, you know, the final phase that I'm talking about, erupted because Narendra Modi came from Gujarat with his experience of understanding the importance of the women vote. In Gujarat also, he had many women-centric policies and the Amul cooperative for instance was full of women. So he had this experience, and he realized as a politician that there is enough scope nationally to use this vote bank to your advantage because it's not been tapped as much as a single, separate constituency. By any politician. And he immediately sort of decided to try and connect with them. So whether it was his idea of individual household toilets, I mean, you know, it's a conversation nobody had had before that women didn't have, especially in rural areas, didn't have toilets in their houses. They had to go to the fields to relieve themselves. Nobody was really talking about it from the Red Fort, right? I mean these were conversations that were happening at some levels, but not by the Prime Minister of the country or about clean cooking fuel for women. So again, as I said, it may have been a very strategic, very electorally driven sort of strategy. But having said that, he did talk about these things. And I think everybody then nationally latched onto it and understood that this was a very important constituency and that it had remained untapped. And there were many, because there was such vulnerabilities, there was so many gaps to fill that you could come out with scheme after scheme addressing women and it wouldn't seem jaded, right? So, there was so much opportunity and so little that had been done so far. And I think that really started off after 2014.
Milan Vaishnav: I want to come back to Modi because I think he's a critical figure in this discussion. But before we get there, let me just ask you, let's try to separate two things, right? Because there's the issue of rising or increased female turnout, right, which you go on to say in the book, you know, that was a huge leap. You kind of sketched out the evolution over time. But I think in some ways, the most distinctive thing that you say here is that it's not just about coming out to vote, it's about how they're voting. That they are voting more independently, right? And I think that for those of us who study India, it's something that most of us feel is true, but can be very hard to kind of quantify or to pin down. Tell us a little bit about, you know, from your time in the field, from various states and localities, what kind of gives you this confidence that, look, it's not just that women are turning out to vote in greater numbers, it's that they're doing so with the ability to have their own kind of sovereignty over how they vote.
Ruhi Tewari: Right. So, there are three things, Milan. One, why are women turning out in bigger numbers, larger numbers to vote? Right. Now, that question itself should tell us something. Nothing has changed dramatically, as I said, over the last few decades in terms of registration. Registration has remained constant since the 70s, 80s, 90s. Right. The fact that women are going out more to vote shows that they're going out to vote because they want to go out and vote and they are doing it willingly because they feel invested in the process. And why do they feel invested in the process? Because today they think they can vote independently and they want to vote independently. So earlier they were pushed out to a vote as a duty that had to be performed or a box that had be ticked and they had to listen to male members of their family or to whoever, to the sarpanch or whoever, the RWA president, whoever they had listen to. Today, they are going out to vote increasingly more because they know who they want to vote for. So one is, of course, that. There's a direct link between why they're going out to vote and the fact that they're voting more independently. The second point is, it's entirely anecdotal, but we have seen how women were so reluctant to talk earlier or didn't have enough views to express or were not allowed to. Today, they do it. I mean, I've had instances in the remotest of villages where a woman sitting with her husband says, you know, he keeps telling me to vote for someone, but I know who I go and vote for when I go to the booth. Now, whether or not she does it, and that's, that's my third point, whether or not women are actually going to the booth and voting independently, the fact that they're saying it in itself shows something, right? There is a change in mindset. They know that they can vote independently. They know there is an understanding of the fact that they should vote independently, and this is not just a duty, but a right that they should assert for themselves and it's an instrument of assertion. And that has happened and that I think has been these three points somewhere down the line tell me that women are voting more independently. Increasingly every election we ask women, at least I tend to ask women especially in rural areas or even in semi-urban urban areas, whether they are voting more based on their thinking now. There are some women who still say that no, you know, we listen to our husbands or fathers or whatever, but majority of women claim to vote independently and the fact that they are claiming to vote, independently tells you something.
Milan Vaishnav: So I want to just kind of drill down on this for a second, right, because I think what you're pointing to is the fact that obviously you're making a kind of generalized statement, but there are nuances and this is not a kind of linear effect, right? You say in the book that, you know, women voters have faced a very uphill journey from kind of obscurity to prominence and that evolution has been gradual, it's been non-linear, it has been multi-layered. In the book, you talk about one moment in particular that stands out to you. You alluded to this at the start of the conversation, but I want to ask you to drill down a little bit, which was these 2017 state elections in Uttar Pradesh, where you clearly witnessed that something was changing. I wonder if you could just kind of call upon some of those ground interviews you did, say, what was it about that moment? For instance, I remember being in Bihar in 2010, and this was Nitish Kumar's re-election, where there was this excitement around various schemes that he'd rolled out, the school subsidy scheme, the subsidized bicycle scheme, and so on and so forth, where you started to see a change that was visible, not just in Patna, but even when you went to rural areas. Tell us a little bit about what that scene was like in 2017 that really grabbed your attention.
Ruhi Tewari: Right. So, no, of course, Milan, Nitish Kumar was ahead of his time. I mean, he was a visionary as far as women voters were concerned. In Bihar, being the state it was, 2010, that election was very, it's actually memorable to all of us who've covered it. In UP in 2017, you know, the main issue, I think, was lawlessness, right? The Samajwadi party government had been associated with very poor law and order and you know.
Milan Vaishnav: Right, I mean they had this moniker of a Gundaraj, right?
Ruhi Tewari: Yes, yes, it was called the Gundaraj.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean that was the kind of epithet that was used.
Ruhi Tewari: Absolutely. And who is affected the most when law and order is poor? It's women. They remain the most vulnerable section. And I think somewhere down the line, that was a pressing issue for women at that point of time, because they had faced five years of really terrible lawlessness. They were afraid to go out onto the roads. They were afraid to be out later in the evening. They were afraid to go to work. They were afraid of going to college. And there was a lot of, as they say, gundagardi in Uttar Pradesh. And that became quite a bit of a rallying point for women and that became quite a conversation point for them when it was about, you know, why do you want to see, say, the BJP come to power and why do not want to say Akhilesh Yadav as Chief Minister again. Even then, women voters were quite clear. You know, most of them said, we like Akhilesh Yadav, he's young and he's nice and he understands us, but the party is associated with so much lawlessness and we have faced the brunt of it. We are not allowed to go out in the evening by our families because they tell us how unsafe it is. And we can't continue to live like that. We have to work, we have to study. We have go out. We have live our lives. I think that became a big conversation point for women and that sort of showed a lot in their conversations and in their voting patterns also because they supported the BJP to a very significant extent. And I think lawlessness and the fact that BJP promised, which has been Prime Minister Modi's mantra always is good governance, I think became a major attraction for women. Also, Prime Minister Modi by then had already become popular among women nationally, and I think that helped the BJP didn't have a chief minister face. So, it was essentially a vote for Prime Minister Modi and there was a lot of, you know, conversation about how he does so much for women and he's talking about women, he's working for women, and he launched so many policies nationally. So, if BJP comes to power in the state, they'll do enough for women because we know the Prime Minister thinks in that direction. I think these became major rallying points for women.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, could I just kind of ask you, because, you know, in 2017, they won, the BJP won on the backs of Modi's image, his promises, but then he quickly turned and installed Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister. Now, Yogi Adityanath up until that point, his primary claim to fame had been as a kind of Hindu right hardliner, right?
Ruhi Tewari: Absolutely.
Milan Vaishnav: He was not someone who was known for his governance, administration, right. But in fact being somebody who was kind of on the fringes one could say even though of course he was part of the mainstream politics. Now he is still in power, he's still the chief minister, he has won election on his own merits. How much of that trust and faith and gratitude for improved rule of law conditions do you think has moved from just the face of Prime Minister Modi to Yogi Adityanath himself.
Ruhi Tewari: I think it's moved entirely to Yogi Adityanath himself. And I think that's also because he's been in power for now almost 10 years, I mean, not 10 years. It will be 10 years in 2027, but because he became the face of the changed law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh, right? He was clever enough to understand that if you look at Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath hasn't done much on the infrastructure front. It's not as if there are some major infrastructure projects or major highways that have You know, that have captured people's imaginations. His biggest contribution, which he sells as his biggest contribution rather, is an improved law and order situation. Whether it was, I mean, of course, very, very controversial and very, very debatable method, which was encounters, etcetera, etcetera.
Milan Vaishnav And counter killings, yeah.
Ruhi Tewari: So very controversial and unacceptable in many ways, but even so, the law and order situation under him is drastically better than what it was under the previous Samajwadi party government. And that conversation is now happening among women. So even ahead of the Lok Sabha elections last year, where the BJP performed below expectations in Uttar Pradesh for a variety of reasons, most women, actually even most men, spoke of how the law-and-order situation under Yogi Adityanath was far better than it was under Akhilesh Yadav. They didn't say it was better because of Modi. All the credit was going to Yogi Adityanath. And I think that disconnect showed in the Lok Sabha election, right? Because the Lok Sabha election was about Modi, it wasn't about Yogi Adityanath. So people didn't feel compelled to vote for Modi because of the improved law and order situation. In their heads, it was credit to Yogi Adityanath and which they had rewarded him earlier in his re-election bid. So I think that conversation about improve law and order, Yogi Adityanath has totally taken it away from Narendra Modi as far as Uttar Pradesh is concerned and I think somewhere down the line the prime minister is aware of it and it's not a happy relationship between them in many ways.
Milan Vaishnav: You know, you're first and foremost a political reporter, so you would know better than most. I mean, this was the basis of much of the political intrigue after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, right? Where it was widely reported that Yogi Adityanath was somewhat sidelined by Amit Shah and Narendra Modi in terms of ticket selection and so on and so forth, which kind of, I think, in some ways kind of boosted his own status because the BJP underperformed, right? And because he had had the selling point. Of improved law and order and so on that had resonated with people, including, it sounds like with women, that in fact, in a perverse way, it actually strengthened him even more after that.
Ruhi Tewari: Absolutely. I think he deliberately decided not to give it his 100 percent in that election because there were lots of differences about ticket distribution, and he had indeed been sidelined. Even the RSS in fact, the Sang also fell sideline in Uttar Pradesh. The kind of dissent within the BJP showed when the election results came out and you know I think a lot of us as journalists also got a little misled because our conversations with voters were about how Uttar Pradesh is better right under this government and a lot of voters said yeah law and order is much better. I mean I don't think there was any voter who didn't compare law and other between Yogi Adityanath's government and Akhilesh Yadav’s government and didn't praise this government's improved law and the situation. But what we forgot was that this election was not for Yogi Adityanath. This was for Modi. And that's where I think a lot of us maybe misread Uttar Pradesh a little bit because there was support for Yogi Adityanath, but it wasn't like there was massive support, you know, that was translating into massive support for the national election per se.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, it gets back to the point you made earlier about, with women, but also with men, right? Ability to kind of make a distinction between the state and the national and so on and so forth. I want to focus a bit on welfare because this is obviously a critical part of the story. It's a bit of a controversial part of this story, right, because one of the main ways parties and politicians have tried to connect to the Indian woman is through welfare. But you say that, look, women obviously appreciate welfare. But their motivations are often misunderstood. They're oversimplified. So tell us a little bit, like when you step back and you look at the kind of chattering classes, what have we kind of gotten wrong about the connection between welfare and the female voter?
Ruhi Tewari: Right, you know, I think, as you pointed out, Millan, I think we tend to oversimplify this conversation and somewhere down the line, this conversation about welfare or freebies or handouts also come from a point of privilege, right? When you see women voters on the ground, it's not as if they're looking at freebies, or handouts as bribes to go and vote. I don't think it's something they're enjoying only because it's free and they're getting something free, so they'll sit at home and enjoy it. No. They appreciate it, they reward it, only if it addresses a genuine gap in their lives. And there are so many gaps, as I talked about earlier, there are many vulnerabilities and there is so much that you can plug. And something as simple, you know, for instance, a mixer grinder that J. Jayalalithaa became synonymous with. She became the face of populism, right, because she would give out mixer grinders to women before elections. And it was, it was almost a joke, but- Honestly, it's not a joke, because when you meet women in Tamil Nadu, they tell you how that mixer grinder changed their lives and changed their life in the household and in the kitchen. They were busy grinding, you know, with the very traditional methods which took all their energy in the heat of Tamil Nadu, which took up their time, and mixer grinders really made their lives simple. It was a very simple thing. You know, it was just one gadget in the kitchen, but they thought Jayalalitha understood the fact that they needed it, because she was a woman or whatever she was able to connect with this gap. And they appreciated the fact that it helped improve their lives. Now, obviously, that mixer grinder is now a non-story today, no woman is going to vote for a mixer grinder because she's got it, right? She knows things have improved already. So, you know, something as simple as that, when you talk about, say, toilets, as I said earlier, it's a huge gap that you're addressing in someone's lives or Nitish Kumar with his bicycles for school going girls. In a state like Bihar, which was steeped in patriarchy, which had such an unsafe rule under the Rashtriya Janata Dal, under Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtra Janata, bicycles for girls became such a tool of empowerment. And with that, Nitish Kumar was targeting or was addressing school going girls plus their mothers who were appreciative of the fact that their daughters would do better than them. They were able to go and study because they had a way to go to school. They didn't have to, you know, rely on unsafe methods to go to schools and they had more access and so on and so forth. Or cash transfers which happen to be the most vilified of the welfare scheme that I think some of it has become a bit of a joke because political parties tend to fall for these tropes that work. But when cash transfers are planned well, now see, why did it work for Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh or why has it worked for Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal? It's because, one, they didn't introduce it just a minute before elections, right? It didn't seem like a last-minute bribe. It was a part of their policy making as soon as they came to power, within a few years of coming to power. And they had enough years to prove that they were serious about giving these to women and on a sustained basis. And there were qualifications that some of them imposed. In fact, Shivraj Singh Chauhas’s Ladli Laxmi or Mamata Banerjee's Lakshmir Bhandar have these- You know that you have to study to a certain level to get this amount of money and so on and so forth. So you're encouraging women to study, you’re encouraging parents...
Milan Vaishnav: They're kind of conditional on achieving certain kind of benchmarks, criteria.
Ruhi Tewari: Yes, and especially in states like Madhya Pradesh where, you know, you're discouraging female feticide and infanticide by telling parents that your daughters will get this much money for their education, for their marriage, so don't look at them as a curse. Look at them some kind of a boon, you now, so you know these things worked. But why I say that women don't these as handouts is because most women I have come across who have received cash transfers or who receive cash transfers on a regular basis have used that money to do something productive. So many women have started small businesses, just a tailoring boutique or a vegetable store.
Milan Vaishnav: Or a beauty shop or something out of their home.
Ruhi Tewari: Or a beauty shop or, you know, anything like, you know, small paan shops, so many women have started paan shops or, you know snacks and tea and they're using this money to generate a sustainable livelihood for themselves. So they're using it for something better. They're not sitting at home thinking of this money as, you know, it's coming, so let me enjoy sitting at home, I don't want to work anymore, which also tells you why women were increasingly participating under MGNREGA, right? They're not afraid of hard work. They just need a source of independence through income. And that's what they're looking at, and that's how they're using cash transfers as well. In fact, ahead of the Delhi elections, I had met this one woman voter in some interiors of East Delhi and she was very excited. She said, look, both parties have promised us cash transfers. I said, so are you going to vote because of that? She said, yes, because I know what I'm going to do. The minute I get my first lot, I'll start a Chola Kulcha stall. I cook very well and I'm going to use that money and then I'll start doing very well because, you know, every month I'll have this money for capital and I'll earn revenue through that stall and my life is set. So there is a thinking behind appreciating welfare measures, appreciating welfarism. And I think it's both unfair and simplistic to just reduce it to a love for freebies.
Milan Vaishnav: So, you know, there's another related controversy, right? I mean, one of the criticisms that you often hear, and you talk about this too in the book, right, from the commentary, and including from some female voters, is in their attempts to reach out to women through welfare, many politicians and parties are kind of reinforcing these preconceived gender stereotypes. So how do we make women's lives easier in the kitchen? How do we it make it easier for... You know, sanitation and all of these things and so kind of, you know the women have their place in the household and we need to cater to them. Is this criticism you think valid or do you think that again that's a simplification in terms of how this two-way process is taking place?
Ruhi Tewari: Right. So, I think to begin with, the base is so low, you know, and unfortunately, women don't have access to the very basics. And it's again, very unfortunate that women in India, in many households across various parts of India are primarily responsible for the house and for the kitchen. So are you really playing into stereotypes or are you helping them where gaps exist. So it's really, it's...
Milan Vaishnav: Kind of meeting them where they are.
Ruhi Tewari: Yes, I mean, can you suddenly uplift them into being independent and who can step out of their homes? I'm not sure. So I think what it also does is, for instance, a gas, right? If you don't have to walk for miles and then cut firewood and then lug it all the way back home and then light a chulha and then spend hours cooking, it frees you up for that much time to do something productive. Right? To do something outside of the kitchen.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, not to mention the negative harmful environmental impacts or public health impacts of breathing in to smoke from fire.
Ruhi Tewari: Absolutely you know the health impact on children and women because those who are largely in the house so you know small things like these I know they play into stereotypes but then is it necessarily a bad thing to begin with because unfortunately, we live in stereotypes, right? And you have to help improve lives where you can. But having said that, can that remain the trope? No. You know, I think the problem with the political class right now is that they think they have found some magic mantra, for instance, cash transfers. And now everybody is in this crazy frenzy to announce a cash transfer scheme just ahead of elections.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, we're on the eve of the Bihar elections. You're about to go cover them. This has been like the number one conversation in the media about what parties are promising.
Ruhi Tewari: Yes, and you know, it's so sad someone like Nitish Kumar who thought of bicycles for school going girls is now coming back to cash transfers. I mean, he was a bit of a visionary in his own way. But coming back to the point, it's just politicians have to quickly think of the “what next?” because women voters are now quickly thinking of the, what next, right? Because there was so much, they were relegated to the margins and the growth in the aspirations will also because of the low base effect will also be really a steep curve. So, politicians have to keep up with it and have to think very, very quickly about the what next. And as I mentioned in the book, I think employment, livelihood is very important to women. And, you know, we have these stereotypes in our head that men care about infrastructure and roads and highways and so on. No, but women care about them as much now. There are women who talk about how better roads have improved their lives, that children's lives have improved access to education, to employment. So, all these issues matter to women and I think the whole point is for politicians to evolve as fast as the woman voter herself is evolving.
Milan Vaishnav: So I want to go back, Ruhi, for a second and talk about Modi, because obviously he has had a central impact in this evolution. You said earlier that Modi has had this unique relationship with the female voter, and it's something that goes back to his days as Gujarat chief minister from 2001 to 2014. And you say in the book that, look, Modi has these two sides, right? On the one hand, He proudly advertises himself as this kind of belligerent, decisive, masculine image, right? There's a bit of like machismo. But on the other hand, as prime minister, he's also projected the softer side, right, one that tries to understand women, their needs. He emphasizes, empathizes with their struggles. He tries to address their expectations. I think we hear a lot about the former, and that's the stuff that gets a lot of media attention, but less about the latter. And I wonder if you could just say a word for that, right? I mean, how has Modi thought about the female voter going back to Gujarat, right, and how did that shape the way he approached governance? Because I think most people who were writing about the rise of Modi in 2013, 2014, didn't really focus on the second aspect, right. It was really more on the former.
Ruhi Tewari: Right. You know, I think when the BJP was campaigning ahead of 2014, and there are senior BJP leaders who've said that, they started to realize that the support for then Prime Ministerial candidate Modi among women was really intense. And they began to wonder why that was happening because they had not really thought of it. I mean, perhaps the Prime and his immediate team had, but they had not thought of it to that extent. I think what has happened with Modi is that he's projected actually three sides. One is, of course, the very aggressive, belligerent, combative Hindutva right-wing leader who really says things which a prime minister ideally should not say on any public platform. Two is this whole idea of Vikas Purush, which is a man who looks at development and good governance and somebody who works. He calls himself the Kamdhar, which is somebody who works. And third is the soft image, which is one of someone who's risen up the ranks. He, you know, he sells himself as a, he calls himself somebody who was a tea seller and he's risen of the ranks and he's fought it the hard way and he is against, you know, rich dynasts and he, he's the one who's sort of fought the world to reach where he has. Plus, he's someone who understands women and who talks to women and who looks at women as part of his immediate political group. So, I think the last two are what have really struck a chord with women voters. One is the whole idea of development, stability, and the idea of this entire self-made man who's from the ramparts of the Red Fort talking to women and talking about women. And how did Modi do this? Honestly, I don't, I'm not sure what made him think of it. I think, I think a lot of it comes from the entire, you know, experience in Gujarat, again, in a state where women, you realize that they were a constituency that had not been tapped in. For him, it also became a matter of political survival in Gujrat, because when he took charge in Gujarat, it's not as if he was a very big leader in Gujarat. He understood that he needed a big constituency to latch on to. And I think he understood that women could be that cross-cutting constituency for him, because Gujarat, again, there is a lot of caste politics that happens. So he sort of understood that and he was astute, clever, strategic, whatever you may want to call it, enough to figure out what gaps there were and to address them. And then. This whole experience with Amul which is such a big cooperative and it's full of women and BJP slowly worked in under Modi's ages worked to get this entire you know to use Amul and to use the women in Amul to reach out to other women and to make them spread the message of the BJP so there was a lot of knowledge information experience that he brought nationally, and I think he came and saw there was so many empty areas which no one had spoken of. And I think that really sort of gave him the idea of using these as, you know, not just talking about them, but actually converting them to policy decisions. And he made it a point that in every Independence Day speech, he would talk about women, whether it's about Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, that you should educate your girl child, you shouldn't consider them to be a curse. Or it's about how women's safety is very important and we need to educate our boys to respect women. So all these conversations from the Red Fort had never really happened or our Independence Day speeches, these conversations had never happened. And I think that really connected with the woman voter of India. And I feel a lot of women vote for him, not because of his aggressive, belligerent persona, but despite it.
Milan Vaishnav: So, you know, one of the questions that this throws up, and it's something you address in the book, is whether somehow the way female voters respond to female politicians is different than to male politicians, because in the course of this conversation, you've talked about Jayalalitha, Mamtha Banerjee, very prominent, strong-willed female leaders who have done a lot for women or prioritize them, but equally you have Nitesh Kumar, Shivraj Singh, Narendra Modi. I mean, the literature in the academic literature is pretty divided on this. What is your sense? I mean, is, do female voters somehow respond more viscerally to politicians who share their gender or do you think actually that male politicians can transcend that gender difference if they play their cards correctly?
Ruhi Tewari: I think male politicians have transcended that gender difference because they've played their card correctly, right? I mean, before Nitish Kumar, there was a woman Chief Minister in Bihar, there's Rabri Devi. Clearly, she didn't have the same connect. In Tamil Nadu, till date, nobody has a kind of connect that Jayalalitha did. So these are two diverse examples, right? One in which a woman has a bigger connect than any of her male counterparts, and one in which her man has bigger connect then any of the other counterparts. So I think gender so far hasn't been a primary issue also because the number of women leaders and women politicians are so less that that has itself narrowed the field down for women. Also because as I've repeatedly mentioned in this conversation, women have so many vulnerabilities that they were quick to lap up whatever was coming their way and whatever was and helping them.
Milan Vaishnav: Irrespective of whether the gender or the politician.
Ruhi Tewari: Absolutely. You know, I mean, there is there is no reason to believe that Smriti Rani or Priyanka Gandhi Vajra or even Mayavati are any more popular among women than their male counterparts. In fact, that's not true. They aren't. They are. They don't have any particular female following. So I think, I think so far we haven't seen a direct relationship between the gender of the politician and the gender and the woman. But having said that, now that women voters are becoming more assertive, more instrumental, more vocal, can gender play a role? Yes, because when it comes to a question of what next, maybe women politicians can, can give a better answer to that question because they have lived experience and that's very important. They can perhaps relate and connect to women more and they might be able to come up with more evolved ways of addressing women and of including women in policies than just cash transfers. And going forward, women voters will ask about what next, not just in terms of policies and what's coming their way, but also in terms why aren't there enough women. You know, why don't we see enough women leaders? And I've already seen murmurs of that, of that starting. There are women voters who say, you know there aren't enough women leaders, you know, that's not right. There should be more women in leadership roles. And that conversation somewhere is already starting. And I think the next stage in the evolution of the woman voter could well be this question about why aren't there more women like us? Why aren't they more women at the leadership level? Why is it that men are dominating the political landscape, but coming to us for votes? So I think that conversation will become relevant at some point soon enough.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, it's worth pointing out, and you do this in the book, that, you know, even despite the fact that we've seen these huge gains in female participation where now we're essentially a gender parity in terms of male and female turnout, I mean I think the latest figures from 2024, it is like around 14-15% of members of parliament are female, right? So I mean massively underrepresented. Of course we should say that this government has passed the Women's Reservation Bill, which has not been implemented yet, but once it does get implemented, presumably after the next delimitation. We will see a third of parliamentary seats and legislative assembly seats at the state level reserved for women. So that, in a way, could be another sign that kind of Modi was ahead of the curve, right? I mean, to give credit where credit is due, I mean one reason he has been so successful is because he has seen things before other politicians have kind of glommed onto them, right, and that's been a real feather in his cap.
Ruhi Tewari: Right. No, absolutely. I mean, this was the entire debate around the women's reservation bill has been on since the 90s and, you know, the governments came and governments went, but nobody really did much about it. I know there was a lot of push that came from Congress leader Sonia Gandhi when the UPA was in power, but again, allies didn't agree and there was conversation about quotas within this, etc.
Milan Vaishnav: The caste politics intersect with gender reservation politics.
Ruhi Tewari: Yes, so all of it became a reason for the bill to never see the light of day and to never be passed. But perhaps you're right, Narendra Modi always sees ahead of the curve when it comes to a lot in politics and he may have sensed that this would be the next question and he has the answer ready, right? If he's asked that question, he'll say, look, we got this bill passed, so we are working towards it. But that's one aspect. The question is, why do you need a legislation for this to happen? I mean, political parties should have already actively worked towards it without needing someone sitting on their head saying that you have to do this because there's a law that tells you to do it. I think Trinamool Congress under Mamata Banerjee does it to a very significant extent. She gives a lot of, you know, she puts up a lot women candidates, gives them and doesn't put them up in just whatever unimportant seats. She puts them up in important seats that are winnable seats for the Trinamool Congress. So she tends to do that.
Milan Vaishnav: And the BJD under Navin Patnaik has also experimented with that approach as well.
Ruhi Tewari: Yes, he’s also done it. But it's, you know, the examples are too few and far between. So it's not been a sustained effort, including by national parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Congress. Neither of the parties have really gone all out to give them in tickets. So I think that is a very, very dismal situation. And that's why I say it's only a glass half full. You know, women voters are suddenly important, but we still don't have enough women at the policy-making level or in state assemblies or in parliament. And that, that imbalance, that gap, really remains.
Milan Vaishnav: So, Ruhi, let me just bring this conversation to an end by asking you one final question. Towards the end of the book, you say, look, there are these basic misconceptions that many of us have about the female voter that continue to be perpetuated, right? That she is content being a mere labarthi or a beneficiary? That she only cares about freebies? That she's somehow kind of gullible or blindly loyal, so in terms of kind of characterizing what we know about the woman voter, what are the key things you would like the readers of your book to kind of take away?
Ruhi Tewari: So, okay, four things. One is, of course, as we've mentioned earlier in the conversation, women are not happy to take bribes. They are not looking at freebies as bribes. They're not happy being lazy beneficiaries of government handouts. They're looking at these schemes as policy decisions that help them improve their everyday lives. And they are going to ask a question about what next very soon. So political parties have to think of that. Two, women are increasingly voting independently. It's really, it's unwise, imprudent to believe that they continue to vote in large numbers based on what their families are telling them. Women are thinking independently and everybody has access to information now. So everybody's thinking more actively now. So women are voting independently. Three, women are not passive anymore. They are not passive by standards of politics or of elections. They are angry if they are denied a benefit. They know what benefit the government is offering and they want that benefit from the government. They don't want to be excluded. So they are angry if they're denied it. And on the other hand, they reward those who give them benefits. So, they are no longer passive. It's no longer we don't know, we will vote for whoever. So, they have a viewpoint. Not just in terms of this, what they say, but in terms of them actually going to the booths to cast a vote. And four, I think political parties now should understand that they can't just, I've seen a lot of politicians do that, right, you didn't get that scheme because that's under the state government or you didn’t get it because the center's not helping you, you didn't get it because your Sarpanch is not helping. You can't shift the blame and you can't take credit because women are now increasingly aware of what scheme, what decision is coming from which level of the government, who is responsible for bringing it to your doorstep and who's not doing the job well. So you can no longer try and pass the buck or snatch somebody else's credit. They're increasingly becoming, I'm not saying everybody's fully aware, but they're increasingly becoming aware of these distinctions.
Milan Vaishnav: My guest on the show this week is the journalist, Ruhi Tewari. She's the author of the brand new book, What Women Want: Understanding the Female Voter in Modern India. It draws on more than a decade of journalism field reportage. Ruhi, thank you so much for taking the time. I know that you're all set to cover the Bihar elections, and we look forward to your reports from the ground, including your reports on the female voter. But thanks so much, for taking your time.
Ruhi Tewari: Thank you, Milan. Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation. It's entirely my pleasure. Thank you so much.
