“Has gender arrived?” asks Prof Deshpande

On Monday 29 September, the New Zealand India Research Institute hosted a public seminar at Victoria University by Rajeshwari Deshpande, Professor of Politics at the SavitribaiPhule Pune University, India,and the current ICCR visiting chair for Contemporary Indian Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. Prof Deshpande’s seminar, entitled “Women’s Vote in Indian Elections: Has Gender Arrived?”, examined the nature of women’s vote casting in India. Her talk was woven around her analysis of the National Election Studies (NES) data set on Indian elections generated by the Lokniti research programme of the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

The NES data, Professor Deshpande argued, provide an empirical vantage point to understand the trends of routine political participation of Indian women during the last two decades. Her analysis of the data indicates that gender as an explanatory factor to understand the nature of women’s vote cannot be seen in isolation and that at times caste and class may override gender in deciding the way women vote. Professor Deshpande argued that gender thus remains enmeshed in other dimensions of social hierarchy and regional dynamics in deciding the nature of women’s political participation. In that sense, gender has not become a major factor in Indian electoral politics yet.