Indigenous Women Leaders and Local Governance in Western India

• In Event: Gender Quotas and Women's Agency

Abstract

Debates rage over the question of the effectiveness of gender quotas in shaping gender equality, political inclusion, and social policy on the ground. India is an interesting case because its gender quota system for local governance is designed as a “quota within quota” system, which ensures the representation of women across communities. To elaborate, the political representation of two historically oppressed groups, Scheduled Castes or Dalits (the self-referential term for groups outside India’s caste system) and Scheduled Tribes or Adivasi (indigenous peoples) of India in the parliament and state assemblies within India’s federal system has been enshrined in the Indian constitution. Since the 1980s, this affirmative action has been expanded to include the Other Backward Castes who lag behind the general population in terms of their socio-economic status. In 1993, political decentralization led to the introduction of a three-tier system of governance that mandated elections in local bodies in rural and urban India. To elaborate, each state is divided across districts, blocks, and villages, and elections are held to ensure local policy-making and implementation; expenditure is devolved at the local level. Gender quotas or 33% reservations for women were introduced for elections in local bodies. The conjunction of community and gender quotas at the lowest level has ensured the representation of women across communities. The quota within the quota system has been significant for increasing the representation of indigenous women, who constitute the most marginalized section of India, in local bodies.
In general, scholarly works on gender quotas in India project women leaders as a homogenous category. Moreover, the existing body of literature has highlighted the impact of women’s leadership on public goods distribution, infrastructure, women’s rights, and inclusionary social spending. In contrast, drawing upon studies that are attentive to questions of quota designs that incorporate intersectionality and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Western Indian state of Gujarat in 2013-2014, this paper highlights the role of indigenous women leaders in shaping local governance. Going beyond the perspectives that focus on the effectiveness of women leaders in service delivery implementation, this paper illustrates the transformative effect of indigenous women leaders’ agency in challenging and refashioning local power structures and relations and generates insights into indigenous women’s localized leadership.

Author

• Gopika Solanki, Carleton University