What’s Stopping Over 21 Mn Eligible Indian Women from Voting?

The worst disenfranchisement of women was in 2014 Lok Sabha elections when 23.4 mn women were denied right to vote.

(Excerpted, with permission, from the book 'The Verdict: Decoding India's Elections', by Dr Prannoy Roy and Dorab R. Sopariwala, published by Penguin Random House.)

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of our current election system is that millions of women in India have not been registered to vote even though they are over eighteen years old and eligible.

The disenfranchisement of women voters is hopefully not quite in the same league as the ‘dark arts’ of voter suppression around the world. However it is a deeply worrying phenomenon of our electoral systems.

The data points towards a major problem: the most reliable measure of population, the 2011 census, suggests that by 2019 the total population of women (aged 18 and above) in India will be 97.2 percent of the total men’s population.

Consequently, it is only to be expected that the total electorate of women voters should be the same percentage of the total male electorate—or at least very close to this figure.

However, the Election Commission data for 2019 states that women voters are only 92.7 percent of male voters. This difference between what it should be, 97.2 percent, and what it is in reality, 92.7 per cent, indicates that there is a 4.5 percent shortfall of women voters.

Why is this? And is it significant?

It is now clear from past census and Election Commission data that this under-representation of women has occurred election after election, decade after decade.

The worst disenfranchisement of women was in the 2014 Lok Sabha election when 23.4 million women were denied their right to vote. For now we are only focusing on the problem in the 2019 election.

What 4.5% Missing Women Actually Means

In fact, while 4.5 percent may seem a small percentage, when converted into actual numbers of women, the scenario is staggering.

The 4.5 percent of missing women translates into as many as 21 million women who are denied their constitutional right to vote simply because their names are not registered in the voter lists around the country.

An indication of how large this figure of 21 million missing women is that it is equivalent to every single woman in any one of the following states not being allowed to vote: Jharkhand, Haryana, Telangana, Kerala or Chhattisgarh!

Or even worse: 21 million missing women translates into 38,000 missing women voters in every constituency in India on average. There are a large number of Lok Sabha constituencies—more than one in every five seats—that are won or lost by a margin of less than 38,000 votes.

The estimate of 21 million missing women voters is based on the percentage/ratio of women to men in the electoral rolls compared with the percentage/ratio in the census. Alternatively, if we do not use ratios but compute the absolute numbers of women according to the census compared with the absolute numbers in the electoral rolls, the number of missing women is even higher, at a staggering 28 million missing women voters.

The large number of women voters missing from the electoral rolls also suggests that the total electorate in India should be above the official 895 million, perhaps even more than 915 million.

The Election Commission cannot be blamed for this massive failure. On the contrary it is in spite of the huge effort that they make year after year to enrol women voters, with a range of outreach programmes targeted specially at women.

It is a result of a combination of social and political factors, and what is worrying is that it is worsening over time.

Disenfranchisement: Regional Differences

There are major biases in the extent of missing women between regions with some states having a much higher level of disenfranchised women than others.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the top three states which will have the largest number of women who are not registered despite being eligible voters are Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.

These three states will account for over 10 million of the 21 million missing women voters in 2019.

It is shocking that in Uttar Pradesh, 85,000 women voters on average will be deprived of the right to vote in every single constituency. Moreover, among the bigger states, those which have the best record with the lowest under-representation of women are from the south of India: Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

Even among the small states of India, the two worst offenders are from the Hindi belt: Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.

Moving on from absolute numbers of missing women, even if we analyse the percentage of women without their legitimate voting rights, once again the Hindi-belt states are the worst: in UP above 10 percent of women will be denied the right to vote, in Rajasthan and Maharashtra it is over 5 percent.

These are unacceptably high percentages of disenfranchised women.

And once again it is sad to see that even in India’s ‘capital’ state, Delhi, a whopping 16.9 per cent of women who should be allowed to vote will not be able to.

But there is a silver lining: Many of the smaller states have more registered women voters than men voters. Perhaps these variations reflect the bigger picture of the vastly different cultural and political attitudes to women in the many regions of our country.