In order to encourage more women to be elected as MPs and MLAs, a group of women professionals will be hosting a day-long conference called the Indian Women’s Caucus (IWC) in Bengaluru to encourage political parties to give more tickets to their women members. This initiative aims to make India more politically gender-just.
The event is being planned as a discussion with women leaders from political parties, intersectional researchers of gender, women pursuing careers in politics, grassroots activists working with women in local bodies, journalists and others to bring in women from all walks of life to enhance women’s participation in politics as well as further others women's political careers.
“The platform is a platform to get more women elected into state assemblies and the Parliament. We have women in local bodies like panchayats and corporations due to the reservations in the state Assemblies and the Parliament. We only have 11% women in Parliament and 9 per cent on average in state Assemblies and clearly, that is not enough,” author and activist Tara Krishnaswamy, who will be one of the women hosting the event, told TNM.
In addition to women professionals, leaders of various political parties like INC, BJP, JD(S), CPM, etc are expected to attend the event and will be among the will be speaking and leading the discussions at the event.
The aim of the event is to form a pressure group which will push for the election of women into the Parliament as well as state assemblies.
“The initiative we are taking – we are calling it ‘Will’ – we will act as a pressure group on political parties to pressure them to give more tickets to women and get more women standing for elections. Our job as a group of non-partisan women who have come to form this is to say that we need a platform to act as a pressure group on pressure groups. In politics, there are several pressure groups, but there isn’t one for women. The idea is to act as a women’s lobby to help the women candidates themselves and pressure parties to give more opportunities to women, both within the party and to get elected,” added Tara.
A resolution on the next steps towards 2019 will be also formulated through the event and released to media at the close of the day.
The event will be held on December 8 at Chanakya Hotel in Bengaluru from 10 am to 7 pm. Those interested may RSVP on their event page on Facebook.
The event will be attended by women across professions, including:
Ammu Joseph - NWMI, Independent Journalist,
Dhanya Rajendran - Co-founder & Editor-In-Chief, The News Minute
Vidya Subrahmaniam, Sr Fellow, The Hindu Centre for Public Policy
Bhavdeep Kang, Journalist
Nisha Agarwal, ex-CEO Oxfam
Nisha Susan, Partner Grist Media/Ladies Finger
Cynthia Stephen, Writer, independent Researcher and Journalist.
Jyoti Raj, Co-founder CERI
Padmaja Shaw, Retd Prof of Journalism, Osmania University
Swarna Rajagopalan, Political Analyst & Social Entrepreneur
Bhanupriya Rao, Founder genderandpolictics.org, Independent Researcher & Writer
Rajeshree Nagarsekar, Publisher of Evescape & Journalist
Tara Krishnaswamy, Co-founder Citizens For Bengaluru, Author & Activist, along with several other women.