Modi's BJP courts India's surging female voters with gender parity push

Ranika Jaiswal sits at the intersection of two India's—the one her family has always known, and the one that is finally beginning to shift. For four decades, her relatives have held positions within the BJP, India's ruling party. All of them men. Now, at 48, Jaiswal is pushing to become a lawmaker herself from Uttar Pradesh in the 2024 national election, seeking party backing to break a pattern that has defined her family's political life. "Three generations of my family, all men, have been with the party," she said. "But now it's changing—as a woman I am also equally invested."

What makes Jaiswal's ambition suddenly plausible is a demographic shift that has caught the attention of India's political establishment. Women's voter turnout has surged from 53 percent in 2004 to 67 percent in 2019—a historic threshold when it edged past men's participation for the first time. Election Commission officials project it will climb further to around 69 percent by next year. This rising electoral power has not gone unnoticed by the BJP, which has governed India for a decade and now faces the familiar challenge of any long-ruling party: how to sustain momentum and prevent voter fatigue from handing ground to rivals.

Yet India's parliament tells a starkly different story. Women make up roughly one in ten national and regional lawmakers, despite comprising nearly 700 million of the country's population. The gap between voting power and political voice has become impossible to ignore, particularly as private polling conducted by the BJP revealed what party officials describe as widespread despondency among female voters. According to Vanathi Srinivasan, the lawmaker Modi selected to lead the party's gender equality initiative, thousands of women surveyed expressed frustration at being sidelined from power despite their substantial economic contributions to society.

In response, the BJP has announced plans to nominate women candidates for approximately one-third of the 543 seats contested in the lower house of parliament in summer 2024—a significant departure from its current roster of just 42 women among 303 MPs. The party also intends to recruit more than 900 women into internal management positions across all organizational levels, aiming for at least one-third female representation at every tier. Srinivasan told Reuters these plans had not been previously disclosed. BJP national president J.P. Nadda framed the push as central to the party's growth strategy, while an official in Modi's office characterized gender balance as integral to governance itself.

The reversal is notable given the BJP's origins. The party emerged from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist organization that was almost exclusively dominated by upper-caste men. Modi himself, now 72, has recently emphasized that India cannot develop as a nation without evening out representation across all sectors of life. Yet the gap between rhetoric and implementation remains wide, particularly at the state and district level where political careers typically begin. Six senior women politicians within the BJP identified resistance from socially conservative local officials as the primary obstacle to change. During recent state assembly elections this year, Modi and other national leaders scrapped several candidate lists that contained no women, signaling top-down pressure for change.

Phangnon Konyak, who became Nagaland's first female lawmaker in the upper house last year, described the selection process as grueling. Local political leaders questioned whether she could focus on campaigning as a single mother, asking why she didn't simply stay home and care for her child or remarry. "The battle is intense for parties to prove to us women that we stand a chance of securing senior positions," Konyak said. "At times the game is rigged by insiders who don't want women to take leadership roles." Hekani Jakhalu, Nagaland's first female state lawmaker, echoed the sentiment: women with political ambition must work far harder than men to convince local party officials of their viability as candidates.

The Congress party, the BJP's principal rival and the party of India's first female prime minister Indira Gandhi, is positioning itself as already committed to gender equality. Netta D'Souza, president of Congress's women's wing, argued that her party has "believed in organic growth" while the BJP has "historically focused on male leadership." The Congress hopes rising female voter turnout will help it recover electoral ground lost over two decades. Meanwhile, women voters themselves are increasingly vocal about the disconnect between their electoral participation and their absence from power. Janaki Prakash, a 42-year-old Hindi literature professor in New Delhi, put it plainly: "We are appreciated for casting votes and turning out in high numbers, but when it comes to giving us a fair share in politics and governance, then we are offered a raw deal. Representation and diversity are still symbolic."

Christophe Jaffrelot, a professor of Indian politics at King's India Institute in London, noted that despite rapid economic development, women's political participation has lagged significantly. "The BJP will have to prove that they really believe in giving women political opportunity," he said. "The numbers will do the talking." Some critics have pointed out that if the BJP were truly committed to equality, it could pass legislation reserving one-third of parliamentary seats for women before 2024—a move well within its majority. The party declined to comment on that possibility. What unfolds over the coming months will reveal whether the BJP's gender parity push represents genuine structural change or a tactical response to electoral mathematics.