In Women and Power, the British classicist Mary Beard asks, “how and why do the conventional definitions of ‘power’, (or for that matter, of ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’)… exclude women?” Beard goes on to explain that this exclusion, from “politics in its widest sense, from office committees to the floor of the House”, is not a prejudice that crept into Western civilisation. It was one of its founding gestures.AdvertisementAs the Assembly elections across Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal reach their culmination with the final phase in Bengal on April 29, and in the aftermath of the uproar over the stalled Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, which attempted to yoke delimitation to the implementation of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, it is tempting to extend Beard’s hypothesis to the the Indian context to examine, yet again, how political parties look at women’s agency beyond its immediate electoral appeal.At first glance, India appears to complicate Beard’s formulation. From the Independence movement to the Constituent Assembly debates to the Panchayati Raj reforms to their overwhelming participation in the electoral process, women have registered their presence in the nation’s public life. Their marginalisation has evolved not through erasure but through formal barriers, becoming subtler and more durable thanks to a political imagination that has traded the idea of parkati mahilayein for a benevolent framing of women’s autonomy and agency.Take the ubiquitous welfare hoarding that advertises a cooking-gas subsidy, a toilet-building initiative, or women’s reservation. At its centre is the image of the political leader as ally and benefactor. Women, in this framing, are to be “saved” (“beti bachao”), “educated” (“beti padhao”), saluted (“nari shakti vandan”), ushered into “women-led development” — intents that place women always in the passive tense, always under the active patronage of a male state. Top-down affirmative action is crucial but the language of welfare is now saturated with this metaphor of bestowal. It avers over and over again that women’s foregrounding is contingent on the right government, the right man, the right moment of political generosity.AdvertisementThis public performance of inclusion, however, does not reflect in the organisational hierarchies of political parties. The percentage of women in Lok Sabha has never crossed 15 per cent. This is far below the global average of 27.5 per cent (as of March this year). In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the first general election held after the passage of the women’s reservation bill, out of 8,360 candidates across all parties, about 800 — 9.6 per cent — were women, much less than the targeted 33 per cent reservation. In the 18th Lok Sabha, 74 women were elected — down from 78 in 2019. In this month’s Assembly elections, in Bengal, the Congress has fielded 35 women, up from seven in 2021. The TMC has moved from 48 out of 290 in 2021 (16.55 per cent) to 52 out of 291 (17.86 per cent) this year. The BJP has fielded 33 women candidates, down from 38 in 2021. In Tamil Nadu, both the ruling DMK and the Opposition AIADMK have fielded 19 women in 176 and 172 seats, respectively. In Kerala, the BJP and the Congress fielded fewer women, while the Left’s CPI(M) and CPI saw marginal increases compared to 2021.In her book, Beard observes that the tropes for female access to power — “‘knocking on the door’, ‘storming the citadel’, ‘smashing the glass ceiling’ — all underline female exteriority. Women in power are always seen as… taking something to which they are not quite entitled.” In India, women’s entry into politics has historically hinged on male patronage. Yet, as the success of Jayalalithaa or Mayawati — the former was brought into politics by MG Ramachandran, the latter mentored by Kanshi Ram — has shown, even the narrowest of footholds can prove transformative.you may likeEven as women repeatedly demonstrate competence, the terms of their participation continue to be exceptionalised. What is changing — and irreversibly so — lies outside electoral politics, in other male-dominated areas of specialisation. In NEET UG 2025, over 58 per cent of qualifiers were female. Women now outnumber and outperform men in medical education. In the Common Law Admission Test 2026, women comprised 57 per cent of candidates. Across medicine, law, and the sciences, women are showing up, in numbers that the system is scrambling to accommodate, for a future which the current vocabulary of public life is entirely unequipped to describe.In two decades from now, the women graduating today — the doctors, the lawyers, the researchers — will be at the height of their professional and public lives. They will, in every quantifiable sense, be the co-inheritors of this republic. The question India must begin to answer, with some urgency, is whether its political imagination — its language, its symbols, its distribution of tickets and trust — will have caught up by then, or whether it will still be busy designing posters to thank itself for their advancement, the political equivalent of a household that prides itself on its liberalism because it “allows” its women to work.As long as the language of welfare casts men as benefactors, as long as every scheme arrives as a gift, the glass ceiling will remain intact. We are simply being told to admire the light coming through it.Stay well,Paromita