Gender, Governance and Empowerment in India
Sreevidya Kalaramadam
Routledge
Since the mid-1980s, the presence of women in governance has become a  major marker of successful democracy in global and national discourses  on the democratization of society. A diverse set of nation-states have  legislatively mandated gender quotas to ensure the presence of elected  women representatives (EWRs) in various rungs of governance. Since 1993,  the Indian state has legislated a massive program of democratization  and decentralization. As a result, more than 1.5 million EWRs have taken  office within the lower rungs of governance or the Panchayati Raj  Institutions (PRI). This book is an ethnography of the Indian state and  its policy of legislated entry of women into political life. It argues  that political participation of women is necessary to change the  political practices in society, to make institutions more gender, class  and caste representative, and to empower individual women to negotiate  both formal and informal institutions. Its locus is the everyday life  contexts of EWRs in the southern Indian state of Karnataka who negotiate  their own meanings of politics, state, society, empowerment and  political subjectivity. Analysing three factors – structural boundaries,  sociocultural divisions and conjunctural limitations imposed on the  participation of EWRs by political parties – the book demonstrates that  the social embeddedness of PRIs within everyday practices and social  relations of identity and power severely constrain and shape the  political participation and empowerment of EWRs. Providing a valuable  insight into contemporary state and feminist praxis in India, this book  will be of interest to scholars of grass-roots democracy, gender studies  and Asian politics.