Why Women Exit Politics: The Case of Two Grassroots Activists in a Slum in New Delhi

Abstract

This article investigates why it is so difficult for women to succeed in politics in India, and it analyses this from a grassroots perspective in a slum in New Delhi. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research, I explore and compare in-depth the political trajectories of two women activists and examine why, despite being successful leaders of women and allied with male political ‘godfathers’, they have ended up leaving grassroots activism altogether. I show that both women were first pulled into political activism by NGOs working on women’s empowerment, that both later allied with male politicians to help draw ‘the women’s vote’ and that both women’s respective success largely rested on their concern with so-called women’s causes. However, neither of them was able to build up their own patronage networks, which is necessary to gain an independent political standing in politics. They remained dependent on their male political mentors and on family support; losing one or both of these instigated their respective exits from activism and politics.

Introduction

Women are heavily underrepresented in politics worldwide. ¹ In most countries, politics remains a male sphere; and India is no exception. Although a record number of women were elected to parliament in the 2019 election, this record only amounted to 14.4% of all women.

In this article, from the vantage point of grassroots politics in a slum in New Delhi, I investigate why it is so difficult for women to succeed in politics in India. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research, I explore and compare in-depth the political trajectories of two women activists—here called Maya and Sita ² —and examine why, despite being successful leaders of women and allied with male political ‘godfathers’, they have ended up leaving grassroots activism altogether.

To combat women’s underrepresentation in politics, India introduced 33% reserved seats for women in village and municipal councils in 1992. Since then, several states have increased the percentage of reserved seats even further to 50%. This has attracted many women into local politics and driven studies on its impact to address questions such as ‘A silent revolution?’ (Lindbergh et al., 2011) and ‘A million Indiras now?’ (Hust, 2004). The answers have varied, but one major concern has been raised about women being elected as so-called proxies for politically ambitious male relatives (John, 2007; Tiwari, 2016, pp. 8–9; Turnbull, 2022).

At the grassroots level of local politics, some women have also been drawn into political activism through two other channels. First, some of the many local women’s self-help groups initiated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as part of the international development goal for women’s empowerment and the national policy for the empowerment of women have evolved into platforms for women’s mobilization and achieved a political dimension (Dubochet, 2019; Spary, 2019). Second, with the increasing number of women now voting in elections—and voting independently of their husbands on specific so-called women’s causes—political parties have become progressively more interested in recruiting local women to help secure ‘the women’s vote’ (Chattopadhyay & Duflo, 2004; Roy & Sopariwala, 2019; Singer, 2007).

Many studies have aimed at explaining the underrepresentation of women in politics, both worldwide and in India, in terms of the various constraints women must overcome. Sexual harassment, concern for women’s safety, women’s lack of control over economic resources, the masculine atmosphere of politics and, related to the latter, the masculine and homosocial nature of patronage networks are frequently mentioned constraints (Bjarnegård, 2015; Majumdar, 2014; Paxton & Hughes, 2017; Rai & Spary, 2019; Singer, 2007).

Conversely, recent studies have analysed factors that enable women to enter politics, highlighting two types of factors. First, these studies call attention to how women can enable each other, or get so-called women’s causes up on the political agenda, through homosocial networking (Benstead, 2019; Goyal, 2020; Nazneen & Masud, 2017; Prillaman, 2021). Other studies have pointed to the family household as a key enabling institution by contributing, for instance, practical, emotional and/or financial support (Ciotti, 2009; Mayaram, 2003; Mufti & Jalalzai, 2021; Rai & Spary, 2019). At the same time, a large body of research has also pointed to the family household as a key site of patriarchal domination (John, 2011; Wadley, 2008). In line with this, Chhibber (2002, p. 415) found a strong correlation between ‘women who can exercise autonomy in and from the household’ and women’s active participation in politics.

While the aforementioned studies and policy initiatives advance the understanding of constraints and enabling factors for how to get women into politics, we know far less about what it takes for women to stay in politics and succeed. By taking a qualitative approach and comparing in detail the political trajectories of two female grassroots activists over time, this article aims to help fill the gap. In the two cases, I show that both Maya and Sita were initially drawn into grassroots activism by NGOs working on women’s empowerment in the area and had supporting husbands. Both became successful leaders of women because they spoke about causes that matter to women in the slum, such as crime, safety and water. Furthermore, both women were at some point ‘discovered’ by male politicians in the area, who allied with them to help secure ‘the women’s vote’ in elections. These alliances further strengthened the women activists’ positions as leaders of women in the slum. However, networking with other women, fighting for women’s causes and helping male politicians still did not provide them with a seat at the table with male leaders. Neither Maya nor Sita has independently translated their positions as leaders of women into political capital. Rather, their success stories and respective emerging political careers both ended abruptly; neither of them currently continues as active grassroots leaders.

To answer the question of why it is so difficult for women to succeed in grassroots politics in urban India, the article makes three interrelated arguments. First, it is useful to analyse political careers in terms of stages, and the enabling factors at work when women initially enter grassroots politics are not entirely the same as those required to stay in politics and succeed as a political leader. This point is particularly relevant to the role of women’s homosocial networking. Whereas joining women’s homosocial networks is likely to increase women’s everyday political participation, as Prillaman (2021) argues, and form an important power base for women when becoming grassroots leaders of women, as I show in the cases of Maya and Sita, women’s homosocial networks were not sufficient for them to become political leaders in the slum at large. Second, personal, social and political circumstances may change over time, and losing family members or mentors that originally enabled a woman to enter grassroots politics and/or gave them access to their patronage networks might have devastating effects on their political career. Finally, taken together, these two factors point towards the same underlying cause of women’s lack of autonomy and a larger degree of dependency on others compared with men for explaining why it is so difficult for women to succeed in politics in India.

The article is divided into six main sections. After this introduction is an overview of the previous literature on women in politics that emphasises the constraints and enabling factors that women face in the Indian setting, with particular emphasis on the paradoxical roles of the family household and homosocial networking. This is followed by a section on methodology that also includes a brief presentation of the two cases of Maya and Sita. Thereafter is a presentation of the setting and political field of the slum, with a particular emphasis on the necessary criteria and attributes of a successful slum leader, forming a backdrop for the main empirical section, where the political trajectories of Maya and Sita are presented and compared by focusing on the following four ‘stages’ of their political careers: (a) being drawn into political activism, (b) becoming leaders of women, (c) being discovered by male ‘godfathers’ and (d) exiting politics. The concluding section suggests that although the two women exited politics for very different reasons, the examples point to the same underlying factor of women’s larger degree of dependency on others compared with men.

Perspectives on Women in Politics

To understand why there are so few women in politics, a large body of research has focused on various constraints that women must overcome. The frequently mentioned constraints in the South Asian setting are how underlying cultural assumptions with concomitant sexual harassment and concerns about women’s safety make it difficult for women to participate (Majumdar, 2014; Rai & Spary, 2019). For women entering politics at higher political levels, women’s lack of economic resources compared with that of men is another constraint (Rai & Spary, 2019, pp. 247–249; Singer, 2007). Several studies worldwide and in India have also pointed to how the masculine and homosocial nature of patronage networks make it difficult for women to succeed in politics (Bjarnegård, 2015; Majumdar, 2014; Paxton & Hughes, 2017; Rai & Spary, 2019; Singer, 2007).

Conversely, emerging studies have drawn attention to factors that might enable women’s political participation and, in this regard, two factors have been emphasized: women’s homosocial networking and the family household. I will describe these in detail, as both are relevant to one, if not both, of the cases of Maya and Sita. As the literature has revealed, these factors are not enabling in themselves and might, under certain circumstances, constitute constraints or blind alleys.

I start with women’s homosocial networking. The concept of homosociality was defined by Bjarnegård (2015, p. 22) as behaviour ‘associated with seeking, enjoying and preferring the company of the same sex’, and has mainly been used to explain male dominance in political settings dominated by patronage. That is, how the informal and personal characteristics of patronage networks in patriarchal settings, where men regard other men as more trustworthy and predictable (i.e., more like themselves), effectively reproduce male dominance. However, in recent years, in regions with strict gender divisions of labour, where reserved seats for women have been introduced and where research now finds that women tend to prioritize different kinds of initiatives than men do (Chattopadhyay & Duflo, 2004), the concept has also been used to refer to the potential enabling effects of women’s homosocial networking. For instance, in their studies in Tunisia and Delhi, Benstead (2019) and Goyal (2020), respectively, show how women elected to political positions by networking with other women can help draw more women into politics. Another type of example is provided by Brule (2020) and Nazneen and Masud (2017), who illustrate how elected women use their positions to prioritize so-called women’s causes.

A different type of enabling potential of women’s homosocial networking is found by Prillaman (2021). On the basis of research on the empowering effects of self-help groups in rural India, she argues that women, by joining such groups, get to socialize with other women outside the family household and that their political participation thereby increases. According to Prillaman (2021, p. 20), when women become connected, they ‘find strength in numbers’ and political empowerment will occur.

However, the first type of examples of the enabling effects of women’s homosocial networking does not discuss how those women elected to political positions, who used this position to enable other women and/or women’s causes, managed to get elected in the first place. Did women’s homosocial networking play any significant role? Moreover, the example provided by Prillaman (2021) was based on women in rural India who had not previously participated in civil society, and she is concerned with the empowering effects that connecting with other women have for them. Would such homosocial networking among women be beneficial if they were to go into politics as political leaders?

According to Bjarnegård (2015), the answer to both questions is no. In her study of male dominance in political representation in Thailand, Bjarnegård found that whereas male homosocial capital benefits men, in societies where men have more power than women, female homosocial capital is ‘simply not a valid currency with which to attain political power’ (2015, p. 29). Bjarnegård (2015, pp. 26–29) further argued that in such societies, both men and women benefit from participating in male networks because that is where they can access relevant resources. However, because both men and women tend to prefer to build networks with people of the same gender, women are at a disadvantage. Added to this, in a study of brokerage, networking and clientelism in Argentina, Daby (2021) found that so-called women’s causes are regarded as inferior and as providing less political capital than more ‘gender-neutral’ (‘male’) causes. Thus, women ‘have fewer opportunities to use clientelism for building, enlarging and sustaining political networks than do male brokers’ (Daby, 2021, p. 215).

Taken together, the previous studies on women’s homosocial networking indicate that such networking can indeed be empowering for women at the grassroots level, but for women to become successful political activists and maybe eventually consider standing for election as a municipal councillor (MC), women’s homosocial networks are not a valid political capital.

The other type of enabling factor most frequently mentioned is the family household. In this regard, Ciotti (2009) and Rai and Spary (2019) describe how husbands, mothers and/or in-laws of politically active women contribute with material, practical and emotional supports such as help with letter writing and childcare, whereas Mufti and Jalalzai (2021) show how the family as a supportive kinship network assists the political newcomer with financial resources and contacts. In fact, according to Mayaram (2003, p. 243), the family is ‘the most significant school currently available for women’s initial political learning’.

At the same time, in India, the institution of the family household is frequently held as a key patriarchal site of domination, where women are regarded as subordinate to and ultimately dependent on men (John, 2011; Wadley, 2008). The traditional ideal family model in North India—the so-called joint Hindu family—is patriarchal, patrilineal and patrilocal, and based on power inequalities of age and gender (Sharma, 1993). Although this ideal model historically has been practiced with great variation depending on caste, class and urban/rural location, the same underlying view, that men are regarded as heads of the family and as providers whereas women are regarded as subordinate caregivers in need of support, remains.

Women are not treated as full legal and social persons on par with men, which is explicitly apparent in the traditional inheritance rules of this patrilineal system. A woman is supposed to receive her pre-mortem inheritance from her parents with the dowry when she marries, but she rarely has any control over this money because it goes to her in-laws (Sharma, 1993, p. 352). Moreover, a woman has no traditional rights to inheritance from her husband, as that will go to her sons. In return, sons are expected to look after and take care of a widowed mother (Vlassoff, 2013). The Hindu Succession Act of 2005 granted daughters equal coparcener rights with sons (Tagore, 2020), but many families in patrilineal India continue to follow traditional laws wherein ‘property is inherited by male heirs and transmitted through them’ (Dube, 2001, p. 225; Vlassoff, 2013; Wadley, 2008, p. 89).

Thus, for women going into politics in India, the family household holds a paradoxical position. On the one hand, as a patriarchal institution, the family household may form a major constraint and actively deny women to go into politics. On the other hand, if the male head concurs with women’s political activism, the family household may constitute the most supportive institution. Chhibber’s (2002) finding of a strong correlation between ‘women who can exercise autonomy in and from the household’ (p. 415) and women’s active participation in politics points directly at this paradoxical position of the family household.

Methods and Presentation of Cases

This article is based on ethnographic research that has taken place over a total period of 15 years in Janata Camp and its surrounding unauthorized colonies, demonstrating a methodological approach, termed by O’Reilly (2012) as ‘ethnographic returning’. The bulk of the fieldwork was conducted as a series of visits to New Delhi, each lasting one to three months between 2004 and 2007. During this period, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with women and men from 60 households in the area. In addition, I interviewed activists, politicians and representatives of various NGOs and municipal officers, and collected written reports, maps and newspaper clippings. This was part of a research grant to study relationships between residents in unauthorized, semi-legal slum settlements and the state in view of gender, caste and class. In the period 2011 to 2012, as part of another research project, I had the chance to conduct several follow-up interviews. Since then, I have revisited the area every year until 2019 to have informal conversations with key contacts.

The many revisits provided me with a unique longitudinal perspective and enabled me to have subsequent informal meetings with select residents and activists and to follow their personal life trajectories over time. My positionality as a female European researcher with only a basic understanding of Hindi likely impacted the research in terms of intersecting power differences between myself and the interviewees and in terms of them positioning me as an outsider (Donner, 2008, pp. 18–19). With repeated visits, follow-up interviews and conversations, my relationships with select residents and activists gradually became closer. Throughout the study, I attempted to employ an approach that accounts for the mitigation of power differences and aimed to understand slum residents’ ways of thinking (Haider, 2000, p. 29; Kamlongera, 2021).

I have depended on qualified research assistants for help with understanding Hindi and for overall assistance. Over the past 15 years, I have mainly worked with three research assistants: first a man and then two women. To maintain an informal atmosphere, I chose not to tape-record the interviews but used a notebook and written diary. ³ Informed consent was obtained verbally before participation in the presence of an independent witness. To protect the privacy of the persons interviewed, all names of people and places were anonymized and, in some cases, minor details concerning, for example, age and number of children, have also been changed.

To find the most important slum leaders, I used a bottom-up approach and started out by asking a number of slum residents about to whom they would turn concerning such problems as water, garbage collection or safety. Thereby, I obtained the names of the slum leaders who the residents found to be the most helpful and thus also the most important (Auerbach, 2019; Harriss, 2005). These slum leaders were, as expected, almost univocally men.

However, over the course of the fieldwork and visits, I also came to know about two women activists who were referred to as leaders of women. This is how I was introduced to the two women, Maya and Sita, on whom this analysis was based. I was told about Maya during my second field visit to Delhi in 2005. She was described as a leader and ‘someone who helps us women’ (July 2005). When I first met her, she was around 50 years old and had been the leader of a NGO for women in the slum since the early 1990s. At that time, Maya lived in a small house in Janata Camp, together with her husband, son and daughter-in-law. She had seven years of education, and her husband had 12 years. They are one of the few high-caste families in the slum but are still quite poor. I have had numerous interviews and conversations with Maya and thus have closely followed her political and personal trajectories.

I heard about Sita for the first time in 2011 several years after I had started my fieldwork. One of my key contacts in Janata Camp knew of my interest in Maya and told me that a new woman had emerged as a leader of women and that I might be interested in interviewing her. A few days later, we walked over to this woman’s house, and I had a long interview with her about her political trajectory. She told me that she was the representative of the Congress Party’s women’s wing in the slum, an important position during the long period of Congress leadership in the city. Sita was then in her thirties and lived in a small, simple flat on the border of the slum with her husband and three young children. She claimed to be illiterate, while her husband had seven years of education and worked as a government servant in the electricity department. They had a Scheduled Caste (SC) background.

During the time I followed the everyday life and slum politics in Janata Camp, Maya and Sita were the only two female grassroots activists that I came across. Although one or both of the two seats of the MC covering the slum for several periods have been reserved for women, slum residents regarded all these female councillors as proxies for ambitious husbands and not as de facto slum leaders. I have also met with a couple of the elected councillors and their husbands and, during these meetings, this impression was confirmed. Thus, Maya and Sita are exceptions.

I am not claiming that the two cases are representative of women grassroots activists in a methodological sense, as representativity is just not the point in qualitative case studies. However, as Flyvbjerg (2006, p. 228) points out, ‘one can often generalize on the basis of a single case’, although that is not the main strength of this approach. Rather, the methodological strength of the comparative, qualitative case approach is ‘the force of example’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 228). It provides rich, context-dependent, longitudinal exploration of the cases and all their complexities, and thereby provides insights easily overlooked in other studies (Small, 2009, p. 24).

The Political Field of Janata Camp

The Setting

Approximately half of New Delhi’s population live in unauthorized settlements such as the slum where this study was conducted (Vidal et al., 2000, p. 20). Janata Camp is on the outskirts of New Delhi, almost entirely encircled by two large unauthorized colonies next to a small, regularized resettlement colony. The slum stands out in terms of its narrow cemented alleys with open gutters and small, simple brick houses.

The first residents settled in the area in 1975. By the early 1980s, it had developed into a permanent settlement and was classified as a slum by the Delhi government (Dupont, 2004). ⁴ Slum residents are considered ‘needy’, and in 1985/1986, the slum wing of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) started providing minimum upgrades to the neighbourhood. By the early 1990s, the slum had been outfitted with bricks in the alleys, garbage collection, water taps and communal pay toilets.

According to MCD estimates, approximately 55,000 people lived in Janata Camp in 2005. This number has been increasing steadily, largely because the families of long-term residents have expanded. The population is not a homogenous group. Although most are classified as SC, some are classified as OBC and scheduled tribe, and a few families belonged to high caste groups. The majority are Hindu, and the remaining approximately 30% are Muslim. Moreover, slum residents come from different parts of Northern India: Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. However, in terms of class, there are no obvious distinctions within the slum, with most people being fairly poor.

Although slums are considered illegal, Janata Camp has never been in any immediate danger of demolition. Over the years, the area has attained a somewhat semi-permanent status of ‘precarious stability’ (Weinstein, 2014, p. 21). Most residents have attained voting and ration cards for Delhi, and, as of now, almost all houses have been upgraded with a second floor and roof terrace. ⁵

As in most urban slums, people live in close proximity to one another. Residents get to know their neighbours well, which, on the one hand, helps engender a good community feeling and, on the other hand, might easily fissure into conflicts (Dubochet 2019; Grover 2018). My overall impression while walking through alleys in the slum and when interviewing people is that of a good community feeling. I frequently observed groups of women sitting outside their houses chatting, and in interviews with slum residents, many reported that neighbours supported one another. For instance, one man reiterated an incidence when a neighbour became ill and the other neighbours collected money for the hospital fees. When I asked Kamla, a widow with three children, how she liked living in Janata Camp and if her neighbours were nice, she said, ‘Yes, my neighbours are good. I feel safe and happy. I do not have to lock the door. It is very cooperative’ (November 2005).

However, in line with Snell-Rood’s (2015, p. 67) findings, these examples of neighbourly support in most cases referred to the most immediate neighbours. Other studies of slum life in India have highlighted how divisions of caste and religion, combined with the overall precarious living conditions, create underlying tensions (Dubochet, 2019). In my interviews with slum residents, no one ever reported such conflicts directly. They would rather complain about the overall bad sanitary conditions with open gutters, the alarmingly declining supply of water, and how drugs and crime caused other problems such as young men fighting in the alleys at night and women becoming prostitutes.

Despite the divisions of caste, religion and regional belonging, residents have in common a similar class position and, most important for the topic here, they share the same precarious living conditions. Successful political slum leaders were those who addressed these problems.

MCs, Slum-Pradhans and Patronage Politics

In 2012, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi was restructured and divided into three regional parts, which were further divided into zones and then wards. From each of these wards, a MC is elected every 5 years. Janata Camp covers two wards, electing one MC for each. For the past four elections, at least one of these two wards were reserved for women, and in a couple of instances, for SC women.

In India and other countries dominated by patronage politics, successful political leaders function as intermediaries between common citizens and bureaucrats or political party leaders higher up in the patronage chain (Alm, 2010; Bussell, 2019; Piliavsky, 2014; Witsoe, 2012). In urban India the slum leader, that is, individuals that ‘offer favours and provide assistance based on political connections’ (Bussell, 2019, p. 175), are well-known figure (Auerbach, 2019; Harriss, 2005; Jha et al., 2005).

Slum leaders come in many forms and operate at different levels. Drawing on Auerbach’s (2019, pp. 92–114) detailed description of slum leaders, for the case of Janata Camp, I highlight the following key characteristics: First, the position is informal, without state sanction (Auerbach, 2019, p. 98). At the same time, I found that in Janata Camp, since the restructuring of the municipal corporation, many slum leaders have tried to consolidate their positions by running for MC; if the seat is reserved for women, a slum leader may ask his wife to run in his place as a proxy (John, 2007; Tiwari, 2016). Second, slum leaders live in the slum and ‘emerge from the pool of residents’ (Auerbach, 2019, p. 99). In the case of Janata Camp, this was also important, but slum leaders could also come from an immediate surrounding unauthorized colony. The main thing was that he/she was ‘one of us, one who understands our problems’. Third, they attract a following because they help residents and solve problems (Auerbach, 2019, p. 99); thus, a slum leader might be likened to ‘a fixer’ (Berenschot, 2014). Fourth, with more than one slum leader in a slum and with newcomers trying to build up a following, the position is competitive (Auerbach, 2019).

To be successful, the most important factor is the capability of solving slum residents’ problems and getting things done. The main capital required in this regard is to be well connected. In Janata Camp, the most important contacts were government employees in the municipality, such as the water department, but a successful slum pradhan would preferably have political connections that could ‘strengthen their ability to secure public resources’ (Auerbach, 2019, p. 99). Moreover, according to Auerbach (2019, pp. 99–100), a successful slum leader would also possess various other attributes such as literacy, ‘charisma and courage before officials’.

To provide a more detailed account of how slum leaders succeed, I will now present Mr. Aggarwal, who is a sort of ‘ideal type’ slum leader. To uncover the most important slum leaders, I asked regular slum residents to whom they would turn if they encountered municipal problems such as water or garbage collection (Auerbach, 2019; Harriss, 2005). Thereby, I learned early on about Mr. Aggarwal, whose name was mentioned most frequently. Thus, I went to see him for the first time in 2005 and have interviewed him about his activism several times since then. He or his wife had stood for election as MC three times for one of the two wards covering Janata Camp. For the first time in 2002, when the seat was reserved for women, Mr. Aggarwal asked his wife to stand for the election as his substitute. She lost. The seat was still reserved for women in 2007, so Mr. Aggarwal again had his wife stand for election; this time, she won. The seat was no longer reserved for women in 2012, and Mr. Aggarwal was elected MC from 2012 to 2017.

He had started his political career as a sort of protégé of a prominent Congress politician. Several years with this politician as his ‘godfather’ allowed him to ‘learn the trade’ and become part of his ‘godfather’s’ patronage network. By the time I met him several years later, Mr. Aggarwal had acquired his own contacts with important people such as officers in local municipal departments. With his own patronage network, Mr. Aggarwal could operate independently, depending neither on his ‘godfather’ nor on a specific political party. To illustrate how these connections were the basis of his power and prominence in Janata Camp, I will recount the happenings of a day I spent with him in 2005:

I had met him for the very first time a few days earlier, and then, to help me with my research, he had offered to take me to meet some government officials that he knew. So, we met up at a small restaurant nearby the slum, and from there, he took me and my research assistant along in his car to meet with municipal officials at the Public Works Department and afterwards at the Delhi Water Board. Not surprisingly, neither of these officials could give me any useful information about Janata Camp, since it is a slum and not entitled to the services of these departments, but at the Water Board, Mr. Aggarwal had a brief talk with his contact while I waited in the corridor. Afterwards, when we returned to Janata Camp, our car was stopped by a crowd just outside the slum. The people were agitated and called to Mr. Aggarwal for help. It turned out that the slum had been without water the whole day, and now they hoped Mr. Aggarwal could help them. We got out of the car, and while Mr. Aggarwal was calming the crowd and I was waiting at the side, a couple of women turned towards me with admiration in their voices and said, ‘Mr. Aggarwal is the leader of us all’. Shortly afterwards, the water was back on.

The example illustrates that Mr. Aggarwal indeed had direct contacts with municipal officers in positions that might help resolve issues in the slum (Auerbach, 2019; Jha et al., 2005). In this case, although I could not prove that Mr. Aggarwal’s private talk with the officer at the Water Board was linked in any way to the fact that the water came back in Janata Camp shortly after our visit, the very fact that Mr. Aggarwal has such connections and that slum residents know about them gives him a prominent standing, as explicitly illustrated by the women’s exclamation when our car was stopped.

During an interview with Mr. Aggarwal in 2014, when he had held the office of MC for 2 years, I asked him about his main tasks. He replied, ‘I make a path for people.’ As slum residents overall have little education, in addition to helping solve municipal problems through one’s patronage contacts, this would involve assisting slum residents navigate the bureaucracy so that they can obtain government services such as ration cards (Auerbach, 2019). Thus, a successful slum leader should possess two attributes: his own individual contacts and a certain degree of literacy, including some knowledge of the municipal bureaucracy. In addition, I highlight a third attribute, which is linked to what Auerbach (2019, p. 100) called ‘charisma and courage before officials’. Something similar is expressed by Aggarwal when he chose the wording of making ‘a path for people’. A successful slum-leader is not a mere manager that follows the paths laid out by others but rather someone who possesses the political clout to find new paths. ⁶

The Political Trajectories of Two Female Grassroots Activists

Becoming Successful Leaders of Women

I now turn to the empirical presentation of the political trajectories of Maya and Sita, and I start with how they initially were drawn into political activism. I use the passive term here because neither of them pursued politics initially. It was external circumstances and serendipitous encounters that pushed them into activism, and NGOs working in the area to improve the lives of slum residents played an important role.

In Maya’s case, a charismatic man referred to as ‘The Professor’ in the early 1990s drew her into activism. He was the leader of an external NGO, whose main aim was to improve living conditions in Janata Camp and make slum residents, especially women, self-reliant. In interviews and conversations, Maya referred to The Professor as her ‘basic inspiration’:

One day The Professor came along with a Pradhan…. He gathered the women together and started having meetings for us. (November 2006)

With his encouragement and assistance, the women in Janata Camp established their own NGO, and Maya was elected president. According to Maya:

The Professor has helped us a lot. He taught us how to speak to higher officials, how to keep hygiene in the area and how to be self-reliant as an NGO…. He taught us about money management, and that girls should be made to study…. All because of him, we have learnt a lot. (August 2005)

Before The Professor’s NGO left in 1993, they taught the slum residents how to mobilize to get water pipes installed in the slum by organizing sit-down demonstrations in front of the houses of leading politicians in the city. After the NGO left, Maya and the other women have continued helping women in the slum and mobilizing them for community action.

In Sita’s case also, a local NGO played an important role in drawing her into political activism. She got involved at a much younger age and much more gradually than Maya. When asked what prompted her to get into politics, she said, ‘I just had the time and got active’. First, she joined an All India Youth Club for the SC caste group to which she belonged, and then she became involved in an anti-dowry programme that also worked against domestic violence, run by the Congress Party targeting Dalits. It was through that experience that she was discovered by an external NGO working with outreach activities in the area, where she became the chairwoman of the Janata Camp office. Just like the NGO of the Professor, the NGO that Sita got involved in had programmes aimed at improving the living conditions in the slum, focusing on women.

The gendered difference between Mr. Aggarwal, whose initial political learning was through a godfather in his own male social network, and Maya and Sita, whose initial introduction to activism was through local NGOs, resonates with John’s finding (2007, p. 3988) with regards to where newcomers and aspiring politicians find their initial support people (Rai & Spary, 2019; Singer, 2007).

In view of the paradoxical role of the family household for women’s political careers, I asked both women what their husbands thought about their political activism. Maya expressed explicitly that her husband helped her with letter writing and such things, while Sita said that her husband did not mind her activism. Thus, the role of the family can be summarized for Maya as being supportive, whereas for Sita, it is more neutral. The correlation found by Chhibber (2002, p. 415) that indicated that autonomy from the household is an asset for women’s active political participation seemed to be the case for Sita but ambiguous for Maya. As leader of the women’s NGO in the slum, Maya exercised a great degree of autonomy, but remained dependent on her husband’s active support.

It is difficult to assess how the two women’s different caste backgrounds impacted their activism. Caste still matters in numerous ways in India (Yengde, 2019), and in the case of Maya, her high-caste position with subsequent higher levels of literacy likely played an important role in her selection as the leader of the women’s NGO in the slum. Sita’s SC background and gender might have also been to her advantage (Jensenius, 2016). Owing to the quota system in municipal politics, which allocates reserved seats to women and SCs, political parties are always looking for local representatives to help draw votes.

Personal Political Causes

The two women’s causes are similar and can be categorized into two types: municipal causes, which concern hygiene and living conditions that are of interest to all slum residents regardless of gender; and women’s causes, such as education for women and safety. These are not watertight categories. Lack of water is a major municipal problem in the area and is also a ‘women’s cause’ as part of their daily household duties (Dubochet, 2019, p. 208). Moreover, the safety issue is about not only domestic violence and safety for women but also young boys fighting in the streets and creating a violent atmosphere in the slum at night (Dubochet, 2019).

These causes reflect the education the two women received from the NGOs working in the area but are also highly personal (Khan, 2021, p. 5). Life for women in the slum is challenging, and one reason for Maya’s and Sita’s popularity among women was that they focused on issues that were important to them from the position of fellow women living in the slum and sharing the same problems. Maya expressed gendered, personal motivations for her activism. Rather than referring directly to political causes, she reiterated her own experiences of gender discrimination from the time she was newly married and lived with her in-laws:

I had only given birth to two daughters. It was the biggest issue—my in-laws wanted me to go to my mother’s house to feed them. My daughters were brought up on black tea and had no clothes…. Whenever I recall those moments, it hurts me a lot. (November 2005)

This element of gendered personal politics explains the women’s popularity and success as leaders of women, and it resonates with Auerbach’s (2019, p. 99) criteria that successful slum-leaders ‘emerge from the pool of residents’. For lasting success, they had to solve, or at least try to solve, the identified problems. Regarding safety, Maya focused on widespread alcohol and drug abuse in the slum, and the related domestic and street violence. She drew on the well-known script of anti-alcohol campaigns among women’s grassroots groups across India, which can be traced back to Gandhi (Joshi, 1988; Kudva, 2003). In cases of brutal domestic violence, Maya led women to the house to talk to the man abusing his wife. Maya would try to stop street fights between young men, and in one instance, was seriously injured, illustrating her personal commitment.

In Sita’s case, safety was mainly about controlling crime. With her contacts with powerful people in the ruling Congress Party, she ‘controlled the police’ and repeated several times that ‘her ward’ in Janata Camp was now a safe place for women:

There used to be much crime in this area, but not any longer because they are afraid of me. Now I control this area—I can send people to jail. Every evening the police will go around, so now it is safe. (October 2011)

To address the many municipal problems, both women used the same two strategies: arranging demonstrations and writing applications and letters to politicians. When I asked Sita if she had organized demonstrations, she said:

Yes, one and a half months ago I organised a demonstration against a private tube-well in the area…. I collected 30 women and we went there, because the women were not getting water. Private tube-wells are not allowed since they make the public tube-wells dry up faster. (October 2011)

Maya had organized numerous sit-down demonstrations throughout her career as an activist, a tool she learned from The Professor and his NGO. My early interviews with residents also confirmed histories of how they rented rickshaws or trucks on numerous occasions in the 1990s and had sit-down demonstrations on the lawns of the MLA for their part of Delhi. To my knowledge, however, this did not play any role in the repertoire that Maya used during the years I interacted with her.

The main strategy employed by both women was to write letters and applications, and for this, they depended on assistance. To write letters to politicians, Maya depended on her husband, who had 12 years of education: ‘My husband supports me in my activism. He supports me when I have to write an application or deal in English’ (November 2011). She would then personally bring the letter to politicians when they were holding public rallies. However, as she did not have any direct personal contacts, this rarely yielded any tangible results.

Through her membership in the Congress Party, Sita was much more successful in this regard, even before she was appointed representative of the Congress Party’s women’s wing in the slum. She told me that while sitting in a Congress committee meeting for outer Delhi, she wrote an application to the Delhi Jal Board about the dismal water provision in the slum. The Congress MLA, who later became her ‘godfather’, helped her, which resulted in two newly installed tube wells.

It was likely her activism to combat violence and crime that brought Maya the most support from women. This was a cause for which she could easily mobilize on short notice. Furthermore, it did not require any letter-writing or patronage contacts; actions could be decided on an ad hoc basis between women. The cause was personal to many women and, when coming together, likely made them feel empowered (Prillaman, 2021).

Alliance with Local Political Leaders to Draw ‘The Women’s Vote’

After years of successfully mobilizing and helping women in the slum regarding water and safety, Sita and Maya were discovered by male politicians in the area, who allied with them to draw ‘the women’s vote’ during elections. For Sita, this happened quite early in her career as an activist, when she, through involvement in the Congress Committee for Outer Delhi, met the powerful Congress representative who became her ‘godfather’. Shortly after, he asked her to become the Congress Party’s women’s wing representative in the area.

She expressed great pride in holding this position, which brought her into contact with powerful people in Delhi at the time. To verify this, she showed me several pictures of herself with important officials and pointed to a diploma hanging on the wall, certifying her formal position in the party. With this position and the important contacts that came with it, Sita could get things done (Berenschot, 2014; John, 2007). When asked what she would do if people came to her with a problem, she replied, ‘I will try to solve it, and if I cannot, I will go to the Congress politician’ (October 2011). It was because of this direct link to her ‘godfather’ and his powerful network that she had emerged as a new leader of women in the slum.

As for Maya, after years of leading the women’s NGO in the slum, she was approached by a male political leader in 2007: Mr. Aggarwal. He first approached Maya because his wife was standing for election as MC on a seat reserved for women. According to Maya, he and his wife knew that they had little support from women, so Mr. Aggarwal approached her to ‘make an alliance’. With the combination of Mr. Aggarwal’s connections and Maya’s high standing among the women behind her, Mrs. Aggarwal was elected MC in 2007. Again, in the 2012 election, when the seat was no longer reserved for women, Maya helped Mr. Aggarwal secure the women’s vote.

When I asked Maya why she had allied with Mr. Aggarwal, she answered vaguely. In my view, her reasons were that through him and his patronage network, she could gain power to solve municipal problems. The empowerment tools that Maya and the other women had learned from The Professor and his NGO did not include how to obtain contacts in political parties and municipal offices. She was popular among women but lacked her own patronage network. Before she allied with Mr. Aggarwal, Maya had struggled for years to solve problems such as water shortages and poor drainage in the slum. An important part of her activism in this regard was to have her husband help her write letters to relevant people in power (Mayaram, 2003). However, without connections, she achieved few tangible results. (Auerbach, 2019; Harriss, 2005; Jha et al., 2005). Hence, partnering with Mr. Aggarwal benefitted Maya in the same way that Sita’s ‘godfather’ benefitted her.

Sita’s Loss of Power

In 2014, both Sita and Maya exited from political activism for different reasons. For Sita, this was not an active choice. The external circumstance of a change in political power in New Delhi made her lose office. Sita had risen to power as an important leader of women when she became the head of the Congress Party’s women’s wing in the area. She had shown that she could solve municipal problems and claimed that she controlled the police, but her contacts in the municipality and with the police were not actually hers. She could get things done because she could ask her ‘godfather’ for assistance; thus, her power rested on her direct links to the Congress network, extending all the way to the Delhi Chief Minister. So, when Congress lost the Delhi assembly election in 2013 to the new Aam Aadmi party, Sita also lost her power and influence in the slum. When I asked about her during later visits, people simply shrugged and said that she was no longer a leader. She had lost the ability to make important government servants listen, so she stopped being a leader to whom women could turn for help.

According to Auerbach (2019), slum leadership is a competitive field, and one may wonder if a male slum leader would have ended up in the same situation. I see two gendered differences between what is required of a successful (male) slum leader and the case of Sita. First, with regards to her place in the Congress Party, although I do not know what intentions the party or her ‘godfather’ had for Sita, it is likely that her role was solely to help draw the women’s vote. The fact that she was chosen as the head of the party’s women’s wing in the slum supports such an interpretation. As noted by Singer (2007, p. 198), women’s wings of political parties hold an ambivalent position in the party structure, as they constitute an independent domain for women party workers and remain ‘outside the decision-making apparatus of politics’. Second, unlike successful male politicians such as Mr. Aggarwal, while head of the women’s wing, Sita had depended solely on her ‘godfather’s’ connections. She had not acquired a patronage network of her own, which might have enabled her to change her political affiliations according to the circumstances and to continue as a leader of women without Congress.

Maya’s Withdrawal from Politics

Unlike Sita, who lost power due to changes in Delhi politics, Maya decided to leave political activism in 2014 after her husband’s death. The family household is an important enabling institution for women in politics in India (Ciotti, 2009; Mayaram, 2003), and Maya depended on assistance and support from her husband in her activism. However, it was not his passing in itself that made her decide to leave. At this point, she had been Mr. Aggarwal’s and his wife’s ally for many years and no longer depended so much on her husband for writing letters to politicians. She decided to leave activism because of her oldest son who, under the pretext of Indian customary law wherein property is inherited in the patrilineage from father to son, took his father’s death as an opportunity to claim the house and evict Maya.

Maya’s son, neither according to current Indian law nor Indian customary law, had any real right to evict his mother from the house. In 2005, an amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 provided daughters with equal coparcenary rights to sons (Tagore, 2020). Still, many families continue to practice customary law under which the oldest son is expected to take over the role of provider when the father, the patriarch, dies (Sharma, 1993). Although widows traditionally have a very low position in Indian society with severely limited rights, continuing to look after their mother is a son’s customary duty (Dube, 2001; Vlassoff, 2013; Wadley, 2008).

To Maya, the fact that her son evicted her was devastating. When I visited Delhi shortly after her husband’s death, her neighbours told me that Maya had fallen ill and withdrawn from politics, and that she temporarily had moved into the house of her oldest daughter, who lived with her husband and children nearby. I wanted to meet Maya to get her version of the story and find out if she had left political activism for good. When I came back the year after, my research assistant called Maya to ask if we could meet her, and that was the last time I saw her.

During this meeting, along with her oldest daughter, Maya said, ‘Now I am old and do not have much power in my body’ (February 2016). She confirmed that she had withdrawn from activism. During later visits, my other contacts corroborated that Maya is no longer an activist. From what I have been able to gather, the women’s community NGO has ceased to exist.

Conclusion

This article has used the cases of two female grassroots activists to investigate why it is so difficult for women to succeed in politics in India. By taking a longitudinal approach, I have analysed Maya’s and Sita’s political careers in terms of stages: Being drawn into grassroots activism by NGO’s; focusing on so-called women’s causes and becoming leaders of women; Being ‘discovered’ by male politicians to help draw ‘the women’s vote; and then eventually exiting politics. I found that the enabling factors at work when they initially entered grassroots politics are not the same as those required to stay in politics and succeed as a political leader. Focusing on women’s causes was indeed beneficial for both Maya and Sita, and it constituted an important power-base for them to become grassroots leaders of women. However, such female homosocial networking was not sufficient to attain political power in the slum at large. For this, they needed contacts among important politicians and municipal officers, so that they could actually solve problems in the slum, like lack of water, when these occurred. To do so, they allied with a male politician in the slum.

The long-term approach also brings out details of how personal, social and political circumstances may change over time, and I show how such changes caused their respective exits from political activism. Sita’s case illustrates that her power depended on her links to important Congress politicians and their patronage network. When Congress lost power, Sita also lost power. In contrast, Maya’s case exemplifies the role of the family for women’s political activism. She had depended on her husband for moral and practical support, and when he died, it was not Maya who took over as the household-head but her oldest son. When the son evicted her from the house, she found it impossible to continue as an activist. Not only had she lost the male household-head’s support but evidenced by the fact that she was not able to stand up to her son, she had also lost some of the autonomy she had negotiated for herself in the household (Chhibber, 2002).

Taken together, the reasons for Maya’s and Sita’s respective exits from political activism underscores the uncertainty and, one might say, vulnerability of the two women’s political positions, in that they both continued throughout their political careers to depend on others. The two cases point towards the same underlying cause, of women’s greater degree of dependency and lack of autonomy compared to men, for explaining why it is so difficult for women to succeed in politics in India.