BENGALURU: Women leaders from the Indian National Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Janata Dal Secular, Communist Party of India (Marxist), academicians, activists and journalists will get together in the city on December 8 for a day-long discussion at the first national-level meet of the India Women’s Caucus (IWC). The Bengaluru chapter of IWC was launched on Monday, with the intent to push for more women elected representatives at the state and parliamentary levels. 

Tara Krishnaswamy, co-convener of IWC, said, “There are lakhs of women corporators and panchayat leaders. However, they do not graduate to MLAs and MPs, as they do not get party tickets to mainstream and regional political parties. Our aim is to push for more women representation in state assemblies and at the parliamentary level.”

At IWC’s first regional-level event held in October, in Goa, regional women politicians discussed the barriers they faced while trying to rise up to the party. “Women politicians told us that men join hands to prevent them for getting party tickets. They are put into a sandbox called the ‘women’s wing’. They do not get to take part in big decisions such as budget funding, ticket distribution, election campaigning, etc,” Tara said, adding, “Even in the recent Karnataka elections, BJP had four per cent  and Congress had six per cent women candidates.”

The upcoming IWC event will see women-led trade unions, dalits, researchers of gender and other minority groups in attendance. Their next goal is to hold a larger event in Delhi and petition national parties to have more women representation in the 2019 elections. The non-partisan pressure group intends to have state-level caucuses in the future. 

IWC, co-founded by Rajeshree Nagarsekar, publisher of Evescape, includes Ammu Joseph, coordinator of Network of Women in Media (NWMI); Nisha Agarwal, ex-CEO of Oxfam; Jyoti Raj, co- founder of Campaign for Electoral Reforms in India, among others.