From Welfare to Ballot: The Role of Gender-Specific Freebies in the Electoral Mobilisation of Women in India

The increasing deployment of the gender-specific welfare schemes, commonly which is referred to as “freebies,” has become one of the defining feature of the contemporary electoral politics in India. Across the ideological divide, the political groupings are offering special Favor to women including free transportation, direct cash transfer, free cooking gas, flybys by bicycle and housing allowance to lure the women voters to its side. Although such measures can be readily justified in certain instances, regarding social justice and equality of the genders, the manner of such measures or how it is electrolyzed has posed substantial constitutional, democratic and ethical concerns. The paper is a critical argumentative article on either gender specific freebies are non-durative concerning electoral inducements or will lead to the reported apparent political empowerment and the substantive agency of the women votes in the long-term perspective. This paper will elaborate on the recent state and local elections in India to evaluate how women have changed the political behaviour, voting patterns, and entry into party discourse in the electoral process basing on the constitutional ideals, electoral jurisprudence, welfare state theory and the feminist political theory. The thesis accepted in this paper is that despite opportunities of entry into the political sphere of ethnic units through these schemes there is the risk of dependency, gender broadly instrumentalization and there is also the leaching out of the system of democratic accountability other than to insert the schemes into the system of rights based and institutionalised systems of welfare.