The Underrepresentation Of Dalit Women In Indian Electoral Politics Before Mayawati: Analysing The Social Response Of The General Mass Through The Lens Of Casteist and patriarchal structures

Abstract

This paper traces back to pre-Mayawati ‘the absence’ of Dalit women in Indian electoral politics. It explores how casteist and patriarchal structures shaped the public space of the mass, triple-oppressed based on caste, gender, and class, while Dalit women occupied the bottom in this hierarchy, seldom being able to participate politically. Caste norms in rural and urban India constituted political leadership as a domain reserved for men from dominant caste groups, while patriarchal values often limited women’s mobility, education, and public visibility. The social imagination of leadership, therefore, systemically excluded Dalit women who were seen by the political masses as lacking “authenticity” and “respectability” along with political acumen. Empirical cases provide illustrations of how such constructions functioned.
For instance, Dalit women who attempted to challenge panchayat elections experienced harassment, social ostracism and male violence: sexual harassment by dominant castes in some North Indian villages in the 1970s and in the 1980s as symptomatic of the resistance to their political positioning. Even where constitutional caveats, enabling Dalit women to assume a local office, though even while functioning, provoked escort “proxy candidates,” as male kin or dominant-caste elites ran for real control, they showed how formal representation was indeed subverted by structural patriarchy.
Leaders of the Dalit political formations were mostly men, while a mere sector of the Dalit women were in some inferior position or another. The media and public discourse also cemented these exclusions through the expunging of Dalit women political actors and a conception of leadership that was framed in terms of upper-caste, male centred power.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.66496/LCAP.9788168710122.2026.297-317