Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, The Verdict: Decoding India’s Elections, written by Prannoy Roy and Dorab R Sopariwala, documents facts regarding the Indian electoral history to decode what goes into the electoral process.

With the use of charts and tables, the book answers some of the burning questions that are on the minds of every citizen, where it talks about the reliability of opinion and exit polls, anti-incumbency, bellwether constituencies, and how fear and other means are used to influence elections.

Touching on an important topic about whether Indian women’s votes matter, the author pens that it turns out to be that the generally held notion that Indian women are submissive stands false. “For those who believe that India is a male-dominated society, the responses we got in our pilot surveys would be an eye-opener. Whenever we questioned women on whether they voted for the party that their husbands told them to vote for, the women’s responses were predominantly to laugh at us, and to treat the question with derision… ‘He may think that I listen to him about whom to vote for, that’s in his dreams – I vote for exactly whom I want to vote for,’” the book reads.

According to research, it was found out that women are an independent vote bank and they are less supportive of the BJP as compared to men, that rural women 6 percent more than the ones hailing from urban areas cast their vote, that this growing participation is pushing political parties to address issues like farm distress, they tend to stay home and not vote if parties “generate an atmosphere of fear and violence”.

However, a surprising fact that emerged was that many Indian women do not have the vote as “21 million women who are entitled to vote will be denied the right to do so because their names are not on the voters list”. The states which see less participation of women voters are Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan which has 6.8, 2.3 and 1.2 million missing women voters respectively. “These three states will account for over 10 million of the 21 million missing women voters in 2019,” reads the book.

While there isn’t enough time to rectify the rolls for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the author suggests, “Any woman who comes to a polling station in the constituency where she resides and is over eighteen years old, be allowed to vote.”

H/T: The Hindustan Times