Discourses From the East
In today’s politics, there is a strong effort to present concern for women as a material of campaign. What the Bharatiya Janata Party is doing is largely the creation of an image of women’s progress— carefully constructed through schemes, speeches, and public rallies. In Assam, under Himanta Biswa Sarma, this image presents the state as a well-wisher of women, foregrounding them as beneficiaries and symbols of development. Former CM pretending as well-wisher brother (mama) of women. Yet this remains, at its core, an exercise in image-making. This image making cannot hide real face of restricting women’s political voice and gender justice.
Schemes like Orunodoi Scheme are often framed as progressive because they “target women.” On the surface, this appears as recognition: women as central to household survival, as managers of scarcity, as anchors of care. But this targeting carries a double edge. It acknowledges women’s role in household, yet fixes them within it. In this sense, the language of welfare begins to blur into the language of containment, where inclusion does not necessarily unsettle the hierarchies, it inhabits. these schemes normalises gender division of labour within household, rather than disrupt them. By directing transfers to women as caregivers, the state implicitly affirms that their primary domain is the household. Care work—already unpaid and undervalued—is quietly institutionalized, this gendered role will get charity from government, not redistribution. There is no parallel transformation of the conditions that structure women’s labour: no systemic reduction of unpaid work, no expansion of public services that would ease this burden. What appears as empowerment can, in effect, become a subtler form of containment. It is here that the promise of welfare reveals its limits—not in what it gives, but in what it leaves untouched.
At the same time targeting women produces a specific political subject: the administered female beneficiary. Women are rendered visible through databases, eligibility lists, and scheme-specific categories. They appear in political narratives—as numbers in rallies, as evidence of outreach—but not as voices shaping policy. Their visibility is counted, but rarely heard; recorded, but seldom transformative.
Empowerment, in any substantive sense, would require shifts in the social location that produce gender inequality—secure rights to land and property, equal wages, recognition and redistribution of unpaid care work, accessible public services, individual dignity, personal freedom and meaningful political participation. Without these shifts, the language of empowerment risks becoming an echo—resonant, but hollow.
Few recent incidents exposes the dubious stand of BJP or Himanta Biswa Sarma. The dissonance between rhetoric and practice becomes sharper when women step beyond the role scripted for them.
Recently Himanta Biswa Sharma targetted Kunki Choudhury, youngest candidate in this election, contesting from Central Guwahati Assembly constituency. When Himanta Biswa Sarma choose to target this candidate, Kunki Chaoudhury, he did that by targetting her mother, Sujata Gurung Choudhury, with mere misleading information. The woman candidate is not engaged as a political subject; she is reframed as a daughter, a product of a household whose “values” must be scrutinized, judged, and discredited. The attack travels through kinship, not critique—through lineage, not legitimacy.
This move is neither incidental nor new. Feminist analysis has long shown that women in public life are rarely allowed to remain individuals. They are tethered to kinship—measured through fathers, husbands, mothers. Their legitimacy is made to pass through the intimate sphere. In this case, the mother’s alleged food habits, beliefs, or expressions on social media become a proxy battlefield. The message is subtle but sharp: a woman’s political credibility can be undone by questioning the moral integrity of another woman in her family. The personal is not merely political here—it is weaponized.
What emerges is a disciplining mechanism. Women in politics are warned—implicitly—that their entry into the public sphere is conditional. Their autonomy is fragile, always vulnerable to being folded back into the private, where they can be judged not as leaders but as daughters, mothers, bearers of culture. The boundary between public and private collapses, but not in a liberatory way— instead, it becomes a site of surveillance.
There is also a striking contradiction when placed alongside welfare targeting. On one hand, schemes like Orunodoi Scheme position women as ideal beneficiaries—trustworthy, responsible, apolitical managers of the household. On the other hand, when a woman steps beyond this prescribed role and asserts herself as a political actor, she is met with suspicion, hostility, and personal attack. The “good woman” is the one who receives quietly; the “dangerous woman” is the one who speaks, contests, and challenges.
This duality reveals the limits of a politics that includes women without transforming gendered power. Women are welcomed as recipients of welfare, but not as autonomous agents of dissent. Their visibility is acceptable when it is numerical—counted in beneficiary lists—but becomes threatening when it is vocal and oppositional. What is at stake, then, is more than electoral rhetoric. It is the very terms on which women can inhabit politics.
The Bharatiya Janata Party fields only six women out of eighty-eight candidates (only 7%), it was seven in 2021 election. This numerical thinness matters. Because political empowerment is not an abstract promise; it is built through presence, through bodies in assemblies, voices in debate, the slow accumulation of authority. When women are kept at the margins of candidature, their role remains symbolic. Women are present, but sparsely—visible enough to signify inclusion, not numerous enough to reshape power. Similarly when When Bidisha Neog dared to contest against Himanta Biswa Sarma, the response is not merely electoral competition but intimidation—her public rally reportedly disrupted, her political presence met with force. The message travels again: participation has limits, and those limits are enforced by the ruling party itself.
Cash transfers, however necessary in moments of distress, do not translate into political voice. They do not secure women’s right to participate as equals in the public sphere. They do not protect their freedom to choose, what to eat, what to believe, whom to oppose. Nor do they dismantle the structures that constrain women’s lives: unequal property relations, precarious labour, gendered
violence, and underrepresentation in institutions of power. Welfare may soften the edges of hardship, but it does not redraw the map of power.
In the end, what emerges is a politics that speaks in the name of women while quietly narrowing the space they can occupy. Care is extended, but autonomy is curtailed; recognition is offered, but only within prescribed boundaries. The figure of the woman becomes central, yet circumscribed, celebrated as beneficiary, disciplined as dissenter. And so, the question lingers, persistent and unresolved: can a politics that fears women’s voice truly claim to stand for their empowerment?
