Chandigarh: More than 31% of women in fights in the election of the Punjab counselors run as independent candidates while 30% fights with small party tickets, showing a lack of support from the mainstream parties.
The trend has been there for a while and analysis of data from the last two assembly elections – 2017 and 2012 – also revealed that a large number of female candidates tried their election fortune on an independent ticket.
In the upcoming election, of the 1,304 contestants in battle for 117 seats, 93 are women – accounting for 7.13% of the total competitors.
This, although female voters constitute 47.44% of a total of 2,14,99,804 voters in Punjab.
Of these, 29 is an independent candidate.
Likewise in 2017, 80 contestants from 1,126 (7.10%) were women, where 32 (40%) had solo.
In the previous election, from 1,049 in polls, 83 (7.91%) were women and 37 (44.57%) fought as independent.
Besides that 29 became independent, 28 others have been given tickets by small parties.
Mukti’s vanished party has reduced four women while the Sangharsh Samajik Party, the National Party Punjab and Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) has provided tickets to the three female candidates and JAI JAWAN JAI Kisan and Party Insaniyat Lok Vikas.
Among the mainstream parties, AAP has nomined 12 women, increasing eight times.
Like the previous election, Congress has provided tickets to 11 women while SAD has chosen five women’s contestants.
BJP has lowered six female candidates compared to two in the last election.
The Bahujan Party of Jajj (BSP) has chosen only one female candidate at that time to nominate two in the 2017 election.
Political analyst Prof.
Ashutosh Kumar from Panjab University stated that this is a typical of the patriarchal community where men get a preference for women.
“Because of the lack of support from the parties, women who are interested in fighting with elections are forced to run as independent candidates,” said Prof.
Kumar.
13% faced criminal cases compared with only two candidates who shared their criminal records during the last election, 12 (12.90%) female candidates have recognized criminal antecedents.
The cost is faced including violations based on NDPS, mining, fraud, SC \ St \ St Act.
AAP addresses a list with seven candidates who declare their criminal antecedents while two are independent and each of them is sad (amritsar), SAD and BJP have shared the details of their criminal case in their nomination paper
PB: 31% of women fight as independent candidates
