“Make no mistake patriarchy in India has not been smashed. The deeply entrenched gender biases in our socio-political milieu continue with tragic brazenness,” writes Indian journalist Ruhi Tewari in her debut book ‘What Women Want: Understanding the Female Voters in Modern India’. She continues, “Yet there is one aspect in which women now find themselves on a pedestal, surpassing even men in importance: voting.”

In her almost 20 years of covering the Indian political landscape for publications such as The Indian Express and The Print, Ruhi Tewari travelled across the country and interviewed many people. When trying to make sure that the voices of all stakeholders were adequately represented, she remembers that “finding the balance in gender was among the hardest to achieve when I first started covering elections in the winter of 2008. It wasn’t always easy to find women willing to speak openly, to draw them out and to get them to express their political views, aspirations and anguish.”

Therefore, for a long time, journalists would focus more on men—“They were, after all, more vocal and decisive, which made for better quotes and soundbites.” This disparity in visibility shaped not only media narratives but also broader assumptions about women’s political engagement.

Although Indian women were granted the right to vote in the year their country was born, it remained common for decades for many to vote according to the wishes of male family members. But Tewari observed a shift over the last few years—women became increasingly vocal, informed, and self-confident in exercising their democratic rights.

Tewari recalls a moment in 2018, when she visited colleges to talk to first-time voters: “To my surprise, I found the female students to be more vocal, clear-headed, aware and aspirational than the men,” she writes. “It was these young women that made me realize she had arrived as a voter and would go on to become the protagonist of many a book, most certainly of my first book.”

In this book, Tewari traces how half the electorate, long treated as a homogenous block or a passive beneficiary, has become one of the most dynamic actors in Indian politics. She asks hard questions, such as: Does gender itself even matter in elections? Does caste or religion override gender at the ballot box? What happens when welfare schemes become the new normal and get taken for granted?

Tewari makes it clear early on that “the Indian woman voter” is not a singular figure. Gender, she writes, rarely functions in isolation—it interacts with caste hierarchies, religious affiliations, and economic precarity in complex ways.

A Dalit woman’s political choices differ sharply from those of an upper-caste urban professional, even when they may share certain experiences as women. Having established these layered identities, Tewari turns to the broader national picture.

She goes deeper, unpacking what female voter participation actually means. She draws on interviews with women she has conducted over the course of her journalistic career, combining their personal stories with political insights and data.

Tewari presents women as pragmatic citizens who are reimagining what political empowerment looks like in everyday life. The author explores what has empowered more women to take part in elections—with some answers so simple, they are baffling. For example, installing toilets in polling booths or allowing two women to go into the voting booth for every man made voting less daunting and more inviting for women.

The distribution of free bicycles to girls increased girls’ age-appropriate enrolment in secondary school by 32 per cent and reduced the corresponding gender gap by 40 per cent. The bicycles brought with them a wave of empowerment, liberating both young girls and their mothers from age-old social shackles and taboos.

This change can be seen in numbers, just to name one example from the book: The 2010 assembly election in the state of Bihar, four years after the bicycle scheme was introduced, was the first time that the turnout of women voters at 54.5 per cent was higher than that of male voters at 51.1 per cent. A decade later, in the 2020 election, 59.7 per cent of women turned out to vote, compared to 54.6 per cent of men.

As impressive as these numbers, facts and figures are, the biggest strength of the book lies in Tewari’s storytelling. The personal accounts of the women she met over the years give the book life. They articulate politics not in party manifestos, but in terms of everyday life: the price of cooking gas, the safety of girls, the availability of work.

These voices, woven through the book, give it emotional texture and immediacy. If one wants to criticise, it would be that these personal accounts are not more extensive, that the author did not give them even more room.

Tewari’s book does not romanticise her subjects. It gives women agency, voice, and complexity—and in doing so, it forces them to confront fundamental questions: What do women really want from democracy, and what happens when they start demanding it in their own terms?

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What Women Want: Understanding the Female Voters in Modern India

Author: Ruhi Tewari

Publisher: Juggernaut
Year: 2025