Women in India are transforming the landscape of electoral politics with unprecedented force. Their turnout has now overtaken male participation in many elections — for instance, women reported a 65.8% turnout in the 2024 General Elections as against 65.6% for men, and an extraordinary 71.6% in the Bihar Assembly elections of November 2025 as against 62.8% for men. This shift has made women an electoral constituency of immense significance. Even though their numerical representation in lawmaking remains low, their growing presence as voters has recalibrated political strategy. Welfare schemes, cash transfers, and targeted development programs are now routinely crafted around women, reflecting a recognition that “investing” in this constituency yields tangible political dividends.
Yet, this dynamic raises more profound democratic questions. Does this “quid pro quo” empower women as full political agents? Women must not remain mere beneficiaries (passive recipients of State benevolence). A democracy worthy of its constitutional promise requires women as active claimants of rights, voice, and agency in policy arenas.
This shift in political participation parallels broader transformations in women’s social and professional presence. Their rising presence in higher education, their substantial contribution to science and technology, their legally mandated inclusion on company boards, and their influential role in panchayati raj institutions have cumulatively infused governance with greater gender sensitivity.
The labor force story, however, remains complex. While female labor force participation has increased to 41.7% (PLFS 2023–24), nearly 95% of these women work within the informal economy, where wage gaps, precarious employment, limited social protection, and minimal access to credit continue to constrain the transformative potential of women’s economic agency.
One domain where women’s contributions remain especially undervalued is peacebuilding. This invisibility persists despite India’s globally recognized achievements, such as deploying the All-Women Peacekeeping Force to Liberia in 2007 and the impactful presence of Indian women in UN peacekeeping missions in Sudan and Congo. These high-visibility successes overshadow the quieter, everyday work women undertake to nurture peace across communal, ethnic, and political divides. Much of this labor occurs in civil society spaces where women mediate tensions, maintain communication channels, provide humanitarian relief, and rebuild social trust.
However, the need is not only for “women-led development” but also for women-led peacebuilding long before conflicts escalate. Women’s interventions unfold along both axes of human security — freedom from want and freedom from fear — making their peace praxis especially grounded and holistic.
India observes Constitution Day on November 26 when the Preamble’s injunctions — justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity — come to the fore. Among these, fraternity — the ethic of coexistence — remains the most neglected in practice. The women of the Constituent Assembly recognized its significance. Despite being few in number, they were unanimous in warning against the politics of identity and exclusion. Renuka Ray cautioned against denominational prejudice; Amrit Kaur warned that ritualism and dogma divide rather than bind; Begum Aizaz Rasul pointed out how communal categorizations fracture the social fabric. While diverse in caste, class, religious and regional backgrounds, the women collectively sought to diminish denominational dominance in the constitutional order.
Women globally have long argued that peace must be crafted, not simply declared. They interrogate cultures of militarism, challenge war-making mindsets, oppose weapons proliferation, and highlight the compounded effects of conflict on economic, social, and political rights. Their activism has created transnational networks for justice, inclusion, and reconciliation.
Enhancing the effectiveness of women in peacebuilding requires strengthening their representation in legislatures, public institutions, and democratic spaces. Gender justice intersects directly with issues such as sustainable development, de-weaponisation, militia disarmament, communal harmony, and accountability for security-force excesses. In conflicts within India, women’s groups have repeatedly taken risks to mediate peace. In present-day Manipur, women work discreetly to support displaced families in relief camps, rebuild relationships, and restore threads of trust. Such examples abound, but are invisibleised. Women’s activism frequently uses performance, symbolism, and spectacle. Rejecting the image of peace as passive purity, women “wage conflict” non-violently, employing household artefacts — rolling pins, utensils, veils — to dramatize dissent. This echoes Gandhian satyagrahawhich transformed mundane symbols like salt and khadi into moral forces.
From the Chipko Movement to Koodankulam, women have expanded peace activism to address livelihoods, ecological justice, displacement, and resource access. Irom Sharmila’s decade-long fast and the Meira Paibi nude protest in 2004 remain potent reminders of the lengths to which women will go to protest systemic and overt violence.
Moving from divided pasts to shared futures requires women’s participation as leaders, mediators, and negotiators. UNSC Resolution 1325 has shifted the global understanding of peace from a militarized model of conflict management to one that recognizes social justice, gender equity, and civilian safety as central to security. In a polarizing climate, reconciliation becomes a democratic necessity.
India’s Mediation Act (2023) offers an opening. By recognizing community mediation, we can create frameworks that make peace mediation more mainstream across social and political contexts. Women, with their extensive and dense relational networks and knowledge of local ecologies, can serve as early-warning monitors, negotiators, and dispute mediators.
Research demonstrates that women’s mediation styles are distinct: They favor consent-building over transactional bargaining; emphasize relationships over zero-sum outcomes; rely on multilogue and network mobilization; and prioritize sustainable agreements over power calculations.
The UN General Assembly (2011) affirmed that women’s participation enhances the durability of peace processes. Their relational perspective challenges the realpolitik view of security as a competition for power.
Today’s peacebuilding landscape has moved from great-power mediation to community-centred, adaptive, proximal approaches. Women lead this “quiet revolution”, navigating interconnected crises. Mediation today is as much about inner work — empathy, intuition, emotional intelligence, and the ethics of care — as about negotiation techniques.
In these times of a global polycrisis, India needs the restorative force of coexistence. Women have shown that Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam can be a lived ethic, not just rhetoric. The challenge is to institutionalize their contributions so that women’s peacebuilding is recognized, amplified, and embedded into the architecture of India’s democratic and constitutional frameworks.
Meenakshi Gopinath is director, Women in Security, Peace and Conflict, New Delhi. The views expressed are personal
