Dr Proma Raychaudhury, Assistant Professor of Politics, SIAS has published a peer-reviewed article titled, Gendering Loyalty in Indian Electoral Democracy: The Trinamool Congress and Its Construction of a Female Constituency in West Bengal in Economic and Political Weekly (Vol 59, Issue 48, pp.87-95) as part of a Special Issue on General Elections 2024.
Through a consistent surge in their salience and distinguished by their autonomy, female voters have become an indispensable constituency in Indian electoral democracy in recent decades. Through a constructivist approach to populist political representation, this paper studies the conceptual terrain of the relationship between voter loyalty and populist democracy in the context of female voting and partisan support in contemporary West Bengal. This paper explores how the leadership of the All India Trinamool Congress in the state constructed a “loyalist” constituency of female voters who are beneficiaries of state-sponsored welfare schemes while exercising the logic of “othering” to exclude female critics and dissidents of the regime from such a constituency. Through interviews with grassroots workers of the AITC, this paper also analyses the gendered expectations that underscore the populist constituency of the “loyal female voter” in West Bengal.
