The status of women today has often been slow in coming and painful in achieving. The rise of Indian women as panchayat leaders is a spectacular achievement given that India has one of the worst records with respect to the way it treats the female sex.
A major source of concern in India is the failure to create strong social sanctions against violent men. Many of the Women’s Court officers are barely literate but they have learned about the law, its implications and limitations. Their dockets are crowded with cases of women seeking help and justice. They hear, mediate and adjudicate cases of divorce, fights between women and their mothers-in-law, complaints about drunkenness, domestic violence, rape, dowry extortion, maintenance for abandoned or divorced women, inheritance, and mis-treatment of widows and the elderly. The courts' successes depend upon the respect of the parties and the parties' willingness to accept its authority. Recent reports in India indicate that many women politicians find it difficult to participate in an effective manner in politics, these points to a pressing need to analyze the role that women play in Indian politics. “Domestic responsibilities, lack of financial clout, growing criminalization of politics and the threat of character assassination” have made it increasingly difficult for women to be part of the political framework. Moreover, women politicians point out that even within the political parties, women are rarely found in leadership positions. Women have different strategies to cope with these constraints. If the family has accepted a woman’s career in politics, she can negotiate with her family. This is more likely if the family is an elite political family with more than one member participating in politics Women’s representation in the parliament, while important on the grounds of social justice and legitimacy of the political system, does not easily translate into improved representation of women’s varied interests. WHAT is even more significant is that in many cases these women leaders have not emerged through the familiar South Asian paradigm of dynastic advantage. Sonia Gandhi, obviously, is a clear example of a dynastic leader, with an almost iconic relevance, but in fact in this respect she is in the minority among women leaders today. Mamata Banerjee, despite or indeed because of her controversial nature, is the leader of a party who can claim to have got where she is on her own, without male assistance in any of the more obvious ways. The role played by women leaders is dramatically different from that by men.