 "Story in numbers: The best show by women candidates is not enough")
Among the political parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has the most number of women winners (41), or nearly 14% of all its members (303) elected to the Lok Sabha. The BJP is followed by the All India Trinamool Congress (9), which had fielded 41% women candidates, unprecedented for any election in the history of Indian democracy.
These parties are followed by the Congress (7 — 13.5% of its 52 MPs), the Yuvajana Shramika Rythu Congress (4 — 18% of 22) and the Biju Janata Dal (4 — 33.3% of its 12).
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Best-ever performance
The previous best tally of women parliamentarians was in the previous Lok Sabha; 62 women were elected in 2014, accounting for 11.4% of the seats of the House. The 6th Lok Sabha in 1977 had the fewest women MPs, 19 or 3.5% of the strength of the House.
The lowest success rate for women candidates was in the 11th Lok Sabha in 1996, when 6.7%, or 40 of 599, women contestants got elected. The second Lok Sabha in 1957 had the highest success rate among women candidates — 48.9% or 22 of 45.
India stood 149th on a 2019 list of 193 countries ranked by the percentage of elected women representatives in their national parliaments, trailing Pakistan, Bangladesh & Afghanistan, dropping three places since 2018. There were 66 women MPs in the Lok Sabha, occupying 12.6% of its 524 seats, while the world average was 24.3%, as of January 1, 2019.
The representation of women MPs in the 17th Lok Sabha — in terms of the strength of the House — has seen an improvement from 11% in 2014 to 14% in 2019. This is still low compared to countries like Rwanda (61%), South Africa (43%), the UK (32%), the US (24%) and Bangladesh (21%).