Political Awareness Among Rural Women of Punjab: A Case Study of Sangrur District

Abstract

India is a democratic nation. It is considered as the world’s largest democracy. Participation of people in working of government is the basic necessity for the success of democracy. It is significant that the extent of participation of individual and various groups in politics depends upon the level of their ‘awareness’. Thus the awareness about politics is the prerequisite of participation. Political awareness broadly defined as a knowledge and information that a person possesses about the nature, structures, functions, activities and problems of the political system in which an individual lives. In spite of constitutional provisions of gender equality and other political rights, only a small number of women have been able to make room for themselves in decision making process due to the lack of political consciousness. Many steps have been taken for the women empowerment as so far. There are many constitutional provisions about equal political participation of women. The 73^rd and 74^th amendment of the Indian constitution ensured the reservation of one third of Panchayats seats for women. These amendments brought about significant changes in the political scenario of the country with regard to women's participation in politics. But over the years, many researchers reveal that these amendments have had little effect on women's lives at the grassroots level. While political indicators reflects an increasing number of women contesting elections and holding offices in villages, study suggests that in most of the cases women's political participation gets reduced to tokenism and rubber stamp. Women empowerment is incomplete without the political awareness and their participation in the social, economic and political institutions. The aim of this paper is to analyze the pattern of political awareness among women with special reference to their knowledge about the political institutions of the country as well as their participation in the local self government and other decisions making structures. This paper also examines the role of political awareness in strengthening the political participation in politics and empowerment of rural women. It also analyzes the impact of social institutions like marriage, family etc. on the level of political awareness among rural women. This study is specifically confined to the four villages of Sangrur District of Punjab.