How Mahila Congress is looking to win women's vote ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls

Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress party’s women’s wing -- the Mahila Congress, is trying to reclaim public spaces for women in the night. The president of the wing, Silchar MP Sushmita Dev is planning a slew of concerted campaigns across the country, along with a new mobile app.

"We realised that while women make about half of the total voters in the country, the gap between men and women voters is 1.46 percent. We need to convince the women to vote, and to vote for us,” said Dev. The women’s wing will now be travelling across the country into several constituencies to ask women what they want. These will include Mahila Adhikar Yatras, choupals and night marches. Dev says that the outfit has already started work in Chhattisgarh, piloting the project there on August 20. “We carried out a rally in the night with over 500 women with them protesting rising gas and petrol prices,” said Dev.

When they travel across the state, members of the wing will carry a canvas for women to jot down their demands. Dev says that the charter of demands will help her distill points, which she will later hand over to the party’s manifesto committee. To record these demands, the Mahila Congress has come up with a mobile app, that will record the women’s voices in these choupals, that are conducted in the night. While they were first started in Haryana, the choupals will some move to Maharashtra and Bihar. Party president Rahul Gandhi is likely to be a part of one of these choupals in Haryana.

Dev says that sometimes the demands sound basic and innocuous, but could matter the world to the women. “There was a woman who demanded that sugar should be brought back into the ration system. The women need to put forward these demands, it is only then we will know what we need to ask for,” said Dev.

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