Assembly Elections 2022: Fight Like A Girl, Fight Like U.P.’s Poonam Pandey

Poonam Pandey writes poetry when she’s in the mood. These days she’s channeling her poetic inspiration to write catchy political slogans. “Main sache padh ki rahi hun, keh sakti din ko raat nahi, aur iman bech de tukdon main, Poonam Pandey ki bas ki baat nahi. (I walk on the path of truth, and I don't mince my words, don’t sell my integrity or soul for money or anything).

Pandey is Uttar Pradesh’s new aspiring politician, part of the opposition Indian National Congress party’s Ladki Hun Lad Sakti Hun (an interpretation of the popular Fight Like A Girl slogan) campaign that seeks to reserve 40% seats for women in U.P’.s forthcoming assembly election. She is one of 50 women, many of them political newbies, who made it to the party’s first list of candidates.

In Pandey’s words, she’s a “political zero”. “I have no political connections. Nobody in my family even has a government job,” she tells me laughingly.

Her husband Abnish works in security at a school. They met on the day they were married. He is extremely supportive, she says, adding that he’s put his life on hold to help her through this latest challenge. They have two boys, Aman, who will turn 10 this year, and Chaman, 12. Pandey’s father is a farmer and her mother, who passed away recently, showered her youngest child with love. Pandey funded her B.Ed. degree with embroidery work and financial assistance from her older sisters.

After a few years as a teacher, she became an ASHA worker or Accredited Social Health Activist, one of three ‘voluntary’ armies of 2.3 million community health workers who are paid a woefully inadequate monthly ‘honorarium’ and who doubled up as frontline workers during the pandemic.

In Shahjahanpur, she will likely face, among others, Suresh Kumar Khanna from the Bharatiya Janata Party who has held this office for a record eight terms, since before Pandey was born.

The 30-year-old came into the limelight in November 2021 when she was allegedly beaten by the U.P. Police for trying to meet Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

As she tells it, she and four other ASHA workers, who had been on an 18-day-long protest, went to a political rally in Shahjahanpur, where they hoped to present Adityanath with a letter outlining their demands.

“Even before we reached, about 500 metres from the venue, they began herding us away like animals. I said can we speak our mann ki baat? Isn't this a public forum and aren't citizens allowed to meet the CM? They said ASHA workers can’t meet him. I said has he given it in writing?,” she recounts. That’s when, she says, the police beat the women badly and “dragged them” to the van.

“I had a fracture, my body was black and blue, my ear was bleeding profusely, there was blood in my eyes,” she adds. Pandey noted the names of those who attacked her, and reels them off to me. Videos of the incident went viral and after they provided medical aid, Congress workers took her to Lucknow to meet Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who had tweeted in her support.

In the preface to its new ‘Women’s Manifesto’ (which outlines an empowerment agenda across six spheres), the Congress says it “endorses the full inclusion of women in the political space of the state. It is this power that will change the future of Uttar Pradesh”.

Whether or not that happens will depend on how these candidates fare, and how the broader party machinery reacts to the idea of implementing increased women’s representation across states. The Congress has been as guilty as most political parties of ignoring the long-pending women’s reservation bill—which provides 33% reservation to women in Parliament and state legislatures. Some are likely to dismiss this latest move as a hurried, last-ditch attempt to distract from the party’s steadily declining electoral fortunes in the country’s most populous state, but there is certainly no precedent for it in Indian politics.

Tara Krishnaswamy who co-founded Political Shakti, a non-partisan women’s collective dedicated to getting more women elected, says that while political parties have, for decades, viewed women as vote blocs, drawing their support with schemes and government initiatives, this is the first time that a party has attempted to mobilise women into a “political force”.

“In that sense I think the outreach, the Women’s Manifesto, candidacies for women, holding political party public meetings where the audience is women are all excellent milestones and signs of how women can be mobilised,” she says.

Pandey’s phone has been ringing off the hook. Her ASHA sisters from villages across U.P. are calling to support and congratulate her. “All the women are calling me. This ticket is a boon for all ASHA workers,” she says, adding that Chanda Yadav, who heads the All India ASHA Workers Union, is due to visit her soon.

India’s army of female health workers has been in the news these past two years, lauded as “corona warriors” even as their demands for better work conditions are summarily dismissed.

“We went door-to-door, if anyone was positive we surveyed the entire village. We saw many deaths, people wouldn't go near the sick but we took their temperature. Still, nobody listened to our demands,” says Pandey.

The Ladki Hun Lad Sakti Hun initiative is unique because it is trying to bring together gender, work, and the political economy into conversations around politics and policy, says Political Shakti’s Krishnaswamy.

“The fact that women in large numbers are brought into the political conversation as the mainstay itself is wondrous but beyond that to tie profession/economy with politics is exactly how political capital is built…You awaken the fact that they have political capital and how they can leverage that capital,” she says.

As for divisiveness and freebies, the two main planks on which Adityanath’s campaign is held, Pandey says, “I’m trying to explain to people that whatever he’s giving you, he’ll take back 50 times.”

And then she shares another slogan: Na Hindu ka, Na Muslim ka, yeh Hindustan sabka hai, nahi samjhi tu yeh baat, toh phir nuksaan sabka hai (Not Hindus, not Muslims, Hindustan belongs to all, if you don't understand this, we will all suffer).

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.