ABSTRACT
Women’s participation and share in politics has increased throughout India since 1993, when the central government allocated women quotas in panchayats, local governing organs, and again, in 2009, when the central government increased women’s panchayat quotas from 33 per cent to 50 per cent. India’s administrative reform has been influenced by international human rights discourses, including the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the four UN Women’s conferences and associated conventions that promoted women’s rights.1 These developments culminated in the 1993 conference on Human Rights in Vienna, where activists argued that it was no longer enough that human rights mechanisms were to be extended to women, but that women’s rights must be understood as human rights (Peters and Wolper 1995).
