Asia and the Pacific

Women’s issues may be high on the agenda for political parties vying for votes in India’s mammoth general election, but few female lawmakers will get an opportunity to implement the policies being proposed.

Less than a fifth of the candidates standing for the front-running main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or the ruling Congress, are women, according to an analysis.

In the current parliament, women hold only 11% of seats in both houses, less than Pakistan at 21% and Afghanistan at 28%, research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union group shows.

With 59 winners of the total 556 contestants, women candidates seem to have had a dream run in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. May 16 will tell if their success story repeats this time too.

In late March, Raveela Gangula rallied a dozen women to stop a drunken man from savagely beating his wife in Muthangi, a village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Although they restrained him and called the police, he was released that evening without charges.

“The police should have locked him up for at least a week and scared him from ever touching another woman like that again,” Gangula said. “The government does not support us.”

On the occasion of Women’s Day in Iran, Iran’s president and supreme leader presented contrasting roles in society for women. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has previously rebuked President Hassan Rouhani’s cultural policies, but this appears to be the first time that the president has contradicted the supreme leader in an area that the two have consistently clashed.

Khyber Pakhtunkhawa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak has announced that women police desks would be established at all 500 police stations of the province to facilitate the province’s female population.

Speaking at a ceremony in the provincial capital city, Khattak announced the establishment of Model Police Stations at Gulbahar, Faqirabad and UniversityTown areas under a pilot project which would be later extended to other police stations across the province.