The video that set off the storm was not much to look at. A circle of 12 men draped in bright garlands were reading aloud solemn statements during a ceremony to form a new local government in a deeply rural corner of India.
The scandal was that six of those elected to lead the village had been women. Those six were absent, each one represented by her husband instead.
The video went viral after the March 3 ceremony, and reporters from India’s national newspapers descended on Paraswara village in the central state of Chhattisgarh over the next week — which included International Women’s Day.
The public erasure of the six female officeholders was shocking but hardly surprising. This kind of unofficial substitution is commonplace in rural India, in exactly the places where small-time leadership positions have long been set aside for women.
Since 1992, the national rules concerning panchayats, or traditional village councils, have promised that one-third and in some cases one-half of all seats will be set aside for women. The idea was to lift up a generation of female leaders and to make the councils more attuned to women’s needs.
The spirit of this law, however, is often disregarded, even when the letter is obeyed. The women who are supposed to take seats in the panchayat end up serving as deputies to their own husbands, who wield power alongside the elected men. There is a well-known term in Hindi, pradhan pati, for this “boss husband” role.
India has a long way to go to empower women at the national level, too. Only about 15 percent of members of Parliament are women, and there are just two women in the 30-member cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government approved a constitutional amendment in 2023 to reserve a third of all parliamentary seats for women, though it will not go into effect for at least another four years.
While many female politicians have risen to national prominence, that has come not via panchayat seats, but often through association with established male politicians.
In Paraswara, the men who had been present at the village’s swearing-in ceremony were defensive about the absence of the six women. One of the men, Bahal Ram Sahu, said in an interview later that three of the women had been ill and that the other three were required at a funeral that day. Other witnesses differed about the details, but all agreed with Mr. Sahu: Sometimes a husband stands in for his wife, and “nobody thinks there is anything wrong with that.”
Over the past 15 years, Mr. Sahu’s wife, Ram Bai, has been elected three times to Paraswara’s panchayat and once served as its head. But “as a husband, I am always with her,” he said. He counseled her on all matters, he added, and represented her whenever she was indisposed.
The husband who serves as a proxy for his officially empowered wife has become a stock character in fiction. “Panchayat” is the title of a popular series on Amazon Prime in which a village’s local boss lounges around on a string bed calling shots while his wife pretends to hold the office to which she was elected.
The national government has recognized the problem. It commissioned a report in 2023 aimed at “eliminating efforts for proxy participation,” and last month it proposed “exemplary penalties” against husbands who usurp their wives’ roles.
Even “Panchayat” the TV show has a role to play. As the series unspools, the wife turns out to be a wily and capable character and finds ways to exercise her lawful authority. Now the show’s producers are working with the government on a series of episodes subtitled “Who’s the Real Boss?,” in which, after all, the woman knows best.
Encouragement comes from real life, too, in other parts of India. In the state of Punjab, Sheshandeep Kaur Sidhu became the head of her village’s panchayat at the age of 22. Ms. Sidhu, who is now 29, had earned a master’s degree in political science and felt determined to do something for her village.
After winning one of the seats reserved for women, Ms. Sidhu had her eye on fixing problems involving education and sanitation. She faced resistance. “I was very young and they were like: ‘What can this girl achieve?’” she recalled.
Ms. Sidhu wants every woman seated in every panchayat in India to stick up for herself and her fellow women, and to use the power the state has entrusted with them. Women like her, she said, must be “headstrong” and “make your points clear to your husbands.”
“I was told politics is not considered a good thing for girls and women,” Ms. Sidhu said. So she made a priority of solving a symbolic problem in her village.
For every household that was headed by a woman, she had a nameplate hung outside. These houses used to be known only by the names of male relatives: fathers, brothers or husbands, even if dead or departed. Now each one shows the name of the actual woman who runs the home.
