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In rural India, guarantees of equal representation on village councils are easily thwarted. But some women are pushing back against “boss husbands.”
March 19, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
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.
