By Warimeki Lyngwa
Yesterday over tea, a friend and I were proudly talking about how lucky we are to live in Meghalaya, a state where women are respected, where lineage runs through mothers, where daughters also inherit property, and where clan names are passed down through women. And then my friend asked the one question that pulled the rug from under my pride: “If women are so central here, why are they not in politics?”
I froze. Because the answer was as obvious as it was embarrassing: nowhere near the cabinet table. That simple question sent me looking back into our own history.
It is not as if women here never led. Women from the Northeast joined the Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, and Quit India movements alongside men during the freedom struggle. In 1937, Shillong’s own Mavis Dunn (Lyngdoh) made history as the first woman elected to the Assam Assembly. By 1939, she entered the Assam Cabinet and is widely described as the first woman cabinet minister in India. Yet today, 86 years after Dunn broke that ceiling, the state of Meghalaya boasts a cabinet with not one woman in it. Clearly, it does seem women have not been given enough opportunities since.
Whenever someone raises this question, the response is consistently the same: coalition politics are complex. Regional balance, party equations, stability: all of it gets cited. But it leaves one uneasy thought hanging… are women somehow seen as a destabilizing factor?
After the latest reshuffle, what was cited was that changes were about balancing districts, honouring coalition partners, and making what is called a “midterm course correction.” That is fair enough, I feel. However, it is important to acknowledge that the induction of new faces inevitably leads to on-the-job learning. Some of the new ministers are stepping into responsibilities they have never held before. Which begs the obvious question: if the system can accommodate newcomers who will inevitably learn governance as they go, why not extend the same opportunity to a woman legislator? After all, we have had women in politics here who have proven themselves more than capable.
And yet the numbers tell a sobering story. Since 1972, women’s representation has never crossed single digits in the Assembly. Even in 2023, just three women were elected out of 60 MLAs. A later by-election raised the number to four, still only 6.7 percent. Contrast that with the voter rolls: women consistently outnumber men in Meghalaya’s electorate. The latest rolls list 1,028 women for every 1,000 men. Therefore, it begs us to question… women vote more, they turn out more, so why are they being excluded from positions of power?
It does not help when defenders of the status quo add insult to injury. A recent write-up defending the cabinet reshuffle was headlined, “No Seats at the Table, But Plenty in the Field.” It argued that as long as women benefit from schemes, SHGs, and welfare initiatives, their absence in the cabinet is not a crisis but a temporary phase. Such an argument is almost laughable. That is equivalent to stating: “Do not be concerned if women are prohibited from entering the kitchen; at least they are provided for outside the door.” And if food is a metaphor, dear gentleman ‘Jack’, then you should know this: when women finally sit at the table, they do not just take what is served. They change the menu.
And here is why it matters. Research by Chattopadhyay & Duflo (2004) shows that Panchayats led by women invested more in water, sanitation, and in some cases education. In Bihar, women once dismissed as “proxies” grew into formidable leaders who reshaped village politics. Globally, Rwanda rose from genocide to having the highest percentage of women MPs in the world, and with it came transformative laws on inheritance and gender violence. Bangladesh, once considered socially conservative, has produced women prime ministers. Mexico just elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, thanks to systematic quotas that required parties to field equal numbers of male and female candidates. In Europe, France mandates zipper rules for some elections, while parties in Sweden and Spain have long adopted “zipped” lists to ensure male and female candidates alternate on ballots. If we look no further than our own state, Roshan Warjri fondly known as ‘Kong Kei’, showed how women in leadership can truly reshape institutions. She strengthened police infrastructure in far-flung districts, brought more women into the force, took on drug abuse and youth crime, and always balanced tough decisions with a humane touch. So, the evidence is overwhelming: once women enter the room, they do not sit quietly as tokens, but they legislate, they negotiate, and they deliver.
The lesson running through all these examples is unmistakable. When women enter decision-making, the agenda shifts. Health, education, and welfare, which men sometimes dismiss as “soft issues”, reveal themselves as the hard spine of real development.
So no, it is not enough to say women “get enough from the field.” They must also decide what the field looks like. Welfare is not power. Self-help groups are not ministries. Access to schemes is not the same as access to decision-making. Cabinet seats matter because they decide the size of those schemes, the scale of budgets, and the direction of policy. Keeping women out of that room means their empowerment will always remain conditional, filtered through someone else’s priorities. Call that “stability” if you like. But let us be honest that it is stability for the men who still keep the keys to the cabinet.
And it is not as though the leadership has been blind to this truth. Our chief minister, known to be just and wise, once said, “Women leadership implies creation of agency for women that will enable them to take decisions and participate in the developmental process…” These words ring in my head today. If we agree, then a cabinet seat, one of the highest agencies of power, is exactly where women should be. This is why many of us will deeply miss seeing a woman leader in the cabinet today.
So what are the fixes? Honestly, in my opinion, they are not out of reach or drastic.
Start by giving tickets. Women cannot possibly win elections if parties do not even put them on the EVM panel in the first place. Yes, some studies point out that women seem reluctant to contest elections. But let us be honest about why. It is not that women do not care about politics. It is that they are weighed down by household responsibilities or raised in the belief that politics is a man’s world. This mindset has prevented many women in Meghalaya from being considered serious decision-makers.
However, the solution does not lie in simply dismissing their lack of interest. The answer is to create the same kind of support system men receive. Mentor them. Train them. Push them forward. Encourage them to step into leadership with the same energy parties use for their male candidates.
Most importantly I feel, the government needs to set an example by giving women today more space and power, as leaders who shape decisions. Because when young people, whether Gen Z or even us millennial (if it is not too late for some of us), see women standing tall in politics, it sparks something. It tells a girl somewhere that it is not too late to dream bigger, and it reminds a boy that leadership is not just a man’s world. That is how examples are set, and that is how change begins.
When you do all these, we will see women rise. Because opportunity does not just reveal talent, it builds it. And until we build that pathway, all the talk about “agency” will just be chatter.
In the end, women of Meghalaya are everywhere, be it in our markets, our homes, our offices, and on the voter rolls. They have been freedom fighters, legislators, and even ministers (once upon a time). What they lack is not capability but opportunity. We call ourselves matrilineal, but until women sit at the cabinet table, it is nothing more than a slogan: a tourism tagline with no political teeth.
If we can gamble with coalition experiments every two and a half years, surely, we can dare to experiment with inclusivity once. Naveen Patnaik showed courage in Odisha by fielding 33% women candidates, including housewives, and proved that women win when given a fair chance. Meghalaya can do the same and make cabinet berths reflect the diversity of the state’s electorate.
Because if women are everywhere in the field, why are they still missing from the main table?
