Low five as Delhi remains a House of a few women

Delhi CM Atishi won during the 2020 Assembly poll as well as the 2025 poll.
| Photo Credit: FILE PHOTO

Five women candidates — four from the BJP and one from AAP — emerged as winners in the election to the 70-member Delhi Assembly. In 2020, eight women were elected to the Assembly.

The winners included senior AAP leader and Delhi Chief Minister Atishi, who beat BJP’s Ramesh Bidhuri by 3,521 votes from the Kalkaji Assembly constituency. Kalkaji also saw Congress’s Alka Lamba contesting and coming in third with 4,392 votes. Percentage-wise, women’s representation is at 7.14%, still a far cry from the 33% envisaged by the women’s reservation Act of 2023.

In Shalimar Bagh, BJP’s Rekha Gupta defeated AAP’s Bandana Kumari, who had held the seat since 2013, by a significant margin of 29,595 votes. From Greater Kailash, BJP candidate Shikha Roy emerged victorious by beating senior AAP leader and Health Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj by 3,188 votes. In Najafgarh, BJP’s Neelam Pahalwan defeated AAP’s Tarun Kumar by 29,009 votes and in Wazirpur, Poonam Sharma of the BJP beat Rajesh Gupta of AAP by 11,425 votes.

Six of the nine candidates that AAP fielded in the last election had won, including Ms. Atishi, Sarita Singh (Rohtas Nagar), Rakhi Birla (Madipur), Ms. Kumari (Shalimar Bagh), Dhanwati Chandela (Rajouri Garden) and Pramila Tokas (R.K. Puram).

Over 71 lakh of Delhi’s 1.55 crore voters are women. All the major parties announced schemes for women ahead of the poll.