As Simone de Beauvoir warned: “The representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view.” Until women claim a place in student unions, parliaments and panchayats, India’s political imagination will remain incomplete. Seventeen years have passed since a woman student was elected as the president of the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU), a university-level election at Delhi University (DU). Here the “glass ceiling” is invisible but intentional: a gatekeeping culture that preserves the presidency as a male domain. Here, women are encouraged to participate and often celebrated when they secure secretarial positions but are systematically excluded from the presidency, revealing a deeper crisis: female ambition is tolerated in symbolic roles but excluded from actual authority, reducing women in student politics to remain voters rather than visionaries.
It’s not just about seats won or lost; it’s about the concept of power itself. Power cannot only be measured in numbers; It must also be understood as the ability to set the agenda, influence decisions and claim space. The exclusion of women from decision-making positions in fraternities reflects a deeper cultural discomfort with female authority. The stereotype of women as supporters rather than leaders is present in DU as well as in ministries where women are limited to “soft departments”. At the same time, men control finances, defense and internal affairs. DU not only reflects the national orientation; it reproduces it.
The DU pattern: routine offside, rare exceptions
This shrinking of women’s space in DU politics reflects a larger erosion of women’s visibility in the public sphere. Representation is granted but authority is withheld. Feminist theorists such as Carol Pateman argued that the so-called “public sphere” was built on the exclusion of women, in which formal equality concealed informal hierarchies. In DU, too, the façade of inclusion obscures the persistence of patriarchy.
Source: Mohsina for FII
In the 2025-26 election cycles, out of 52 DUSU colleges (except six women’s colleges like Miranda House, Lakshmi Bai, Vivekananda, Shyama Prasad Mukherji, Aditi Mahavidyalaya and Bhagini Nivedita), only two co-ed colleges – PGDAV and Ramanujan – had female ones Presidents elected. A similar trend was witnessed in 2024-25 with only two co-ed colleges in Delhi University electing women presidents. This is not a statistical blip; it is a systemic pattern. The last president of DUSU was Nupur Sharma in 2008 and no woman has been elected to the position since then. ABVP has not given any woman a presidential nomination since then and NSUI gave it in 2019 and 2025 and suffered defeat by a significant margin.
The reluctance to accept women as presidents, often relegating them to “secretary” or “support” roles, reveals something deeper. The moment they express ambition or demand authority, they face veiled personal attacks, rumors about their character, and the gendered accusation of being “too bossy.” The price of striving is humiliation.
Delhi University as a whole comprises about 22 women’s colleges (Indraprastha College for Women, Lady Shri Ram College, Daulat Ram College, Kamala Nehru College, Maitreyi College, Jesus & Mary College, Gargi College, Lady Irwin, Kalindi College, Mata Sundari College for Women, Janki Devi Memorial, Bharti College etc.). However, only a few universities take part in the central DUSU elections. Their exclusion further shrinks the number of visible female leaders. This representation gap, meaning there are few female presidents at co-ed colleges and only a handful of women’s colleges included in the central DUSU list, suggests a continued reluctance among campus voters to accept women in the most visible leadership roles.
The Cost of Striving
The reluctance to accept women as presidents and the frequent relegation of women to “secretary” or “support” roles reveal something deeper. The moment they express ambition or demand authority, they face veiled personal attacks, rumors about their character, and the gendered accusation of being “too bossy.” The price of striving is humiliation. As feminist scholar Nivedita Menon has argued, “Patriarchy controls women not only through laws but also through ridicule and cultural codes.” For many young women at DU, the unspoken message is that politics will cost them their dignity.
Equally worrying is what happens when women actually break through. Many who succeed in competing and taking the lead are exhausted by relentless trolling, character assassination, and the instant, unforgiving judgments that greet their every move. The result is predictable: some withdraw from politics entirely, others sink into inactivity. These are not isolated personal choices, but the result of a hostile ecosystem – structural and institutional barriers that make women feel disempowered, undervalued and ultimately unwelcome in the political sphere.
The politics of DU students and the global contrast
At the world’s leading universities, female leadership positions are not an exception, but an expectation. Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard have seen women occupy the highest student positions in recent years. Rashmi Samant and Anvee Bhutani have led the Oxford Students’ Union, while Sruthi Palaniappan has been elected president of the Harvard University Undergraduate Council. These people are all Indian women who have distinguished themselves in politics abroad. Other female student union leaders in the past five years include Zaynab Ahmed, Sarah Anderson, Aastha Dahal, Anjum Nahar and LyLena D. Estabine at Cambridge University and Sara Speller at Harvard University. At Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, women have consistently held the highest student positions over the past five years. In contrast, Delhi University has not elected a single woman president since 2008.
Equally worrying is what happens when women actually break through. Many who succeed in competing and taking the lead are exhausted by relentless trolling, character assassination, and the instant, unforgiving judgments that greet their every move. The result is predictable: some withdraw from politics entirely, others sink into inactivity.
Therefore, when universities treat female presidencies as routine rather than a rarity, they prepare women not only for student politics but also for the highest echelons of national and international leadership. This gap shows that the exclusion of women from visible power in student politics in Indian universities is not inevitable but structural, cultivated and sustained.
Why is this important? Because India is preparing to implement the law in 2029 Women’s Reservation Actwhich will reserve a third of the seats in Parliament and the Assembly for women. If universities like DU, which is one of our most important leadership incubators, fail to produce consistently confident, capable women leaders today, the reservation could inadvertently produce a generation of token female politicians tomorrow: candidates parachuted into seats and often dependent on male mentors, family dynasties or male colleagues to “mentor” them. Without training, many will be exploited, manipulated, or sidelined, and their authority will be compromised before they even begin. As political theorist Hanna Pitkin argued in her classic The Concept of Representation (1967), proper representation is not just about numbers but about effective participation and authority. Without preparing women for leadership roles, India risks creating “decorative representation” instead of genuine empowerment.
The way forward
The way forward is urgent and obvious. Effective leadership channels need to be established, including mentoring programs, workshops and debate platforms, to promote women for leadership positions from year one. Student parties in DU and other central universities must equally invest resources in women’s campaigns rather than just symbolically supporting them. To change the outcomes, we need long-term investments in capacity, protection from gender-based attacks and a conscious political will within student parties, university authorities and the student body to see women not only as voters and supporters, but also as leaders. And most importantly, we change the cultural idea of leadership, shifting from aggression and machismo to the empathy, collaboration and moral authority that women can powerfully embody.
When colleges treat female presidencies as routine rather than a rarity, they prepare women not only for student politics but also for the highest echelons of national and international leadership. This gap shows that the exclusion of women from visible power in student politics in Indian universities is not inevitable but structural, cultivated and sustained.
Power in India is decentralized in the legislative, executive and judicial branches. Between 2011 and 2013, India had the strongest constellation of women in power: Sheila Dikshit in Delhi, Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh. Five female prime ministers simultaneously governed some of the country’s most populous and politically important states, a moment that seemed to herald a new normal in which women in leadership positions would have become routine rather than rare.
But this promise has faded into the background. From 2019 to 2024, only one or very few women held the prime ministership, most notably Mamata Banerjee, with fleeting newcomers such as Atishi Marlena Singh and Rekha Gupta in Delhi. Also in the judiciary Justice BV Nagarathnas A possible short term as chief justice reflects symbolism rather than substantive power and reflects that women in symbolic roles are still treated as acceptable rather than anchors of authority.
Delhi University is more than a campus; It is a trial phase of Indian democracy, a nursery of national politics in which every caste, class and community is represented. If women can’t be leaders here, what message are we sending to the rest of the country? Power cannot be granted to women in parts; it must be recognized as their equal right. The choice is either to prepare women to be substantive leaders or to accept a future of decorative democracy.
If we seek justice, representation must be more than occasional. It must be sustainable, substantial and authoritarian. Otherwise, these few names become curiosities rather than harbingers, underscoring that many women are still expected to occupy ceremonial corners of public life rather than its center.