“Khela hobe” — the game will be played — once rang out as a slogan of defiance. In the quiet after an electoral defeat, it begins to sound like something else: A reminder that for women, the game has never been played on equal terms.

This election cycle offered a striking visual contrast. Across four major states, leadership contests were largely defined by men. In Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, the faces of power remained overwhelmingly male. West Bengal stood apart not only because of its political contest but also because it placed a woman, Mamata Banerjee, at the very centre of it.

That difference matters because when a woman is not just present but central to power, the terms of evaluation shift.

A day after a political loss, the instinct is to reduce a leader to numbers. Seats won, seats lost, margins that shifted. The harder task is to ask what a political life reveals about the system it inhabits. The interest here is not in the individual alone, but in what her trajectory exposes about the conditions under which women are allowed to lead.

Across the world, the relationship between women and power remains uneasy. In Iran, women have risked imprisonment and violence to assert control over their bodies and identities. In democracies elsewhere, women in politics continue to navigate a narrower band of acceptable behaviour, where strength is often recast as excess and ambition as overreach. The question persists: How much space is a woman allowed to occupy before she is seen as too much?

India reflects this tension in its own way. It has........

© Indian Express