THE SUPREME COURT ON SEPTEMBER 15 refused to extend the scope of The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (‘POSH Act, 2013’) to political parties. The decision, in my understanding, retreats from certain core tenets of how we must imagine justice. The bench led by Chief Justice of India B R Gavai stated that political parties are not employers, but ‘voluntary associations’, and their inclusion in POSH would open a ‘Pandora’s box’, inviting blackmail. The Court has passed the baton to the Parliament. However, the aftermath is clear, women remain unprotected in an arena in which they have assertively instrumentalised the best possible means of exercising and living democracy.
This view in Yogamaya M.G. v. State of Kerala & Ors. (2025) represents a departure from the historic verdict in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) where the Court did not let the legislative silence undermine their ability to pass guidelines by recognising a woman’s right to a workplace that was safe and adherent of Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution.
Transposing the Vishakha and Yogamaya verdicts, the former of which sowed the seeds for the creation of the POSH Act, makes it clear that the latter refrains from any bold, purposive approach, preferring caution where urgency should have been exercised.
Political parties are entities which are not abstract in nature. They are organisations run in systematic hierarchies, powered by cadres and categories and sustained through tangible labour, often invisible and mostly by unpaid women who organise, mobilise and campaign religiously. To rule that these spaces are not workplaces is the denial of the obvious. Work is not always salaried. It is a structured activity carried out under authority, with some expectations. The specific exclusion of political parties gives enough vacuum for harassment to thrive unchecked, with women being left to navigate the danger without a remedy of an institutional recourse.
What is unpersuasive is the Court’s expressed anticipation that such a ruling would be misused by women belonging to political parties. Such an observation aligns with an existing culture of patriarchal or elite dogwhistling to create judicial myths through which protective laws are subjected to often unverified apprehensions of ‘misuse’, from the Domestic Violence Act, to the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act. Direct exclusion not just diminishes, but completely extinguishes, even the slight possibility of justice for them. Women are encouraged to break the glass ceiling, have enough representation in boardrooms and be allowed to seek redressal but women in politics. Yet, the ones who carry hopes of becoming legislators and the ones who are shaping democracy as grassroot workers, are silenced.
In January this year, the Supreme Court dismissed pleas challenging provisions of the Women's Reservation Act (Constitution 106th Amendment), which seeks to ensure greater representation in legislatures. In April, Justice B.V. Nagarathna pressed for the implementation of the Act, which has remained in a limbo. The immediacy of implementing this measure cannot be overlooked, yet a protective and inclusive institutional framework would be incomplete if the courts turn a blind eye towards the safety of the political space.
To remove that uncertainty, the onus now lies on the Parliament. It must amend the law to include political parties as workplaces, regardless whether their women are salaried employees or volunteers. Adding on to the difficulty of this aspiration is the fodder of apprehension supplied by the Court itself, through the usage of phrases such as ‘fear of misuse’, and ‘opening a Pandora box’. Such dogwhitling by the Court may have provided more reasons to the political parties to never bring a bill concerning this matter, remain unaccountable & non-transparent, in the absence of any requirement to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee. It is only possible when political parties are able to realise the centrality of ensuring dignity of women to the broader project of gaining public trust.
An inclusive democracy space cannot be assured merely by ensuring a mandated representation (however crucial a first step that might be). The safety accorded to the women who reach those spaces is equally crucial. POSH intended to raise voices that have been long silenced and the exclusion of political parties has now muted the law in the very place it came alive.