Nearly 100 women candidates fought the Delhi Assembly polls this year, but only five – four from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and one from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) – could emerge as winners, the lowest in the last 10 years.
Outgoing Chief Minister Atishi, the only woman candidate of the AAP who won this time, was among those five newly-elected women MLAs, who now constitute seven per cent of the 70-member assembly.
Of the 699 candidates this year, 96 were women, including nine each from the BJP and the AAP, and seven from the Congress. The three key political parties fielded more women candidates this time than in the 2020 Assembly polls.
This year, it was also the first time since the Delhi legislative assembly was reconstituted in 1993 that a higher turnout of women voters — 60.9% against 60.2% of men exercising their franchise – was registered. About 44.08 lakh of 72.36 lakh registered women voters got their fingers inked in the single-phase election on February 5.
Women Who Won 2025 Delhi Polls
Atishi: She retained her Kalkaji seat and won the election by a margin of 3,521 votes, defeating BJP’s Ramesh Bidhuri. Atishi is among a few AAP ministers and senior leaders who won the elections as most of the party’s big guns, including Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Saurabh Bharadwaj, and Satyendar Jain, lost.
Neelam Pahelwan: The BJP nominee from Najafgarh defeated her nearest rival, AAP’s Tarun Kumar, by nearly 30,000 votes.
Rekha Gupta: Fielded by the BJP from the Shalimar Bagh seat, she defeated AAP’s Bandana Kumari by 29,595 votes.
Poonam Sharma: The BJP candidate won the Wazirpur constituency, defeating Rajesh Gupta of the AAP by 11,425 votes.
Shikha Roy: The BJP leader emerged victorious by defeating incumbent health minister Saurabh Bharadwaj by a margin of 3,188 votes from Greater Kailash.
A Look At Delhi Women MLAs Over The Years
Only 44 women candidates have won the Delhi assembly elections since 1993 with the highest number recorded in 1998, when nine women won.
In 1993, just three women were elected, making up only 4.3 per cent of the assembly.
In 2003, seven women were elected, and the number dropped to three in both 2008 and 2013 elections.
In 2015, a total of 63 women contested the polls and six of them won.
In the 2020 elections, 76 women were among the 672 nominees who fought the polls, of which, eight women had won.
Delhi has so far seen only three women chief ministers – the BJP’s Sushma Swaraj in 1998, the Congress’ Sheila Dikshit, the longest-serving chief minister of the capital who held the office for 15 years from 1998 to 2013, and the AAP’s Atishi, the city’s youngest chief minister who took the top post after Arvind Kejriwal resigned.
