Religious Majoritarianism and Crimes Against Women in India

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of a rise in popularity of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2013 on crimes against women in India. To do so, I use a novel state-panel data from 2009-2016 along with a difference-in-differences and event study estimation strategy. Using the outcomes of the party's victory in the 2014 General Elections to define the treatment as ‘BJP majority state’, I find that rape and kidnapping of women increase in the BJP majority states in 2013, that is, a year before the election and more or less persists until 2016, the end of the sample period. Replacing the binary treatment with a continuous one based on vote shares in the 2014 elections, I find that rape and kidnapping increase with the BJP vote share in the states. The binary treatment model remains robust to exclusion of Delhi from the sample. The results are also robust to alternative specifications where I allow for the possibility that crimes are under-reported. In contrast to crimes against women, I find no evidence of the popularity of BJP on gender-neutral crimes such as murder and burglary; I find very small effects on robbery compared to rape and kidnapping of women. The results collectively point to a causal link between BJP's popularity and crimes specifically against women in India.

Keywords: majoritarianism, popularity, crimes, women