For nearly two decades, Nitish Kumar has cultivated women as a distinct constituency.
'To create a broader vote base, he thought it would be better to bring women to electoral politics.'
Just weeks before Bihar heads to the polls, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has reached again for his trusted lever of social engineering: Women.
His cabinet recently approved a 35 per cent reservation for women in all government jobs, but this time restricted exclusively to those who are the state's permanent residents.
First introduced in 2016, the horizontal quota had also extended to women from outside the state.
This tightening of domicile rules signals a blend of political calculation and electoral choreography in the run-up to polls.
For nearly two decades, Nitish Kumar has cultivated women as a distinct constituency. Their presence in the electorate has always been formidable, nearly half of the whole.
But their turnout, their willingness to show up, has altered the balance of power.
"Since more women are coming out to vote, this has made them far more crucial and significant in electoral politics," said Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Lokniti.
In the 2010 assembly elections, women in Bihar edged ahead of men: 54.48 per cent turnout to 51.11. By 2015, that gap had widened -- 60.48 per cent of women voted, compared to just 53.31 per cent of men.
In the intervening years, Nitish Kumar's women-centric welfare schemes -- from bicycles for girls to panchayat reservations -- had begun to show real-world impact in mobility, education, and public participation.
The pattern held through national polls. In the Lok Sabha elections of 2019 and 2024, women once again out-voted men, with a difference of 4.6 and 6.4 percentage points, respectively.
In 2024, the trend became unmistakable: Not only did women vote at higher rates, they outnumbered men outright -- 21.8 million women exercising their franchise versus 21.4 million men.
D M Diwakar -- former director of Patna's A N Sinha Institute and currently associated with the Development Research Institute, Jalsain, Madhubani -- traces this partly to the state's chronic male migration.
"Of course there is some positive impact of different schemes," he said.
"But the major factor behind higher voter turnout of women is unavailability of men voters during election because of migration."
Still, the growth of women's participation has its own momentum. Bihar's gender ratio remains grim -- 918 women for every 1,000 men, according to the 2011 Census.
Yet women are registering to vote faster than men. In 2010, there were 25.4 million women on the rolls.
By 2024, that number had swelled to 36.7 million, a 44 per cent rise, outstripping the 36 per cent growth among men, whose number grew from 29.6 million to 40.5 million.
Nitish Kumar began laying this groundwork as soon as he entered office in late 2005.
In early 2006, he launched the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna, putting cash in the hands of ninth-grade girls to buy bicycles and ride to distant schools.
For many, it was the difference between studying beyond middle school and dropping out.
By government count, more than 9.7 million bicycles have since been provided to girl students.
The same year, Bihar became the first state to provide 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayati raj institutions, exceeding the national mandate of 33 per cent.
It was called nothing less than a 'silent revolution'.
According to a report titled Women and Men in India 2023 by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI), of a total 136, 573 elected representatives in Bihar, 71,046 were women, around 52 per cent.
But, as Diwakar notes, it birthed its own distortions: The rise of the "sarpanch pati" or "pradhan pati", the husband ruling in the wife's stead.
The following year brought JEEViKA, a partnership with the World Bank to knit women into self-help groups, bringing financial services and market linkages into rural households.
What began as a pilot in seven districts of Bihar now spans all of its 534 blocks across 38 districts, with 11 million groups and more than 12.8 million members, collectively leveraging more than Rs 78,000 crore (Rs 780 billion) in institutional credit.
Even the controversial liquor ban of 2016 -- fresh after Nitish Kumar's victory in the 2015 state elections -- was framed as women's policy, a shield against domestic violence and household ruin.
An analysis of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) by Ideas for India later suggested it had indeed curbed spousal drinking and reduced violence; a Lancet study estimated 2.1 million cases of intimate partner violence were prevented.
By 2018, Nitish Kumar had added the Mukhyamantri Kanya Utthaan Yojana, promising Rs 94,100 in instalments to every girl child from birth to graduation, a financial scaffold against early marriage and foeticide, and a push towards higher education.
These measures not merely burnished Nitish Kumar's reputation as a reformer; they yielded hard political returns in earlier elections.
In the 2020 assembly polls, women voter turnout crossed 70 per cent in 13 constituencies and exceeded 60 per cent in 141.
Men breached 60 per cent turnout in only 38 constituencies, and none crossed 70. Of the 43 seats Nitish Kumar's party won, 37 had higher turnout among women than men.
The arithmetic is clear. "The Kurmis (the community to which Nitish Kumar belongs) make up only about 3 per cent of Bihar's population," said Diwakar.
"To create a broader vote base, he thought it would be better to bring women to electoral politics and started a number of women centric schemes."
Sanjay Kumar of Lokniti frames it in terms of margins. "There is a slight tilt of women voters towards the current ruling alliance," he said.
"Even a tilt of 2 or 3 per cent of such a large voter base can alter the result significantly."
The latest state budget extends this arc even further: A Mahila Haat in Patna for women entrepreneurs, 'pink' buses, hostels for working women, and one-third reservation in transport jobs.
And yet, the paradox remains stark. In Bihar's 243-member assembly, women hold only 26 seats, amounting to just 10.7 per cent of its strength.
Md Kaifee Alam is a Business Standard-Rahul Khullar journalism intern.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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