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Mind The Gap: How women voters powered the NDA’s Bihar sweep
Bihar’s women do poorly on several counts. But in one area they do very well—flex muscle at elections.
Let’s first get the caveats out of the way. Some are calling the ₹10,000 deposits into the bank accounts of 14.1 million women a bribe. There are legitimate questions about the ethics of a cash deposit scheme launched two months before a crucial election. And, without a doubt, the deposits raise concerns about the Election Commission’s credibility and impartiality.
But equally, it is clear that it is women who swung the vote for the NDA alliance, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) and the BJP, that has swept back into power, winning 202 out of 243 assembly seats.
Nitish is now set to take the oath of office for the 10th time. As the results were coming in, the JD (U) handle tweeted: “The trust of Bihar’s women triumphed. The NDA has triumphed, Bihar has triumphed.”
In the days to come, analysts will look at the historic female voter turnout of 71.6%—the largest ever in Bihar’s electoral history, leagues ahead of the 62.8% turnout of male voters and likely one of the highest in any assembly election in India.
Analysis by The Telegraph shows the NDA had an advantage in 96 of 113 constituencies where female voters outnumbered men by over 10 percentage points.
How much of a difference did the cash deposits make? The money had already been deposited before even the first vote was cast. Some women had bought goats, others were thinking about what to do with cash. Moreover, the opposition Mahagathbandhan led by RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav was also offering a cash handout of a one-time grant of ₹30,000 if it came to power.
But, the women voters of Bihar—and I am by no means suggesting this is a monolithic vote block—were determined to send a message to what many believe is the last election of Nitish Kumar who has survived 20 years of incumbency.
And, yes, the cash may have served as a Hail Mary, but it is only the latest in a long scheme of women’s empowerment schemes that go back two decades. “A generation of voters…have lived in the Nitish Kumar era, enjoying the incentives from school to college,” analyst NK Choudhary told the Hindustan Times. “It is a classic example of how a constituency of women can be nurtured.”
Agreed Manisha Priyam, Sir Louis Matheson distinguished visiting professor, Monash University: “Women voters have led the scale of this victory, especially as Nitish Kumar’s investments in this constituency have been long term.”
Legacy edge
Bihar, otherwise among the most backward states, has not been short on imagination and vision. In 2005, the year Nitish Kumar first became chief minister, he introduced a scheme to distribute free bicycles to secondary school-going girls in order to bring down the drop-out rates. That year he also introduced scholarships for girls from marginalized sections.
Also in 2006, Bihar became one of the first states to increase reservation for women in panchayats from the legally mandatory 33% to 50%.
A year later, Bihar with assistance from the World Bank embarked on an ambitious rural livelihoods project, the Jeevika movement. Starting in six of the poorest districts, Jeevika is now amongst the largest women’s self-help groups in India over 14 million members, or didis as they are called.
When I visited some years ago for a story for IndiaSpend, I saw a vibrant movement where Bihar’s poorest women, some of them completely illiterate, many from marginalized Mahadalit communities like the musahars (or so-called rat catchers), presiding over funds of ₹one crore and more.
Setting aside savings of ₹10 a week, they had raised enough to pay off earlier, usurious debts and were funding their childrens’ education and their own healthcare needs. Outside the house, they had already gained economic and political heft.
It was, in fact, at a meeting of Jeevika didis in 2015 that chief minister Nitish Kumar promised a ban on alcohol if voted back to power. That election year, a record 60.5% women turned up to vote. And, yes, Nitish came back to power and, against all the doomsday warnings of the ruinous cost of prohibition, kept his word.
Miles to go
National Family Health Survey data shows a steady improvement on several parameters in Bihar. Yet, despite two decades of a conscious women empowerment policy, women continue to lag behind the national average.
Has Nitish Kumar run out of ideas? Cash handouts, once derided by prime minister Narendra Modi as revdi or freebies, have become an electoral strategy in successive state elections. They reflect, “the changing nature of engagement of political parties with the electorate at the bottom of the pyramid,” said Priyam. “Ideologies and mobilisation are not enough.”
Across party lines, 113 million women in 11 states already receive payments that range from ₹1,000 to ₹2,500. Another five states, not including Bihar, have promised similar schemes, according to a July 2025 policy brief by Professor Prabha Kotiswaran of Kings College, London. These schemes, she said, have resulted in increased household expenditure on items like medicine.
But they come at a cost to the exchequer. In Himachal Pradesh that cost is ₹200 crore. In Maharashtra it is ₹36,000 crore.
In Bihar there is already speculation that the NDA government might have to roll back prohibition in order to get the revenue to fund the cash deposits. But for now, the women voters have flexed their muscle and shown just how much their vote matters.
