KAVITHA IYER
Waves of political support for one or other disposition, and certainly a ‘tsunami’ of voter sentiment, as the Marathi news channels called it, tend to be visible. We know that from 2014.
That was one reason to spend the morning after election results in Maharashtra on the phone, calling a couple of dozen women—Hindu, Muslim, Other Backward Class, Maratha, left-leaning, Hindutva activist, informal worker, unionist, farmer, civil rights activist, professor and more—to ask if the landslide win for the Bharatiya Janata Party-led ‘Mahayuti’ combine in Maharashtra might be partially explained by women voting in stealth mode.
Nobody in the media or among the pollsters had sensed that there was such rock-solid support for the incumbent government during campaigning.
BJP, Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) and Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar) leaders were themselves taken by surprise. The simplest answer was speculation that the government’s Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin scheme had hit a home run, an echo of previous victories won by Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh on the back of a similar scheme that entails a cash payout every month to women from families with an annual income below Rs 250,000.
The phone conversations were mixed, some uneasy and some disconsolate.
Among those I called, some lamented the death of ‘real’ electoral issues of health, education, and justice for workers; some dismissed Rs 1,500 as too meagre to sway women’s votes en masse; a few said they’d picked pragmatism over empty promises even if it was for a seemingly insignificant sum.
Eventually, the professor laid it out succinctly.
For one, she said, women, long ignored, saw hope in these direct transfers. Voting for the party that enabled a little cash in hand was less about loyalty and more about survival.
Two, voting in large swathes of the country has anyway been divorced from meaningful discussions on public goods such as health and education.
Marathwada in Maharashtra’s 2024 assembly election was a good example of a campaign season driven exclusively along caste lines.
Elsewhere in the state, the BJP benefited from a communally polarised election, the ‘BatengeToh Katenge’ (suggesting that Hindus would be slaughtered if they allowed themselves to be divided) slogan reaping some dividends. To somehow anticipate that women voters must bear the responsibility of nurturing well-informed public discourse ahead of an election seemed unfair.
Three, and most critical, whether it was caste-based tensions in Maharashtra or women voters lured by a modest payout, both reflected a deeper malaise, one of deepening distress among very large numbers of citizens left behind by India’s extremely unequal growth.
Rural Maharashtra recorded a significantly higher turnout of nearly 70% compared to urban regions, and rural women’s vote was for a minuscule breather from ongoing financial and socio-economic setbacks for families.
A vote for the Ladki Bahin scheme, if that won the Mahayuti the election, reveals a portrait of grim structural inequities plaguing India today. Ultimately, the silent power of the women’s vote was not just about securing a few hundred rupees. It was also about agency, as elusive for women as political accountability.
Read Kavitha Iyer's full story here
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