Women’s vote analysis questions support for Nitish Kumar; activist claims debt burden and job demand overshadow ‘empowerment’ narrative among rural women
As Bihar’s second- and final-phase polling for the Assembly election closes on November 11, with the result expected on November 14, some key questions hang in the air, but perhaps this leads the list: How did the women vote?
Of course, women aren’t a monolithic category. Like for men, their votes also turn on caste, class, and the dynamics of the age bracket, which points to levels of the burden of family responsibilities that women typically bear in an agrarian economy with earning prospects lower than the national average.
The Bihar story thus far has been that women voters are Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s immutable support base, his true pillar of strength — that after the introduction of prohibition in Bihar in 2016, women have remained the CM’s frontline backers; indeed, that he might have to fight for the winning space if it weren’t for the women.
The ‘women’s empowerment’ narrative
This story has been amplified by the mainline media over the past 10 years, noticeably at election time, and the trend held through the poll campaign in 2025 as well. Probably, this enhancement—even glorification, for the underlying message is that Bihar women have been “empowered” by the CM’s policies—owes to the fact that the CM is a long-time ally of PM Narendra Modi, and siding with the PM has in recent years been the most significant feature of India’s mainline journalism linked to big business.
Also read: Exit polls in charts: NDA has clear edge in Bihar elections
It is worth pondering whether women’s “empowerment” would have been a sustained discussion point during the election, in order to give the NDA a perception leg-up, had Modi and Nitish fallen out. At any rate, the election analysis for 2020 does not really bring forth evidence for the immutable-support-for-Nitish theory. Post-poll data from CSDS-Lokniti 2020 survey, cited in a Wire analysis, shows 38 per cent women voted for the Nitish-led ruling NDA alliance and 37 per cent for the Mahagathbandhan, the opposition alliance.
60 pc names deleted in SIR were of women
Regardless of big media preferences, there is a larger reality that is hard to ignore in 2025, and this has several strands. One, 60 per cent names deleted through the deeply contentious SIR in Bihar were of women voters. According to a PTI story in early October, just a few days after the Election Commission published the final voters’ list after the SIR operation, the Opposition Congress alleged that most of these deletions were of Dalit and minority-community women, spread over 59 constituencies that had been close races in 2020. Is there any validity to this? Only the Election Commission has the data, and it has been conspicuous by its silence.
To put it mildly, it is interesting that after the first round of the Bihar polling on November 6, the poll control body—which would appear to have revealed its preference for the NDA time after time in popular perception, casting aside its constitutionally-mandated as well as common sense-directed impartiality—is yet to put out any data about women voters, for example, how many voted this time around and their proportion in relation to the menfolk.
Also read: 'Paltu Ram' tag aside, Nitish still electoral linchpin, but will he be CM again?
According to The Wire’s research (published November 3), since 2010, reversing a trend, the percentage of female turnout in elections has been noticeably higher than that of men. In 2015, 60.5 per cent women voters came out compared to 53.3 per cent men. In 2020, it was 59.7 per cent women as against 54.5 per cent men.
The same analysis suggests that more Muslim and Yadav women tended to vote for Mahagathbandhan, the opposition alliance, and more upper caste, non-Yadav OBC, and Dalit women for the ruling NDA. What’s going to be the story in 2025? That’s the intriguing question.
Talks of empowerment only hype
Here, we have a pretty massive field-based reporting exercise (which cannot be called a properly conducted scientific survey or investigation and would be subject to corroboration, seeds of which are loosely available) done personally by the well-known Delhi-based social activist, Shabnam Hashmi, who recently put out her “findings” in an interview to the Satyahindi online video channel, among the most widely-viewed Hindi-language alternative media shows.
There are important insights here, which point to the threadbare lives of rural Bihar women that can only suggest a dire condition, notwithstanding all the hype about the empowerment of women in the Nitish raj. Shortly before the election, the activist spent a month and a half almost exclusively in 20 of the 38 districts of rural Bihar. She claims to have interacted with 6,500 women in small groups. It is her distinct impression that only a handful of the women she met spoke of their desire to vote for Nitish Kumar, the others speaking in different tones.
Women’s debt burden
Hashmi’s foremost point is debt burden of these rural women thanks to microfinance companies that charge extortionist rates of interest. This has led to suicides and to the sexual exploitation of women. The points made are startling. A Hindu article (November 9, Bengaluru edition) a few days after the Satyahindi interview corroborates indebtedness to microfinance lenders of impoverished women (who simply cannot do without such loans—and there is no governmental effort to relieve their agony).
Also read: Bihar election: Why Seemanchal's political landscape appears set to change
The Hindu write-up cites the Bharat Microfinance Report by Sa-Dhan, an RBI-appointed self-regulator for the microfinance sector, as saying that Bihar accounts for nearly 15 per cent of the industry’s portfolio, the highest in the country. In March this year, the outstanding microfinance loans in Bihar amounted to Rs 57,712 crore.
In the backdrop of this larger reality, the Rs 10,000 given out (practically doled out) to about one crore women by the Nitish government, as the election process was unfolding, seems to suggest a slowly etched dramatic mockery. At best, it might serve to pay out a few instalments of the loan, for most, the Hashmi interview suggests, but the women are indebted for life, and the debt collector shows up every week to collect the “kisti” or instalments.
What Bihar’s women want
There is an air of grave, even tragic, despondence about the picture Hashmi draws. She says the most critical demand of rural women in Bihar today is employment, and education for their children. The women are not asking for the moon.
If this is the grim reality that haunts Bihar women after 20 years of NDA under Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, does that reality spare the menfolk of those women? Can it? The national mainstream media, preoccupied with the politics of power and smoothening the linkages of big business to power, has missed the story entirely. It has been too busy placing propaganda above news.
Also read: Why the 2025 Bihar Assembly election matters for all of India
We can never know any election result until the counting. But there was an interesting analysis in The Times of India from Patna after the first round of polling on November 6. It suggested that, historically, when the overall polling crosses 60 per cent, it is Lalu Prasad who wins and when the voting is less than that, it is Nitish Kumar, framing the story in terms of the two friends-turned-rivals. The final overall data is yet to come in, though the first round recorded 65 per cent voting and the second round, provisionally, more than 67 per cent.
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