Bihar polls: Modi's Rs 10,000 cash dole rattles Grand Alliance's momentum

With its blitz against the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, a comprehensive EBC (Extremely Backward Classes) Nyay resolution and the crowd-pulling yatras of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and his Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) counterpart Tejashwi Yadav, the Grand Alliance had, until recently, dominated much of the political discourse in poll-bound Bihar.

However, the disbursal of Rs 10,000 each to 75 lakh women beneficiaries under the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana (MMRY) by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week has left the Opposition bloc rattled.

Opposition worried over wooing women voters

Sources in the Opposition camp told The Federal that the massive financial incentive dished out days before the Election Commission’s expected announcement of the Assembly poll schedule has prompted a rethink among leaders of the RJD, Congress and Left parties, which collectively form the Grand Alliance, on how they must now reach out to Bihar’s women voters.

Also read: Nitish Kumar’s ‘Dus Hazaar’ cash transfer frenzy sweeps Bihar ahead of elections

Publicly, the Opposition leaders have likened the state’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s monetary sop to “bribing of women voters” as a desperate move to counter anti-incumbency.

Grand Alliance leaders acknowledged that their promise of providing a monthly financial assistance of Rs 2,500 may not be enough to attract Bihar’s women voters, particularly after the NDA came up with the DBT of Rs 10,000 as the polls near.

In private, they conceded that a cash infusion of Rs 10,000 each for 75 lakh women across the state, tethered to the promise of an additional Rs 1.9 lakh being credited to them after six months, could trigger a mass consolidation of women voters behind the Nitish Kumar-led ruling coalition.

'They are resorting to bribery'

“In the name of women's empowerment, they are actually resorting to bribery. They had promised Rs 2 lakh for women from 94 lakh underprivileged families of the state earlier, too, but that sum was never given. Now they are resorting to this bribery by giving Rs 10,000 to get the votes,” RJD’s national spokesperson Professor Subodh Mehta said.

Also read: Why EBC Nyay could be central to Grand Alliance’s Bihar strategy | Capital Beat

The Opposition leaders that The Federal spoke to anticipated that the ‘mahila voter’ could rally behind the NDA constituents – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Janata Dal (United), Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular), and Rashtriya Lok Morcha — during the Bihar polls in the same way she backed the BJP and its allies in the latest Assembly polls in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi. The crucial constituency was either offered a pre-poll ‘direct benefits transfer’ (DBT) or the promise of a post-poll cash incentive that outweighed similar promises made by the Opposition parties.

Opposition feel their 'meagre' promise not enough

Leaders of the Grand Alliance acknowledged that their promise of providing a monthly financial assistance of Rs 2,500 may not be enough to attract Bihar’s women voters, particularly after the NDA came up with the DBT of Rs 10,000 and a promise of further incentives as the polls near.

Also read: PM Modi to credit Rs 10,000 each to 75 lakh women in Bihar ahead of polls

The Opposition camp believes that the “women vote” was always a “low-hanging fruit” for the Nitish-led government, given that the chief minister has, over the past two decades, “constantly nurtured this segment with regular doses of populist schemes”, distributing to them everything, from “bicycles to uniforms and now cash”.

Nitish, Centre have eyed women voters

Likewise, Nitish’s decision to turn Bihar into a prohibition state had also been widely attributed as a move to consolidate his appeal among women voters, particularly in the vast swathes of rural Bihar, where alcohol addiction among men had brought financial ruin to countless families and was also touted by the chief minister as a major cause for domestic violence against women.

Also read: Why Rahul, Tejashwi's EBC Nyay resolution is key to Grand Alliance's Bihar poll strategy

In addition, the past 11 years of Modi’s rule at the Centre have also witnessed a sustained campaign to win over women voters through countless sops. Understandably, at a recent meeting of Bihar’s BJP leaders and party workers, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had reportedly said that the NDA’s campaign for the upcoming polls would be pivoted around three M’s — Modi, Mahila and Mandir; the last being a reference to the NDA’s push for a temple dedicated to Lord Ram’s wife Sita, in Sitamarhi, in Bihar at the same scale as the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.

Priyanka Gandhi steps in

The ruling coalition’s aggressive electoral courtship of women voters has left the Opposition camp groping for an effective counter-strategy. On September 26, hours after Modi had presided over the disbursement of the first tranche of financial assistance under the MMRY, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had, at a rally in Motihari, urged women voters to “take the money but vote for the country.”

Also read: 'Homebound' Chirag’s ambitions, seat demands stir trouble in Bihar NDA

The Wayanad MP, who the Congress plans to use extensively for women outreach during the polls, is expected to intensify her “mahila samvaad” (dialogue with women) in the coming days and her counter-strike against the Nitish government will rely heavily on questions about why did it take the NDA over 20 years to roll out the bonanza it is now unveiling ahead of the impending polls, if the government was so concerned about women welfare.

The Opposition camp believes that the “women vote” was always a “low-hanging fruit” for the Nitish-led government, given that the chief minister has, over the past two decades, “constantly nurtured this segment with regular doses of populist schemes”.

The Congress, along with its senior ally, the RJD, is also expected to aggressively assert in its campaign that, unlike the money given to women voters under the MMRY, the Grand Alliance’s proposed Mai Behan Maan Yojana will provide them a guaranteed monthly allowance of Rs 2,500.

Also read: Priyanka Gandhi’s ‘Har Ghar Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar to keep alliance’s momentum going

The Grand Alliance, sources said, wants to clearly distinguish between the Nitish-led government’s incentive and its own proposed dole by telling women voters that the MMRY will be “reviewed after six months” and that “there is no guarantee that the women who have received Rs 10,000 now will also get the remaining Rs 1.9 lakh that have been promised by Modi and Nitish only to get votes”.

Tejashwi is also expected to take a more expansive view of things by punching holes in the arithmetic of the NDA’s poll promises.

Modi, Nitish trying to fool women: Tejashwi

On Sunday (September 28), Tejashwi had told reporters that Modi and Nitish were trying to “fool the women of Bihar” with the MMRY and other promises and said that “while it would take an allocation of over Rs 7 lakh crore to fulfill all the promises they (NDA) have been making, the (state) government currently struggles to even meet the budgetary requirements of Rs 1 lakh crore… so where will all this additional money come from.”

Also read: Will Rahul Gandhi's 'vote chori' charges be a factor in Bihar polls?

Yet, while the Opposition leaders put up a brave face publicly to fend off any impression of the MMRY being a “game changer” for the ruling NDA at the hustings, nervousness within their ranks is palpable.

Grand Alliance leaders pointed out that a cash dole of Rs 10,000 each for 75 lakh women in the state has the potential to swing the election. They reason that the Bihar caste survey, conducted and published in 2023, had revealed that as many as 94 lakh people in the state, out of its total population of little over 13 crore, had an income of less than Rs 6,000 per month.

Additionally, a paltry 3.9 percent of the state’s total population earned more than Rs 50,000 a month, while a 2023 NITI Aayog report claimed that at 33.76 percent, Bihar had the highest poverty rate among all Indian states.

With such financial backwardness, a cash dole of Rs 10,000, coupled with the promise of an additional Rs 1.9 lakh being disbursed to the 75 lakh beneficiaries after six months, cannot be dismissed lightly on the eve of elections, said the Opposition leaders.

MMRY neutralised Opposition's strategy?

Sudhakar Singh, the RJD’s Lok Sabha MP from Buxar, admitted that the MMRY had practically “neutralised” the Opposition’s bid to wean away the women vote from the NDA combine.

Singh, however, made an interesting distinction. Stating that these women benefitting from the MMRY had already been voting for the JD(U) and BJP for the past several electoral cycles, Singh said the MMRY “will not increase the NDA’s vote share in the state but consolidate its existing vote”.

As such, the damage he foresees for the Grand Alliance is on the “limited aspect” of the Opposition not being able to break away a vote that had already been held captive by the rival camp.

Also read: Bihar polls: Race for women votes heats up with cash freebies

The Buxar MP feels that while the Grand Alliance’s bid to attract women voters, especially from within the EBCs, has been jolted by the MMRY, the Opposition still has a fair chance to benefit electorally from the more wide-scale disenchantment among the youth, including women, against the state government.

Meanwhile, the Congress hopes to tell women voters that incentives like the MMRY are not the same as the Mai Behan Yojana financial assistance the Grand Alliance is proposing because the “money (given under MMRY) is a loan which they will need to repay with interest, but they are not being told about it right now”.

Congress’s Bihar unit media chief Rajesh Rathorre said the party also plans to question Modi and Nitish why the cash infusion was given only to the 75 lakh women registered as ‘jeevika didis’ while “leaving out the other 2 crore women in the state” who had previously been promised financial assistance by the same government.