Rethinking the woman voter: A growing force reshaping India's politics

It looks, at first blush, like an exciting new winning political formula. Empower women — with cash grants, free transport, and safety both in public places and within the family — and the votes will come pouring in. The central premise is that female voters no longer vote as directed by the male members of the family. Instead, they have emerged as independent-thinking entities who vote driven by considerations of employment, financial autonomy, welfare of the family and — dare we say it — personal ambition.

 

It is hard to ignore the evidence. In Bihar Nitish Kumar has reaped a huge dividend from the votes of women over the years, especially from low-income groups. His scheme in 2005-06, providing free bicycles for girls, was an electoral super hit. In 2006, his government introduced 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayati raj institutions. The jury is out on the women-empowerment element of this scheme, as cases of men taking decisions by proxy have also been reported. But in 2015, his promise of prohibition, projected as a way to protect women from violence and penury, saw women outnumber men in poll turnout figures. 

Other parties have not been twiddling their thumbs. They quickly latched on to women as a viable voting category. The Ujjwala Yojana was the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) outreach to women on a national scale. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has launched a massive campaign for the safety of women and argued for better-lit public spaces in Delhi. Mamata Banerjee’s 2021 announcement of cash grants to all women regardless of income level may have been a crucial reason for her return. In Himachal Pradesh (2022) and Karnataka (2023), the Congress promised cash grants to women as part of their Assembly poll promises. BJP-led governments were quick to follow. The Madhya Pradesh government’s Laadli Behna, the Maharashtra government’s Ladki Bahin, and the Haryana government’s Laado Laxmi schemes were all variations on the same theme: Direct cash transfers to women. Around 10 states in India are paying cash to women, with many, like Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana, Kerala, and Punjab allowing women to travel free in state government-run buses. The Tamil Nadu government in a study found that this move increased the disposable income of women, improved their participation in the workforce, reduced dependence on family members for transportation and was generally a liberating experience. Obviously, it has a cost: Goldman Sachs research says states collectively provisioned $18 billion in their 2024-25 Budget Estimates, amounting to 0.5 per cent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) for the financial year. 

But when you add data from the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21), collected by the Department of Health and Family Welfare, it is not hard to understand why women are and should be targeted as an independent voting category. The Survey says 79 per cent of women have a bank or savings account that they themselves use. This number was 53 per cent in NFHS-4 (2015-16). Women’s participation in decisions about their own earnings has increased (from 82 per cent to 85 per cent) since NFHS-4. Fifty-four per cent of women have a mobile phone that they themselves use. Seventy-one per cent of women who have a mobile phone can read text messages. 

There is another side to this. Where is the money going? Take the case of the microcredit crisis in Assam. At one stage, it was the biggest empowerment-of-women idea. Small collateral-free loans to low-income groups that did not have access to conventional credit sources became a rapidly spreading contagion when thousands of groups of women (primarily) banded together but when some members were unable to pay the loans, collective default led to crisis and became a political hot potato. In the 2021 Assembly polls, the Congress offered a complete waiver of microcredit dues for women, while the BJP promised relief like extending the repayment window and interest waiver case by case. In December, under the Assam Microfinance Incentive and Relief Scheme, the debt of around 5,000 women was retired by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who has told women to stop taking microcredit altogether. India has around 100 million women self-help groups.

  The Assam experience tells us free money to women is not enough. Cultural and social factors and poor financial literacy can lead to inefficient expenditure. The thinking that cash transfers cut out intermediaries, foster a sense of autonomy, and can fuel consumption leading to growth is only one side of the argument. The Assam microcredit story, which follows the previous crisis in Andhra Pradesh, throws up a darker and often tragic reality. 

But meanwhile, “women” as a political constituency appears to be an idea that has come of age. It is changing India in ways that we only dimly understand.