Chhattisgarh's rare feat and the importance of the 'woman vote bank'

This year, the Prime Minister announced specific schemes for women' self-help groups in his Independence Day speech

Chhattisgarh has achieved a rare feat. According to the data released last week by the Election Commission (EC), the poll-bound state now has more women voters than men on its draft electoral roll.

According to the Election Commission data released in August, Chhattisgarh now has 9.85 million women voters as against 9.82 million male voters. Only eight other states and one Union Territory (UT), of the 28 states and two UTs that have legislatures, currently have a gender ratio in favour of women on the electoral roll. These are the southern states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh; the UT of Puducherry; Goa; and the Northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Manipur.
 

The EC has claimed this to be evidence of the success of its outreach to women voters. But the improved numbers of women electors in Chhattisgarh also suggests an improving gender ratio in that state, which was 991 in 2011, and shows why political parties increasingly treat women as a distinct voting bloc, tailoring their poll promises to appeal to them, and the keenness among women to enrol themselves as electors lest they lose benefits of government schemes.
 

EC officials say they find, especially in northern Indian states, young women of marriageable age, including first-time voters, refraining from enrolling themselves as voters to avoid the paperwork involved in getting their surnames and addresses changed once they marry. In Chhattisgarh, EC officials focused on Assembly constituencies with a “low gender ratio” on their electoral roll, identifying 23,000 polling booths in 10 of the state’s 90 Assembly constituencies for a focused outreach. The gender ratio in these Assembly seats was as low as 965 or fewer women per 1,000 men.
 

It named the effort nava vadhu samman samaroh, identifying 61,683 women who had recently married but were yet to enrol themselves as voters. It has also encouraged young unmarried women to enrol, promising that the EC would promptly amend their surnames and addresses once they marry.
 

But there is also increased keenness among women voters to enrol, while political parties release women-centric manifestos, “guarantees” and promises. According to Lokniti-CSDS findings, says psephologist Sanjay Kumar, in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, 43 per cent of women voters indicated that they made an independent voting decision. That increased to 50 per cent in 2014 and 77 per cent in 2019.
 

Pradeep Gupta, founder and chairman and managing director, Axis My India, says 30-40 per cent of women, especially the poor, do not depend on the earnings of their fathers or husbands. “But India is a patriarchal society; whatever they earn goes to the male member of their family, which is where politicians realised that the most deprived member of a family is its women and tailored the schemes so that the beneficiaries are women,” Gupta told Business Standard. He attributed the post-2014 support of women for the BJP to the Narendra Modi government’s intent, sensitivity, and swiftness in implementing women-centric schemes.
 

If in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls only six states had a higher percentage of women than men turning out to vote, it was 16 states five years later. In the 31 Assembly polls in the last five years, women’s voting percentages were better than men’s in 21 of them. In the December 2022 Himachal Pradesh Assembly polls, women’s voter turnout was 77 per cent, six percentage points more than that of men. The Congress, which won, promised women a Rs 1,500 monthly allowance. Five months later, the Congress won Karnataka on the back of women-specific promises, with one post-poll analysis finding that the number of women voting for the Congress was 11 per cent more than the number of BJP voters.
 

This year, the Prime Minister announced specific schemes for women’s self-help groups in his Independence Day speech. After the loss in Karnataka, the BJP galvanised its women’s wing to enrol 200 women Kamal Mitra in each of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, 100,000 such “friends of the lotus” across the country to spread the message of the Modi government’s “15 flagship women-centric schemes”. In April, the BJP’s women cell chief, Vanathi Srinivasan, told Reuters that a third of the party’s candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls would be women.
 

In Rajasthan, the Congress government is organising “inflation relief camps” for women beneficiaries of its schemes, such as the Indira Gandhi subsidised LPG cylinder scheme, which offers cooking gas cylinders at Rs 500, with Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot inviting its first two beneficiaries to tie rakhis to his hand on Rakshabandhan. 
 

In poll-bound Madhya Pradesh, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan increased the Laadli Bahna allowance to women between 21 and 60 to Rs 1,250. He promised LPG cylinders at Rs 450 as his Rakshabandhan gift to his “sisters”.