Women in Bihar will have to stay content with the annual Rs. 10,000 that the BJP-JDU combine promised and also paid to some in the run up to the just concluded Assembly polls.
On Thursday morning, when Nitish Kumar took oath as the chief minister of Bihar for the 10th time, only three women were sworn in as ministers in the 27-member cabinet.
Leshi Singh from the JDU and Shreyasi Singh and Rama Nishad, both from the BJP made the cut, in a cabinet which included Jiran Ram Manjhi’s son, Santosh Suman and Upendra Kushwaha’s son Deepak Prakash.
Deepak is neither a member of the legislative Assembly nor the legislative council. Bihar has a 75-member legislative council, the upper House in the state Assembly.
The elections in Bihar were skewed in favour of women. Just ahead of the elections, in September, Prime Minister Narendra Modi symbolically pressed a button to credit ₹10,000 each into the accounts of 75 lakh women. Nitish followed with a similar transfer to another 25 lakh beneficiaries. Disbursements were ongoing for another 25 lakh women even in the first week of November.
Bicycles were provided for free to girl students, 50 per cent reservation for women in local bodies, 35 per cent reservation in police recruitment, hikes in monthly pensions for widows and physically-challenged women were announced.
Keeping their faith in Nitish Kumar, when time came to cast their votes, over 71 per cent women queued at the polling booths, while the percentage of male voters was far low at 62.98 per cent.
Bihar’s total voter turnout was 66.91 per cent, the highest since the first election of 1951. In 2015, the turnout of women voters was 60.48 per cent and dropped marginally to 59.69 per cent in 2020.
Despite the fact that more women voted this time than ever in the past, the NDA, including the BJP and JDU, has only 28 women MLAs out of the 202 seats it won.
Among these 28, only three have been made ministers. Only 255 women had contested the polls from all the political parties in the state out of the total 2,600 candidates.
Poll strategist and Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor has blamed the Rs. 10,000 dole for the one crore women as the reason behind the sweeping victory for the JDU-BJP combine, and his own party’s dismal performance, where it failed to win a single seat.
Of the 238 seats that the Jan Suraaj Party contested, it managed about 3.44 per cent votes and in 68 Assembly seats more votes went to NOTA than the JSP nominees.