Opinion In Bihar, women didn’t swing the election. But the cost of the myth is pushing India towards fiscal disaster

First, it’s not true that a sudden and huge number of women, lured by the cash scheme, flocked to cast their vote in the Bihar election. The share of women of the total voters in Bihar has been steadily increasing with every election for the past three decades. 2025 was merely a continuation of this trend. The share of women voters rose from 40 per cent in 1995 to 50 per cent in 2015 to 50.4 per cent in 2025. Nothing extraordinary in the number of women that voted in the current election.

Yes, it is true that more women voted than men for the first time in Bihar. But that is because the increase in male voters was less than normal, driven by rising male worker emigration out of Bihar, not because of an abnormal jump in women voters. The Election Commission was disingenuous in claiming that women’s voter turnout percentage was the highest in 75 years. While technically correct, the percentage was artificially inflated due to the reduction in the denominator of total women electors through the SIR process. Boasting, like the EC did, that the number of women voters this election was the highest is silly and akin to claiming that one reaches their highest age on every birthday, which is an obvious trend. Overall, the increase in absolute number of women voters in the 2025 election was neither abnormal nor staggeringly high as believed.

Then, was there a big shift of women votes from the Opposition MGB alliance to the NDA due to the cash transfer scheme? No. Both in the 2020 and 2025 Bihar state elections, 37 per cent of women voted for the opposition MGB. In other words, women voters did not shift en masse from MGB to NDA in the 2025 election. Further, a simple correlation test between the change in share of total women voters and the change in NDA alliance’s vote share in every constituency between the 2020 and 2025 elections shows no relationship and there is no evidence that women voters propelled the NDA to victory. For example, in Begusarai and Khagaria districts, even though the share of women voters declined slightly from the previous election, the NDA’s vote share increased by a whopping 18 percentage points, because of Chirag Paswan’s party coming into the NDA alliance fold and not because of women’s shifting allegiance.

So, contrary to the popular narrative, the cash scheme announced by Modi neither led to an abnormal increase in the number of women voters nor caused a large number of women voters to shift their votes to NDA from the Opposition. At best, it can be claimed that the cash scheme may have ensured that women voters did not move away from the NDA even after two decades of being in power.

However, what is real is that a cash-strapped poor state like Bihar forked out a whopping 12,000 crores to lure women voters. To put this in context, this amount is more than the entire health budget of Bihar for an entire year. Think about it — the amount of money spent to provide healthcare facilities for the entire population of Bihar in one full year was just handed over as cash in two months for votes. Or starkly, the Bihari woman received money for her vote by taking it out of her own medical expense.

It all started with the Karnataka state election in 2023, where the Congress party promised Rs 2,000 a month to women before the election. Unsurprisingly, media pundits looking for simplistic one-line explanations and job-hopping election consultants clamouring for credit attributed the Congress’ victory to its cash promise, when in reality, the Congress may have well won even without the cash promise, given the deep anti-incumbency against the then BJP government.

Since then, all political parties have fallen over each other to promise cash to women before elections in 10 other states and every victory has been credited with this idea. Consequently today, 12 states in India collectively dole out Rs. 1.7 lakh crore every year in cash to fulfill an election promise. For context, this is roughly equal to the amount of money budgeted by the Union government for MGNREGA, rural drinking water and rural roads schemes combined for the entire country.

Worse, such huge sums of money to lure voters are not even the game-changers in elections as propagated. But this reckless election gamble by all political parties risks plunging the entire nation into economic and social ruin. I recall a meeting during the Maharashtra 2024 election where an election consultant for one of the parties audaciously told a former chief minister that unless they agree to promise a greater amount than its rival for a cash transfer scheme, he will not take responsibility for the election outcome. This sparked a competitive race for higher cash promises between the two alliances and since then, the consultant has moved on to the next election while Maharashtra is drowning in debt and struggling to fulfill that promise.

The total liabilities of state governments have doubled just in the last five years. When government debt increases, the cost of money and borrowings for the same rural household increases too. And there is less money for education, health and agriculture, which impacts the lives of poor families the most.

The nation is fast rolling down a path of economic disaster and social disorder. Democratic politics, with its five-year election cycles, inherently incentivises short-term knee-jerk action. It takes courage and patriotism for political parties to eschew actions that can have disastrous long-term consequences for the nation. Can there be a compact of all parties in the nation’s interest to refrain from promising cash transfers before the next election?

The writer is chairman, All India Professionals’ Congress and Data Analytics of the Congress