Bihar Elections: More Female Voters, But Less Victories

The day the Bihar Election cliffhanger finally ended, it was the BJP-JD(U) alliance that managed to secure yet another term for incumbent Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.Surprisingly, the results contradicted most of the exit polls, which predicted Tejaswi Yadav's RJD led Mahagathbandhan to emerge successful.The number of female candidates has been abysmally low in Bihar as the elections did not translate into greater representation of women in the state.Only 84 women were given tickets by major parties (including Left and LJP) compared to a total of 371 women who contested the 2020 election against 273 in 2015 .In fact ,out of this , only 26 won in an Assembly of 243 this time as the The Assembly lost 2 women legislators as compared to 2015. Moreover, male candidates seem to be getting a slightly greater share of votes than their female counterparts despite all the commitments expressed by major parties for gender equality .A party-wise breakup reveals that female candidates actually performed better in Congress in this election , perhaps the only boost for the party considering its disastrous outing. But considering the support Congress expresses for the Women's Reservation Bill it barely is accomplished in practice in the electoral fray. Their strategy appear to include more women only when constrained by law. The gap however is highest in BJP followed by their ally JD(U), and very less in RJD. Apart from this , it is interesting to note that parties like JDU andLJP which did nominate 22 female candidates each , failed to make much of an impact as LJP managed to win just 1 seat whereas JDU took their tally to 43 , of which only 6 went to women candidates. In short , the parties which did make efforts to nominate more women , unfortunately were unsuccessful to convert them into seats.Within the Mahagathbandan , the count is even lower as only 9 female candidates were elected out of the 25 nominations. The BJP nominated 13 female

candidates out of the 110 seats they contested and 9 of the contenders secured a seat. The minor partners of the NDA coalition, the VIP and HAM(S) both fielded 1 woman candidate each and both of them emerged victorious.The trend of lesser vote share for women candidates, however, is not the same for all parties.But for a party like RJD , the overall women representation has been on a decline over the years. For instance , in the last 20 years , Lalu Prasad Yadav's RJD has won 430 seats across 6 assembly elections but only 28 of them were secured by women.In 2020, the party nominated 16 women out of 144 candidates and only 7 got elected.Furthermore , half of these 16 candidates hailed from political families mostly wives or daughters of eminent RJD politicians and thereby it was mostly the men who were the face of their electoral campaigns .And when it comes to the Communist Parties, they unexpectedly turned out to be the dark horses, showing signs of resurgence yet interestingly

nominated only a single woman out of their total 29 candidates.

But when we try to draw a parallel between the performance of female and male candidates, the scenario barely scripts any wide difference.For example , in 2020 , 54% of the 84 female candidate contested theìr maiden elections while the count of male debutants was 46%.12 first time female contestants also registered comprehensive victories.Furthermore , 8% women from principal party alliances ran as turncoats against 12% for male.The mean victory margin of female MLAs was 9.4% against 9.8% for men. Comprehending the entire electoral scenario , it is no rocket science for anyone to understand , that the disenfranchisement of female representation in elections does not serve any purpose rather it is the retrogressive mindset of people to continue the perpetuation of age old prejudices and bigotry against them. This context is all the more critical now when one considers the steady significant increase in the number of women casting their ballots in the past 2 assembly elections. As per provisional data , the female turnout in polling booths was 59.7% against 54.6% for men. At the moment, the fate of women to receive more nominations depends heavily on the inclusive mentality of prominent party leaders and the goodwill of potent parties. While political pundits called the women of Bihar to have been the silent army for Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's record win , it will be quite riveting to see if women manage to get substantial representation in the forthcoming elections and grow more to be the political face of Bihar.