Women form 50 per cent of the population and persuading them to vote, if with cash, shifts the balance.
| Photo Credit: Utpal Sarkar/ANI
Earlier this year, LibTech, a grouping of academics and activists, published numbers that showed the deletion of over 39 lakh registered workers from the rolls of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The trend of deletions began around 2022, when the government started pushing the Aadhaar Based Payment System, which lays down stringent conditions of eligibility: Aadhaar cards linked to job cards, identical names on both, bank accounts seeded with Aadhaar, and so on.
These conditions have forced several workers, a large number of them women, out of the scheme. The Centre has also steadily lowered the budget for MGNREGS (it is about 1.8 per cent of the total budget now) and governments have steadily failed to pay wages on time. Moreover, the unemployment allowance mandated by law for workers who do not get MGNREGS jobs is not paid in a vast majority of cases. This scenario continues despite the increased pressure on MGNREGS given the persistent high unemployment rates and the pandemic-driven reverse migration.
It is, therefore, particularly depressing to be told that the Maharashtra and Jharkhand Assembly elections might have been won largely on the back of a Rs.1,500 and Rs.1,000 monthly payout to women voters. Notice that there appear to be no conditions attached nor payment delays for any election-related dole. While the immediate benefits of a direct cash transfer to women are obvious, the overall cynicism behind such schemes becomes painfully obvious through statistics such as those put out by LibTech.
Only a Pollyanna would imagine that the myriad aggressively marketed mahila schemes today have anything to do with real women’s empowerment. Or that they signal women getting a bigger say in the country’s polity. They are merely a Machiavellian use of demographics—women form 50 per cent of the population and persuading them to vote, if with cash, shifts the balance.
The announcement of such schemes by the Congress in Karnataka or the DMK in Tamil Nadu is less surprising because the social welfare manifestos of these political parties have never been a secret. (How efficient they are or how free of corruption is a different discussion.) But one was told repeatedly by fond financial columnists that the BJP holds no truck with social welfare payouts. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi called them “revdi”, it was rapturously broadcast across television channels and broadsheets. Now, with absolutely no irony, these voices attribute the BJP-led Mahayuti’s win in Maharashtra to the masterstroke of a cash grant.
In February 2022, I wrote in The Hindu about Priyanka Gandhi’s Women’s Manifesto launched for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. The Congress lost badly, but the manifesto was astonishingly progressive. It spoke of reservations for women as bus drivers, ration shop owners, and constables; of mahila chaupals; of suspending police personnel who don’t register complaints within 10 days. Even the promise of smartphones for girls in Class 12 was based on the fact that these luxuries are usually reserved for sons. It was a women-centric manifesto, which foregrounded education, employment, empowerment, and gender justice. Only when an election is won on the back of such a manifesto can we claim that women have begun to own democracy.
But when a political party that denounces feminism and divorce as “Western” notions, believes marital rape is fiction, and whose IT cell has a free pass to viciously target women uses a cash grant to woo female voters, it would be a great delusion to misread it as anything but opportunistic.
Writing in 2022, I envisaged the Congress women’s manifesto presaging a time when women might consolidate as a progressive vote bank. It is safe to say that it has not happened yet.
