The myth of the ‘women vote bank’

After a decades-long silence following the enactment of the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments in the 1990s, the discussion on women’s political representation and political participation has been revived now. Two simultaneous processes have led to this.

The first is the increased turnout of women voters after 2010 and the gradual closing of the gender gap during elections. This was evident in both the Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections. In the 1996 Lok Sabha election, the gender gap was around 10 per cent. In the 2024 election, it was negligible. The share of women voters exceeded that of men in 19 out of 31 States and Union Territories. It meant that more than 200 Lok Sabha constituencies had a higher turnout of women voters than men. This phenomenon prompted both political commentators and political parties to celebrate the arrival of a distinctive woman constituency in the polity.

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The surge in women’s turnout has also led to the rise of competitive populism, with political parties unfolding “women-centric” schemes across States. We saw this play out in Maharashtra, where the impressive victory of the Mahayuti (grand alliance) led by the BJP was linked to its Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin (Chief Minister’s Beloved Sisters) scheme, and in Jharkhand, where the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha introduced the Maiyan Samman Yojana scheme.

The Ladki Bahin scheme is a carbon copy of the Ladli Behna scheme earlier introduced by the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, which was so popular that the BJP’s return to power in the State in both the 2018 and 2023 Assembly elections was largely attributed to it. Similarly, it has often been suggested that the Ujjwala scheme helped the BJP in its 2019 Lok Sabha election win.

Since then, the role of women as voters and labharthis (beneficiaries) has been much discussed in popular media. In the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the hype around women’s support for the BJP became a dominant narrative of the campaign, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi even addressing a women-only rally in West Bengal where he referred to women as one of the only four important “castes” for him along with poor people, youth, and farmers. The Congress joined the chorus, launching separate women-centric manifestos for the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka and promising substantial monthly cash transfers to poor women.

These celebratory narratives, however, require serious inquiry. First, in the absence of robust empirical evidence on gender-wise voting, the narrative remains largely conjectural or speculative. Second, it becomes a paradoxical narrative in the context of the growing social insecurities faced by Indian women, with declining levels of their participation in the workforce and a rather limited extent of their overall political participation, which is further limited by the reluctance of political parties to offer candidatures to women. Most importantly, despite the rhetoric of women’s empowerment, the narrative undermines the political agency of Indian women at many levels.

The idea of women’s empowerment officially arrived in India in the 1990s, when a women’s quota in local self-government institutions was ratified by constitutional amendments. Since then, the mainstream political parties have always attempted to carve out a “non-political” political constituency of women in which women would essentially remain marginal political players. The recent spate of populist welfarist pro-women initiatives reinforces the marginal role of women in several ways.

Women as labharthis

Women are mainly seen as beneficiaries of schemes rather than as autonomous political agents. This assumption seriously undermines their role as active citizens. The perception of women as labharthis is also about an imaginary female vote bank that will respond to the welfare benefits offered by a clientelist mode. More importantly, the overall framing of the discourse of women’s welfare is such that it confines women to the domestic, familial arena and thus compromises their political agency. Hence the appeal to women as beloved sisters in Maharashtra this time was to vote for their “real” brothers rather than “stepbrothers”. Women themselves were not considered as eligible to contest elections, even by the Mahayuti.

The National Election Studies (NES), conducted by Lokniti-CSDS, offers a unique window to probe and problematise these simplistic assumptions about the women’s vote and their political participation. The NES is the only nationwide study of its kind that gives longitudinal insights into the nature of Indian elections in general and that of the women’s vote in particular. An analysis of these extensive empirical datasets shows that women voters in India do not always operate as labharthis; that there is no national-level “vote bank” of women; and that, instead, their vote is determined by regional political dynamics. They do not vote only as women (or as gendered beings); their voting decisions are also guided by their class, caste, and similar social identities.

As depicted in the table here, historically, the Congress party has enjoyed more support among women voters than the BJP. However, there are two caveats to this reading. The first is that the gender advantage to the Congress has gradually declined over the years and is almost neutralised now. Second, these are all-India trends derived from the NES. If one tries to disaggregate it at the regional level, the extent of women’s support for the Congress party becomes drastically uneven. Similarly, the BJP, too, enjoys drastically uneven support among women voters in various States. At the same time, as the table depicts, at the all-India level, more men than women typically vote for the BJP.

The gender disadvantage of the BJP as far as women are concerned gradually declined over the years as the BJP has expanded its support base both geographically and socially and exerted its dominance at the all-India level. As a result, there was only a slight difference between the Congress and the BJP in terms of women voters in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Historically, particularly in the 1990s, the lack of support for the BJP among women was rather skewed. That skew has disappeared over the years, and yet, compared with men, fewer women voted for the BJP even in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Through the last three decades, the BJP’s overall support base has expanded while that of the Congress has shrunk. And yet, the Congress party seems to have maintained steady support among women over men at the all-India level, as suggested by the longitudinal data of the NES.

The macro-level gender-wise voting patterns presented here change a great deal if one looks at State-level data. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, more women than men supported the BJP in States like Delhi, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, and Kerala. These are not essentially BJP-ruled States. They are also not States where the number of women voting necessarily exceeded that of men. On the other hand, in States like Bihar, where women voters outnumbered men, the women did not support the BJP more than men. This is also the case in Madhya Pradesh.

Despite claims that the Ladli Behna scheme was the key factor in BJP’s 2023 victory in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly election, studies conducted by Lokniti indicated differently. The numbers suggested that the BJP enjoyed more support among women beneficiaries of welfare schemes but not among other women and the studies noted that gender cannot be seen as the only factor contributing to the BJP’s win. In the Lok Sabha election, in fact, a slightly smaller number of women supported the BJP than the Congress in Madhya Pradesh. Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu saw an uneven gender gap against the BJP among women voters. Once again, there is no clear pattern that suggests why women do not prefer the BJP over other parties in these States.

In a way, the hazy and uneven State-specific pattern of the women’s vote going to the BJP states the obvious: that the States matter in Indian elections. It points to the fact that rather than the supposed arrival of a pan-Indian woman constituency, the women’s vote (like that of the men) takes shape in a State-specific context and is influenced by several political and social factors that go into the making of State-level electoral dynamics.

The Maharashtra case

Maharashtra is no exception to this trend. In the recently concluded Legislative Assembly election, the Mahayuti led by the BJP gained more votes among women than men. However, this has not been the case always. Earlier data from Assembly election studies in Maharashtra conducted by Lokniti and the Department of Political Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, indicate shifting support of women voters to different political parties in the State. In that sense, the women’s vote in Maharashtra has always been in tune with overall electoral trends and the regional political dynamics of the time rather than women asserting themselves as an independent and decisive vote bank. In 2024, a slightly larger number of women than men voted for the Mahayuti, but if one disaggregates the individual party-wise support of women, it seems that along with the BJP, the Congress too enjoys a small gender advantage among women voters in the State.

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The Maharashtra election also tells another story about the nature of the women’s vote in Indian elections. It is about how other social indicators like class and caste influence the way women vote. The current phase of competitive populist welfarism targeting women conveniently forgets the layered nature of gender realities in India and imagines a pan-Indian all-women vote bank ready to be lured by cash transfer schemes. However, the NES data, being sensitive to the gender realities in India, underline the fact that women do not always vote as women and that their voting decisions remain enmeshed in other dimensions of social hierarchies and inequalities like caste.

In Maharashtra this time, women from certain caste groups like OBCs seem to have voted for the Mahayuti in larger numbers compared with women belonging to other social groups such as Dalits and Marathas. These trends can also be seen at the all-India level in 2024 as well as in several earlier elections. In the Lok Sabha election in 2024, women’s support to the BJP (and to the Congress) was uneven across social groups. Like their male counterparts, rich dominant-caste women tend to support the BJP in a more pronounced manner. Similarly, rural, poor, less educated, Dalit women do not prefer to vote for the BJP. Considering that these socially underprivileged sections constitute the bulk of Indian voters, their voting pattern explains the slight gender disadvantage the BJP suffers among women, despite the build-up.

To cut a long story short, in the light of the empirical analysis presented here, the hype about the arrival of the woman constituency and the celebration of women’s role as labharthis is not only speculative and conjectural but also detrimental to the real and long-term agenda of women’s empowerment as it compromises their political agency. 

Rajeshwari Deshpande teaches political science at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, and is associated with the National Election Studies conducted by the Lokniti, CSDS, New Delhi.