An Offering of Nothings

The outcome of the Bihar elections reminds one of the French saying-the more things change, the more they stay the same

- Subir Sinha IS DIRECTOR, SOAS SOUTH ASIA INSTITUTE

IN the recent past, election outcomes, not just in India but across the world, have been so unpredictable and unforeseeable that political scientists have failed to comprehend or explain the electoral trends.

The recently concluded Bihar election was no different—it was an election that was fought with no narrative or vision and the outcome, so overwhelmingly one-sided, has stumped political parties, voters as well as psephologists.

Anomalies are expected, especially in states like Bihar, where the voters have been inscrutable and have delivered unpredictable verdicts previously too. However, as with some other recent state and national elections, more questions have been raised on the credibility of the election process.

The most prominent of these questions is about the deletion of large number of voters in the SIR process: constituencies with the largest deletions have overwhelmingly returned NDA candidates as winners. Critics have also pointed to anomalies between the total number of eligible voters post-SIR, the voting percentage, and the total number of votes counted.

While women voters outnumbered men, at the heart of the ‘mahila’ wave were targeted welfare schemes—from Rs 10,000 cash deposits under Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana to the Jeevika Didi scheme—aimed at the social and economic empowerment of the rural poor. The NDA announced that it will transfer Rs 10,000 to over one crore women, nearly a third of all women voters. Questions are being asked as to why, when a similar distribution of benefits shortly before polls was disallowed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in other states, the ECI allowed them to go ahead in Bihar. It cannot credibly be argued that these cash transfers did not affect the outcome.