The votes that built Nitish's stronghold

Ahead of Assembly polls, Bihar CM sharpens women-focused agenda with domicile quota, banking on female voters' rising clout and support. Md Kaifee Alam explains

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Just months before Bihar heads to the polls, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has reached again for his trusted lever of social engineering: Women. His Cabinet recently approved a 35 per cent reservation for women in all government jobs, but this time restricted exclusively to those who are the state's permanent residents.

First introduced in 2016, the horizontal quota had also extended to women from outside the state. This tightening of domicile rules signals a blend of political calculation and electoral choreography in the run-up to polls.

For nearly two decades, Kumar has cultivated women as a distinct constituency. Their presence in the electorate has always been formidable, nearly half of the whole. But their turnout, their willingness to show up, has altered the balance of power.

"Since more women are coming out to vote, this has made them far more crucial and significant in electoral politics," said Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Lokniti.

In the 2010 Assembly elections, women in Bihar edged ahead of men: 54.48 per cent turnout to 51.11. By 2015, that gap had widened — 60.48 per cent of women voted, compared to just 53.31 per cent of men. In the intervening years, Kumar's women-centric welfare schemes — from bicycles for girls to panchayat reservations — had begun to show real-world impact in mobility, education, and public participation.

The pattern held through national polls. In the Lok Sabha elections of 2019 and 2024, women once again out-voted men, with a difference of 4.6 and 6.4 percentage points, respectively. In 2024, the trend became unmistakable: Not only did women vote at higher rates, they outnumbered men outright — 21.8 million women exercising their franchise versus 21.4 million men.