No Woman's Land

The Left parties, which champion women's representation and empowerment, fielded only one woman among their 33 candidates in the Bihar election

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

FOR years, in his numerous terms as Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar has cultivated a women's vote bank that cuts across caste and religious lines.

This August, on election eve, in a move many dubbed a political masterstroke, he announced a onetime cash handout of Rs 10,000 to one woman in every family to start a business, with the promise of more assistance for those who used it well.

Despite this overt focus on women voters, the Left parties, a key part of the opposition alliance Mahagathbandhan, fielded only one woman among their candidates. The Communist Party of India (CPI) and the CPI(M) had none among their nine and four candidates, respectively, while the CPI(ML)(Liberation) fielded only one among its 20—Divya Gautam, a 34-year-old political greenhorn, who lost by a margin of 59,079 votes. Overall, the Left parties shared the misfortune of their alliance partners and saw their tally in the Bihar assembly fall to three from 16 in 2020.

Compared to 370 candidates in the fray in 2020, Bihar had only 255 women contesting in 2025. Of them, 29 won, with only three coming from the Opposition—all from the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Of the rest, 10 each were from the JD(U) and the BJP, three from the Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular), two from the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and one from the Rashtriya Lok Morcha.

The elections not only recorded the highest ever polling percentage in Bihar at 67.13 per cent, but also the highest participation by female voters since 1951, with a polling rate of 71.78 per cent. The polling rate among male voters stood at around 63 per cent, nine percentage points lower. After the results, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the so-called 'MY' equation, which earlier referred to the Muslim-Yadav alliance—the bedrock of the Rashtriya Janata Dal's social engineering strategy—now represented mahila and youth, the segments the ruling National Democratic Alliance purportedly caters to.