As the final votes were tallied, Bihar awoke to a political script few had fully anticipated. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) stormed back to power with over 200 seats, an astonishing strike rate of nearly 90% despite no tangible progress on the economy, jobs, education, health, or law and order.

This resounding victory reveals how forces beyond governance performance shaped the mandate: the questionable conduct of the Election Commission of India (ECI), targeted cash transfers to women, resilient caste-social coalitions, the NDA’s jungle raj narrative, a late swell of sympathy for Nitish Kumar and the BJP’s formidable electoral machinery powered by Home Minister Amit Shah’s vote management skills. Together, they produced an outcome far more sweeping than expected.

For over a decade, women voters have steadily reshaped Bihar’s political landscape. Their rising turnout, distinct preferences and decisive weight in electoral contests have compelled every party to court them. As several media reports noted, the NDA’s 2025 strategy revolved around money and mahila: an intentional pitch to women voters that placed cash transfers and employment-linked support at the heart of its campaign.

These measures are now widely cited as key drivers of the surge in female turnout, which many regard as a pivotal factor in the NDA’s landslide victory.

The overall voter turnout in Bihar was 66.91%, the highest since 1951. Female turnout reached 71.6%, far ahead of the 62.8% recorded for men. This marks a sharp rise from women’s turnout in 2015 (60.48%) and 2020 (59.69%), making the 2025 election a clear watershed in terms of female political participation. According to the ECI’s preliminary figures, women cast at least 4.34 lakh more votes than men, which is remarkable given that the voter rolls, after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), listed roughly 42 lakh fewer women than men.

Also read: Why Fall in Share of Women Voters in Bihar SIR’s Final Rolls Signals a Serious Regression

This paradox, lower registration but higher participation, underscores the growing political force of the women’s vote. Analysis of turnout patterns also indicates that districts with higher proportions of women voters tended to report stronger support for the Janata Dal (United), reinforcing the political significance of this surge.

The paradox becomes even sharper when viewed against the backdrop of the SIR conducted just before the election. The process produced net exclusions that disproportionately affected women, while men were comparatively less affected. As a result, the gender ratio in Bihar’s electorate slipped to 892 in the final SIR rolls, down from 907 just a year earlier. A statistical analysis by The Hindu found that young women (18-29 years) were the most severely hit, particularly under the category of “permanently shifted” deletions.

This pattern suggests that women who moved after marriage bore the brunt of removals, with little clarity on whether they were subsequently enrolled in their new constituencies.

Bihar’s exceptionally high male out-migration helps explain why women’s turnout exceeded men’s despite their smaller presence on the voter rolls. With a substantial share of working-age men absent from the state, women constitute a larger proportion of the active electorate. The last-minute cash transfers, added to these demographic realities, boosted participation in ways that reflected administrative and economic interventions more than any deepening of women’s political empowerment.

Until the ECI offers clarity on the integrity of the voter registration process and the patterns of exclusions, the surge in women’s turnout must be viewed with caution.

Nevertheless, the available evidence indicates that this rise in turnout during the 2025 elections worked decisively to the NDA’s advantage. It signals that women voters have become a core electoral constituency in Bihar, particularly for the ruling alliance. Their surpassing men in absolute turnout marks a significant socio-political shift, one that merits recognition.

Yet a higher turnout is evidently insufficient to secure gender-equitable representation. Unless women are also elected as MLAs, their electoral weight cannot fully translate into legislative influence. This democratic paradox is stark: women are emerging as a formidable voting bloc, even as their presence within the legislature remains disproportionately low.

Reflecting this disconnect, despite the centrality of the women’s vote in Bihar, parties allotted only a token number of tickets to women, a striking irony given that the election hinged on their support. Reliable data on the exact distribution of tickets or the number of women who ultimately won is still unavailable, but early reports indicate that only 258 women contested the assembly election.

Also read: For Bihar’s ‘Jeevika Didis’ Rs 10,000 Scheme Offers Little Relief Amid Debt and Inflation

Women may be the most courted vote bank during election campaigns in Bihar, as also in several other states, yet they remain largely absent from the corridors of power after the elections. This gap lays bare the limits of electorally driven participation. Welfare schemes may continue to target them, but their deeper aspirations for agency and representation remain unmet. In many rural areas, rising debt and persistent job shortages now overshadow the state’s oft-repeated ‘empowerment’ narrative.

It is within this context that Nitish Kumar’s nearly two-decade tenure has maintained a long-standing focus on women’s welfare through targeted economic and social interventions. The Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana, launched in September, follows a long tradition of women-focused initiatives: from providing bicycles to schoolgirls in 2006, to enshrining 50% reservation for women in Bihar’s Panchayati Raj institutions, to reserved posts in government jobs, to expanding the Jeevika network of women’s self-help groups and later, the 2016 prohibition policy. Together, these measures have placed women at the core of the state’s welfare architecture.

The yojana promised up to Rs 2 lakh to women to help them launch small enterprises. Its first instalment of Rs 10,000 was rolled out in phases, beginning with 75 lakh women receiving it on 26 September, just a day after the scheme was unveiled and ten days before the election schedule was announced.

Additional disbursements continued well into October, even after the Model Code of Conduct came into force, eventually taking the total number of beneficiaries to around 1.21 crore across Bihar. This direct transfer of Rs 10,000 yielded huge electoral dividends for the NDA, particularly the JD(U).

Opposition parties formally challenged it as a violation, but the ECI declined to intervene, classifying the scheme as “ongoing”. Cash disbursements, therefore, continued uninterrupted, enabled by the commission’s inaction. Their continuation amounted to a breach of the Model Code of Conduct and the timing raised serious ethical concerns. This cash transfer scheme, described by many critics as a de facto “bribe”, became a major draw and played a key role in the NDA’s overwhelming victory, all without attracting scrutiny from the ECI.

Also read: Bihar Election Results: Bribery Working at a Grand Scale

This lapse lies at the centre of the debate on the women’s vote: if a significant share of women’s turnout was shaped by transfers issued during a period meant to ensure a level playing field, the integrity of that vote cannot be assessed without examining the ECI’s non-decision.

In these circumstances, the NDA’s narrative of development, law and order and women’s empowerment gained more traction with female voters than the Mahagathbandhan’s appeal, helping turn the tide in its favour amid unprecedented women’s turnout. Yet this surge sits uneasily alongside deeper structural concerns: skewed electoral rolls, large-scale exclusions and unaddressed violations of the model code.

Taken together, these issues complicate what this rise in women’s voting power actually signifies. They point to a surge shaped less by growing political agency than by the interplay between mahila and money and by the wider mix of welfare, political loyalty and gaps in electoral integrity.

Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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