Abstract
This article studies the patterns of women’s vote in the Lok Sabha elections in India in 2024. It draws upon the National Election Studies (NES) data of 2024 and of previous years to address three key questions related to women’s vote in Indian elections. The first is about the extent of Indian women’s political participation in the wake of increased turnout of women voters and the closing of the gender gap. The second question is about the extent of women’s support to the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) as their favoured party. In the absence of conclusive evidence on gender-wise patterns of vote, there have been several tentative and speculative analyses regarding the increasing support of women voters to the BJP both at the regional and national elections, especially since 2014. The article uses the unique window of the NES data sets to understand and decipher women’s support for the BJP and other political parties on a timeline. Finally, from within the confines of the empirical evidence provided by the NES data sets, it also tries to address a rather nuanced question of the arrival of women’s agency in the electoral democracy in India. With the help of the NES data sets, it tries to understand whether women vote mainly as women, prioritizing their gendered identities over other kinds of identities, and whether their voting patterns indicate the arrival of an autonomous women’s constituency in Indian democracy.
Introduction
After a long lull of many years, the discussion on women’s empowerment in Indian politics was revived during the Lok Sabha (LS) elections of 2019. It was revived in the wake of the gradual increase in the women’s turnout in the state assembly elections over the past few years and the closing of the gender gap in turnout. Although slogans like ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ remained blemished by the growing social insecurities for women, political parties tried desperately to attract women voters to them. If ‘winning women’ and women’s presence in political offices constitute done part of the arrival of women’s constituency in the elections since the 1990s, the distinctive nature of women’s vote must be seen as the other important, though neglected part of the story. It has always been a somewhat elusive story in the absence of aggregate data on the social profile of voters. What do we know about women’s voting patterns in Indian elections? Given the layered nature of gender realities in India, do women always vote as women? Is there any distinctive women’s constituency shaping in Indian politics and how do we empirically assess it? The article uses the National Election Studies (NES) data sets to answer some of these questions in a more nuanced way.
The article is arranged as follows. In its brief introduction to the puzzle, the article discusses how the agenda of women’s empowerment in general and of their political representation in particular is shaped in the Indian context. It also reviews the existing body of literature in the area and suggests how it provides a context for our enquiries into the nature of women’s vote in the 2024 elections. The introduction is followed by three main sections of the article where it presents and analyses the NES data on the extent of political participation of women; the nature of their vote and whether or to what extent it remains enmeshed in their other social identities such as caste, class or religion. In other words, in the last part of its discussion, the article uses available NES data to understand whether and to what extent Indian women vote independently as women or ‘primarily’ as gendered beings.
A Paradoxical Puzzle
Most mainstream research on women’s political participation—in the Indian context as well as internationally has focussed on their marginal presence in the elected offices (Dahlerup, 2006; Dhanda, 2008; Paxton & Hughes, 2017; Rai & Spary, 2019; Singer, 2007). These studies underlined the structural and cultural conditions that make it difficult for women to win political offices and to wade through the roughhouse of politics. However, most of these studies did not and could not take up for discussion the issues related to women voters, their electoral participation and their agency. The question of how ‘everyday’ women respond to the opportunities and incentives presented by (parliamentary) elections has largely remained unanswered in the literature so far (Blaydes & Tarouty, 2009). The gap in the literature was mainly a result of the non-availability of data on gender-wise patterns of voting. On the other hand, it also resulted from the essentialist assumptions about the nature of women’s vote which were celebrated not only by the political parties but also by the women’s movements and researchers (Gordon, 2019). In the Indian context, particularly during the long debate on women’s quota in political offices, it was often assumed that women constitute a self-evident category and that women in themselves constitute a distinct political identity (Menon, 2004). However, empirical studies in more recent times have questioned these essentialist assumptions: in India and in other countries as well. If the active participation of women in communal riots was a wake-up call in the 1990s in India (Menon, 2004), Republican women voters supporting Donald Trump in the US presidential elections in 2016 (Setzler & Yanus, 2018) was a more recent alert regarding the layered nature of gender realities and regarding the need to understand women’s political participation in a more nuanced manner.
The gender differentiations in voting participation diminished or were reversed in many Northern democracies in the 1990s and the traditional gender gap in electoral turnout had become insignificant (Norris, 2002). However, that was not the case in India in the 1990s despite its much-celebrated official agenda of women’s political empowerment (Deshpande, 2010; Tharu & Niranjana, 1999). Throughout the tumultuous decade of the 1990s and till the 2009 LS elections, the gender gap in voting persisted in the Indian elections. The trends started to change rapidly when the female turnout surpassed that of men in the state-level elections in 2012 (Kumar, 2022).
The rather drastic closing of the gender gap in the Indian elections in the decade of 2010 led to a revival of the discussion of women’s empowerment in Indian politics after a long lull of many years. Since then, political parties have been trying to outdo each other in attracting women voters to them. Although the official agenda of women’s empowerment was inaugurated in the decade of 1990s with the enactment of the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, more targeted ‘pro-women’ policy initiatives arrived much later when regional-level ruling parties like the Janata Dal (United) (JD (U)) in Bihar and All-India Trinamool Congress (AITC) in West Bengal initially tried to woo women voters. The agenda was soon taken over by the central government and by the BJP as a ruling party both at the national and the state levels. After it came to power in 2014 the BJP-led NDA government at the centre launched several women-centric schemes. 2 One of the flagship schemes among them was Ujjwala, which aimed at providing clean cooking fuel to Indian women at subsidized rates. It was often considered the vote-winning scheme for the BJP in the 2019 LS elections. 3 In the run-up to the 2024 elections, the central government as well as many states ruled by the opposition parties announced a number of similar schemes targeting women voters and encouraging direct cash transfer to women’s bank accounts. Most of these schemes reinforced women’s role as confined to the sphere of domesticity. The titles of most schemes also explicitly underlined women’s secondary role both within the domestic and the public arena as they essentially touted women as ‘beloved sisters’ at the mercy of the benevolence of male political leaders.
At both these levels, the discussion brought forth the contradictory aspects of the puzzle of women’s empowerment in Indian politics and a distinctive arrival of women’s constituency. The upward spiral of women’s turnout in the state assembly elections was celebrated by researchers as ‘feminisation of Indian politics’ (Rai, 2017) and as the silent revolution towards gender equality (Ravi & Kapoor, 2014). However, these celebratory declarations were offset at various levels as women’s participation in the public sphere in general but in the Indian workforce in particular remained low and declined (Deshpande & Singh, 2021); as concerns of violence against women became alarming 4 ; as the overall share of women representatives in the Indian parliament remained stagnant, and as discussed below, the extent of women’s political participation in activities other than voting also remained limited in the Indian elections.
The existing literature on the impact of women-centric welfare schemes and on the connection between welfare and women’s vote is scant, mostly conjectural in the absence of robust empirical evidence, and once again, points to the paradoxical nature of the agenda of women’s empowerment. Since the re-election of the Nitish Kumar–led JD(U) government in Bihar in 2015; scholars and analysts have commented on the possible impact of pro-women welfare schemes for incumbent ruling parties at the state and at the centre. 5 Women voters, particularly the women beneficiaries of central schemes like Ujjwala and Prime Minister Awas Yojana (housing scheme), were seen as contributing to the BJP victory in LS elections in 2019 in a substantive way. 6 Similarly, the BJP’s return to power in the state of Madhya Pradesh both in 2018 and in 2023 was also largely attributed to the party’s initiatives for women like ‘Ladli Behna’ [Beloved Sister] or ‘Ladli Laxmi’. 7
In the run-up to the LS elections 2024, the hype about women’s support for the ruling party at the centre almost became a dominant narrative of the campaign. The central government and the BJP celebrated it at various levels when the party claimed to have liberated Muslim women by banning Triple Talaq; when the Indian parliament enacted the long-pending women’s reservation bill guaranteeing 33% quota to women in the national elections and when during the election campaign the Prime Minister addressed a women-only rally in West Bengal. 8 Amid the opposition’s call for a nationwide caste census as an important issue in the election campaign, the Prime Minister referred to women as one of the only four important ‘castes’ for him along with the poor, youth and farmers. 9 It was not just the BJP which tried to woo women ahead of the LS elections in 2024. The Congress party, too, announced various welfare schemes for women in its electoral promises in the state assembly elections in Karnataka in 2023. 10 The party came up with a separate women-centric manifesto for the assembly elections both in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka. During its campaign for the LS elections in 2024, the Congress party promised substantial monthly cash transfers to poor women, immediate implementation of the Women’s Reservation Act, and 50% quota for women in government jobs. 11 Many regional parties too invested a great deal in similar efforts to attract women voters to their fold. 12
The electoral strategies of mainstream political parties as well as the (mainly journalistic) analyses of the nature of women’s electoral support both equally contributed to the paradoxical puzzle about women’s empowerment and their political agency. In their ‘women-centric’ initiatives political parties addressed women mainly as labharthis [beneficiaries] and that too as beneficiaries who mainly belong to the domestic sphere of social life. Despite the rhetoric of women’s empowerment, the overall framing of the discourse of women’s welfare compromised their political agency in a serious way and thus remained marred in contradictions. It has always been the case over the past almost four decades or so (Deshpande, 2010). All these years, women were mainly seen as marginal players in politics and the public sphere, and attempts were made to carve out a ‘non-political’ political constituency of women in Indian politics. The recent welfarist pro-women initiatives of political parties reinforced the non-political and marginal nature of women’s political mobilizations. The academic analyses of these initiatives also remained inadequate and lazy and thus contributed to the paradox: first, with their simplistic assumptions about the women’s vote bank and second in assuming its clientelist linkages with the welfare benefits. Second, these analyses continued to essentialize women as a self-evident political category without taking into consideration the layered nature of gender realities where women’s identities as gendered beings remain enmeshed in other social indicators of inequalities and hierarchies.
Empirical investigations into the patterns of women’s vote in Indian elections may help us understand and unravel this paradoxical puzzle in a more nuanced manner and address the questions related to shaping of a woman constituency in a more scientific/rational manner. The comprehensive NES data sets of Lokniti provide a unique and exclusive opportunity to take up such detailed empirical investigations. The NES data sets track the Indian elections since 1996 and they have indicated some long-term trends regarding the nature of women’s vote in Indian elections so far. The first is about the participatory upsurge among women along with other socially marginal groups in the decade of 1990s (Yadav, 2000). The participatory upsurge plateaued in between till almost 2010 when the gender gap in voter turnout remained intact. As noted earlier, the trends reversed once again in the last decade when turnout of women voters surged. The second long-term trend depicted by the NES studies was about a definite bias among women voters towards the Congress party at the macro level. To decode this bias, the earlier studies tried to disaggregate the women’s vote at the regional level and across parties and arrived at an important conclusion about how women’s vote shapes in the state-specific context. Third, the NES data of the past seven LS elections also indicated a clear and consistent gender disadvantage to the BJP among women voters. This was a consistent trend so far, both at the macro and the micro levels. The article tries to investigate if the gender disadvantage to the BJP sustains in the 2024 LS elections as well or whether the party was successful in reversing these trends. Finally, the studies using the earlier NES data have also suggested how gender as an explanatory factor could not be seen in isolation (Deshpande, 2004) and how women’s vote remains enmeshed in their caste and class identities. The article revisits these long-term empirical observations based on the NES data in the context of the recent LS elections to understand and complicate the idea of the arrival of the women constituency in Indian elections.
Extent of Political Participation
Table 1 presents the details of gender-wise voter turnout in Indian elections since 1996. It shows how the gender gap in turnout has gradually neutralized over the years. In the 2024 LS elections, the overall turnout of voters is slightly low compared to that of the previous elections. However, the gender gap is practically non-existent. The share of women voters exceeded that of men in 19 out of 31 states and union territories, which meant that more than 200 LS constituencies had a higher turnout of women than of men in 2024. The women voters outnumbered men in electorally important states like Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Odisha along with the so-called socially ‘backward’ states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. 13
Gender-wise Turnout in LS Elections 1996–2024.
In that sense, the closure of the gender gap in turnout was a very important and noteworthy feature of the 2024 LS elections. At the same time, it needs to be contextualized with reference to the overall extent of political participation of Indian women and also at the backdrop of persisting gender inequalities in the socio-economic arena. Scholars have offered two possible explanations to understand the dramatic increase in women’s turnout in recent elections (Kumar, 2024). The first is the self-empowerment hypothesis, which argues how rising levels of literacy and media exposure empower women to vote in large numbers. On the other hand, it is also suggested that the institutional factors, particularly the initiatives of the Election Commission towards registration of (women) voters may have contributed to the increased turnout among women voters. However, both these hypotheses prove inadequate for various reasons. First, although the voter–sex ratio in recent Indian elections has become less adverse, the elector–sex ratio (ESR, or the ratio of female electors who are registered to vote to their male counterparts) remains rather skewed (Kumar, 2024). Second, women’s participation in the Indian workforce also remains low, and their share has in fact further declined in recent years. These trends are contrary to both the self-empowerment and institutional explanations offered by scholars. Considering it, some scholars have argued how the puzzle of increased turnout among women remains an unresolved puzzle and how multiple factors contribute to this development (Kumar & Gupta, 2015). In this regard, large-scale migration of men is also identified as a possible factor contributing to increased turnout of women, particularly in what are considered as socially and economically ‘backward’ states (Kumar, 2024).
Although the act of voting constitutes an important part of it, women’s turnout cannot be the only measure to assess the overall extent of political participation. Other political activities during the elections like participation in campaigns, attending rallies or political meetings and distributing pamphlets also become important indicators of politically active citizens. Membership of a political party or of social/political organizations indicates a more committed and politically active citizen. Using the NES series, Table 2 presents the data on select indicators of political (and social) participation of men and women citizens. The earlier studies based on the NES data have noted a gradual increase in levels of political participation among Indian citizens, particularly in the decade of the 1990s (Palshikar & Kumar, 2004; Yadav, 2000). At the same time, it is also evident that (a) not many Indian citizens are committedly active in politics and (b) the active citizens mainly come from socially privileged groups of Hindu, rich, educated men. Palshikar and Kumar note that in 2004 the gender-wise ratio of politically active citizens was five to one among men and women (Palshikar & Kumar, 2004). Table 2 depicts similar trends for the elections since then. Women’s participation in election campaigns has gradually increased over the years and yet, a significantly smaller number of women than men participate in election campaigns. In the 1996 elections, 20% of women respondents associated themselves with some political party. That figure doubled in 2024, when 40% of women said that they feel close to a particular political party. There is a noticeable gender gap in these responses, but the gap is also considerably reduced between 1996 (14 percentage points) and 2024 (eight percentage points). On the other hand, there is a clear gender gap of more than 15 percentage points in responses related to the question of whether citizens sought anyone’s advice in deciding their voting choices or whether they voted on their own. In the 2024 elections, 63% of men as against 48% of women said that they voted on their own and did not depend upon anyone else’s opinion. More specifically, as far as the spouse’s opinion is concerned, comparatively more women than men seem to have sought advice of the spouse. There is a 10% gender gap in these responses, which has remained intact over the years, even in 2024. It indicates a mixed scenario regarding the nature of women’s political participation. The fact that only 14% of women thought it necessary to seek the advice of their husbands in deciding whom to vote for points to the arrival of women’s autonomous agency. On the other hand, the fact that comparatively more women than men rely on their spouse’s advice indicates a still impaired political agency of women. This point is revisited later in the article where the connection between gender and other social indicators is discussed.
Women’s Political Participation, 1996–2024.
How Do Women Vote?
The NES have so far advanced three observations regarding the nature of women’s vote in Indian elections. The first was about a participatory upsurge among women along with other marginalized groups in the 1990s (Yadav, 2000). The second observation was about the overall gender advantage to the Congress party among women voters (Deshpande, 2004, 2009; Yadav, 2003) and a consistent disadvantage for the BJP. The third observation, based on the NES data, was that gender could not be seen in isolation as an explanatory factor to understand the nature of women’s vote and that it operates along with other dimensions of social hierarchy in deciding women’s voting behaviour.
Table 3 presents the Indian women’s vote on a timeline. The data go back to the 1971 general elections when the second round of NES was conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). 14 As the table indicates, barring the elections in 2014 (in which the Congress party was at its all-time low) the Congress party consistently enjoys more support among women than men at the all-India level. This trend is evident in the 2024 LS elections as well. Historically, along with the Congress, the left parties also enjoyed gender advantage among women voters. However, during the past decade, the overall support of the Left parties has declined, and as a result, their advantage among women voters has become mostly insignificant for the election analysis at the national level. If both the Congress and the Left parties have consistently benefitted from women’s support to them the BJP has been equally consistently at a loss. And the trend remains intact even in 2024. At the same time, the data also show that the gender gap against the BJP among women voters has gradually declined over the years. In the 2024 elections, both the Congress and the BJP respectively have only a slight advantage and disadvantage among women voters by one percentage point. However, the BJP’s gender disadvantage among women was rather skewed in the earlier elections, particularly in the 1990s. In the 1998 LS elections, the gender gap against the BJP among women was six percentage points. It was slightly reduced to four percentage points in 2014 and down to 1% in the 2024 elections. Throughout this period, the BJP’s overall support base has gradually expanded, whereas that of the Congress has shrunk. Yet, the Congress party seems to have maintained a steady support among women over men.
Women’s Vote on a Timeline, 1971–2024.
The macro-level gender-wise voting patterns presented here change a great deal if one looks at the state-level data. Figure 1 presents a snapshot of BJP’s uneven gender-wise support across different states in the LS elections 2024. 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, they did not support the BJP more than men. The same is the case in Madhya Pradesh. BJP’s victory in the assembly elections in 2023 in the state of Madhya Pradesh was largely attributed by analysts to its pro-women policies, particularly to the populist welfare schemes like Ladli Behna, resulting in the BJP garnering a large-scale support among women voters in those elections. 15 However, the assembly election studies conducted by the Lokniti in Madhya Pradesh in 2023 indicated differently. The Lokniti team suggested how BJP enjoyed more support among women beneficiaries of welfare schemes but not among others and noted that gender cannot be seen as the only factor contributing to the BJP’s win. 16 In the LS elections in 2024, in fact, a slightly smaller number of women support the BJP than the Congress in Madhya Pradesh. Madhya Pradesh, along with other states like West Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, witnessed an uneven gender gap against the BJP among women voters in these elections. Once again, there is no clear pattern that suggests why women do not prefer the BJP over other parties in these states.
The hazy and uneven state-specific pattern of women’s vote to the BJP in a way states the obvious: that the states matter in Indian elections. It points to the fact that rather than the expected arrival of a pan-Indian woman constituency, the Indian women’s vote (like that of the men) shapes in the state-specific context and is influenced by several political and social factors which go in the making of the state-level electoral dynamics. The earlier NES also supports this observation (Deshpande, 2009). As mentioned earlier, historically the Congress party has consistently enjoyed a gender advantage among women voters. However, this macro-level advantage to the Congress disappears when the data are disaggregated at the state level. In an earlier study, I checked the data on women’s support to the Congress party across states and across elections between 1996 and 2009 (Deshpande, 2009). The study showed uneven patterns of support to the Congress by women voters across states and even within a state. Till that time, the Congress enjoyed a fairly consistent gender advantage in those states where it was the dominant party. However, whenever state-level politics became more competitive, the Congress lost its advantage among women voters. In other words, the study indicated that macro-level gender advantage to the Congress at the all-India level emerged more as an aggregation of state-level electoral dynamics rather than women decisively supporting the party.
The BJP was not a dominant party at the all-India level in the 1990s and in the 2000s. Its social support base was limited and skewed at that time. Despite that but also because of that, BJP too during that period enjoyed an uneven support among women voters across states and across elections even within the same state. Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Odisha could become interesting cases where the BJP seems to have enjoyed greater support among women at times, but this equation did not always hold true for the party. Even more recently, when the BJP has become a dominant political party and when its social support base has expanded significantly, it has not enjoyed greater support among women voters consistently across states and even within a particular state across elections.
Women have also voted for the regional parties in large numbers. For example, women in West Bengal have voted for the AITC under Mamta Banerjee’s leadership. Their vote can be seen as strengthening the hypothesis that women’s leadership matters for women voters. However, the hypothesis cannot be stretched too far, at least in the case of the 2024 elections because, with the decline of the BSP and Mayawati and the demise of Jayalalitha, we do not find any other state where women were at the helm of electoral affairs. The earlier studies based on the NES data also do not support this hypothesis that women essentially prefer women leaders (Deshpande, 2004). In that sense, women’s support to the AITC can also be seen more as an outcome of a combination of factors. If Mamta Banerjee’s leadership (not only as a woman but more generally also) is one such factor, the evidence that women have generally preferred the regional parties over national parties in the past can also be considered yet another important factor not only in the case of West Bengal but also in many other states (Deshpande, 2004, 2009). As a result, along with AITC, Akali Dal in Punjab and Biju Janata Dal in Odisha also seem to have benefitted from women’s support to regional parties in the 2024 LS elections. A possible reason for this choice was suggested by another study of socially marginal voters based on the NES data (Palshikar & Mishra, 2023). In their analysis of the caste and class-wise patterns of voting of the marginalized sections of citizens Palshikar and Mishra show that the vote of the poor is more dispersed in nature whereas that of the dominant sections is more concentrated in favour of the ‘national’ parties. Taking a cue from these studies, it can be further argued that since women largely belong to the marginal sections of the society, they tend to vote more for the regional rather than the all-India parties, leading to the dispersal of their imaginary national-level vote bank.
The discussion on state-wise patterns of women’s voting in the 2024 LS elections and the previous elections helps us arrive at some useful conclusions regarding the nature of women’s vote and the arrival of a women’s constituency. The NES data indicate that the gender advantage to the Congress at the macro level does not hold when it is disaggregated at the state level. More importantly, it tells us that women’s vote in Indian elections is contextualized by the state-level regional political dynamics.
Gender Disadvantage to the BJP: How Real It Is?
The story of the arrival of the women constituency gets further complicated at this level. On the one hand, the empirical evidence based on the NES data indicates that women’s vote remains subsumed under the regional electoral dynamics. As a result, the earlier observation about women historically supporting the Congress party needs to be modified. However, the same cannot be said in case of the gender disadvantage among women voters for the BJP. It is true that the BJP does not get uniform support among women across states even in the 2024 LS elections and, in that sense, the state dynamics matter in deciding the nature of women’s vote for the party. At the same time, the data also indicate possibilities to suggest that the gender disadvantage to the BJP may be ‘real’, even if we factor in the regional dynamics in our analysis.
The article explores three such possibilities in the following part in its empirical investigations based on the NES data. The first is by looking at the voting pattern of beneficiaries of centrally sponsored prominent welfare schemes. Table 4 presents gender-wise votes of the beneficiaries of major welfare schemes implemented by the central government over the past few years. The NES survey included questions related to select important schemes such as MGNREGA, PM Awas Yojana, PM Pension scheme, Ayushman Bharat and Ujjwala Yojana. Some of these welfare schemes were first initiated by the United Progressive Alliance government and were appropriated by the National Democratic Alliance government when it first came to power in 2014. The NDA government also introduced several new welfare schemes including the much-publicized Ujjwala scheme targeting women. The NES asked its respondents questions on whether they have benefitted from any of these schemes during the past few years and, if yes, whom would they attribute the credit for their benefits—to the state or to the central government? An earlier study based on the NES data (Deshpande et al., 2019) noted an increasing trend of centralization of credit attribution for such welfare schemes among Indian voters. This trend became more pronounced in the LS elections in 2024 (Kailash, 2024, The Hindu). The trend was in tune with the ruling party’s election campaign which celebrated the effective implementation of such welfare schemes a great deal. There was a particular emphasis in these celebratory narratives on pro-women schemes both on the part of the government as well as on the part of the political pundits. In this context, the table tries to understand if beneficiaries in general but particularly women beneficiaries voted for the BJP rather than for the other political parties. 18
Gender-wise Vote of the Beneficiaries of Various Welfare Schemes 2024.
Overall, the welfare beneficiaries tend to support the BJP rather than the other political parties. However, it is only a slight advantage of two percentage points. And among the beneficiaries, more men than women support the BJP. On the other hand, the gender advantage to the Congress party remains intact even among the beneficiaries of various welfare schemes. Among the Ujjwala beneficiaries, however, support for the BJP increases significantly. Overall, 44% of Ujjwala beneficiaries have voted for the BJP as against its average vote share of 36%. But even among them, more men (45%) than women (43%) favour the BJP. The statistics become important for our analysis of women’s vote in the context of expanding the reach of welfare schemes during the last decade (Kailash, 2024) and in the context of setting up of a celebratory discourse around them during the election campaign. However, our empirical enquiries suggest that despite the hype women do not essentially operate as labharthis in Indian elections. The data point to two possible conclusions. The first is about the linkages between welfare and voting. A detailed analysis of such linkages is obviously beyond the scope of this article. However, the data presented here definitely urge us to question the speculative assumptions of such linkages and probe further into the question of whether and to what extent welfare benefits can solely explain the nature of vote in Indian elections. More importantly, the data refute the dominant hypothesis of women as (merely) labharthis and the assumption that their vote can be bargained with the help of populist ‘pro-women’ policies. The fact that even among the beneficiaries of various welfare schemes, a smaller number of women than men support the ruling party, points to a possible arrival of women constituency where women assert their agency in small measures.
The extent of gender disadvantage to the BJP among women voters can be assessed at yet another level with the help of data on voting patterns among women and men by their social demographic character in the LS elections in 2024 as presented in Table 5.
How Social Indicators Matter: NES 2024.
Historically, the social support base of the BJP was somewhat skewed and the party drew its support predominantly from among the urban, upper class and male voters (Heath, 1999). The social profile of the BJP voters changed with the mainstreaming of the party and with its gradual expansion into new regions and into new social constituencies. And yet, as suggested in Table 5, generally more privileged sections of Indian society tend to vote more for the BJP compared to the underprivileged sections. The rich, urban, graduate and upper caste men tend to vote for the BJP in far more numbers compared to their rural, less educated, lower caste, poor and female counterparts. Compared to this neat pattern, the social profile of Congress voters is obscure. The Congress gets more support from the urban poor and many sections of women. However, contrary to the assumptions about it being a party of the underprivileged, certain sections among citizens from the marginal sections do not vote for the Congress. Therefore, the Congress gets less than average support among the rural, Dalits and less-educated sections. Following our earlier observation about the dispersal of the vote of the disprivileged, it can be argued that these sections of citizens preferred the regional parties more than the Congress in the 2024 elections. The Congress also obviously draws far less support from among the upper castes and the rich.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the data on social indicators presented here is about the women’s vote across different social groups. Earlier NES have made three observations in this regard (Deshpande, 2004). Based on a detailed analysis of voting patterns of women and of their perceptions of social issues in the 2004 general elections, the study argued that to decipher the patterns of women’s vote, the layered nature of gender realities needs to be acknowledged and that gender needs to be seen as one aspect of the broader matrix of social hierarchy rather than considering it as a self-evident political category. It also argued that caste/community identities tend to override gender in the process of making of women’s vote as well as their opinions on social issues. Third, it observed that men and women from the same social group have more identical opinions on social issues than those of women from different social groups and in fact women tend to more strongly reinforce the opinions of their male counterparts from the same social group.
The present exercise tries to revisit some of these observations in its analysis of the 2024 NES data. As shown in Table 5, women’s support to the BJP (and to the Congress) is uneven across social groups. Like their male counterparts the upper caste, rich women tend to support the BJP in a more pronounced manner. Similarly, rural, poor and less educated, Dalit women do not prefer to vote for the BJP. These trends are in tune with the earlier observations of the NES. However, in 2024 an interesting change in women’s voting can be depicted. In 2004, women tend to share and support the voting choices and opinions of their respective social groups more strongly than their male counterparts. This was particularly true of the women from privileged sections of the society. However, as shown in Table 5, in the 2024 elections, this aspect of the women’s social identities does not hold true. Instead, we see that women from across different social groups support the BJP to a lesser extent than their male counterparts. This pattern is evident not only among the less privileged social sections of women but also among the traditional social support groups of the BJP including women from urban, rich and graduate upper castes. For example, in the 2004 elections, 26% of rich men and 30% of rich women voted for the BJP. Among upper castes, these percentages were 33 and 40, respectively (Deshpande, 2004, p. 5434). Whereas in the 2024 LS elections, 44% of rich men and only 37% of rich women prefer to support the BJP. Similarly, 54% of upper-caste men and 52% of upper-caste women favour the BJP over other parties. These changes point to a possibility that women’s vote does not necessarily remain enmeshed in their caste/community identities and that women do vote independently prioritizing their gendered identities.
Strictly within the limits of the survey data we check this possibility further statistically using a binary logistic regression method. Table 6 provides a summary of the regressions for several elections between 1971 and 2024 to check the statistical significance of BJP’s gender (dis)advantage among women voters. The table gives us a few pointers to understand the patterns of women’s vote for the BJP. The first is that women are less likely to vote for the BJP compared to men even if we control all other social factors like caste, class, locality, level of education and so on. Second, the gender disadvantage to the BJP among women voters remains statistically significant for all LS elections except the one in 1971. Third, from 1996 onwards, the likelihood of women not voting for the BJP seems to have reduced significantly considering the estimated odds ratio in the summary presentation of regressions for each election. In the earlier elections, the BJP faced a more than 20% gender gap among women. It seems to have reduced considerably in 2024 to around 7%. This change can be seen because of two developments. As mentioned earlier, the BJP’s electoral strength was limited till 1996 and its social support was skewed. Since the BJP support base at that time mainly came from among the privileged sections of society and since most women belonged to the underprivileged sections, the BJP must have suffered more among women voters. As the BJP’s social support base started expanding in the latter part of the 1990s, the gender disadvantage softened. Second, as far as the last two elections are concerned, it is possible to surmise that women-targeted policies and the party’s efforts to mobilize women may have helped it to a certain extent in reducing the gender gap that it faced earlier. At the same time, the data presented here also show that even in the recent elections women are less likely to vote for the BJP compared to men.
Disadvantage to the BJP Among Women (Summary Presentation of Binary Logistic Regressions for Several LS Elections). 19
Conclusion
The empirical enquiries presented in this article about women’s vote in the LS elections lead to three possible conclusions. The first is that despite their increased turnout the extent of political participation of Indian women is still low compared to men. Second, contrary to the assumptions of political commentators, the BJP does not get women’s vote and faces a gender disadvantage. Although the party has succeeded in reducing this gender gap, it is not completely neutralized even in the 2024 elections. As far as the puzzle of the arrival of women constituency is concerned, the article notes two nuanced developments. At one level, women’s vote remains enmeshed in the community-based social identities, at the same time, there are indications of the arrival of women’s agency since women across different social groups vote for the BJP in smaller numbers compared to men.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting of Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author acknowledges partial financial support of RUSA (Rashtriya Ucchatar Shiksha Abhiyan) Maharashtra for her research, which contributed to this article.