UP assembly elections: Women’s voice echoes in BJP’s cheer

NEW DELHI Women voters have stood up to be counted, once again. The traditional ‘silent voters’, who determined successive electoral fortunes in Tamil Nadu, Bihar, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, have done it again in UP, where they account for 40% of the electorate, and emerged as the key reason for BJP scripting history and winning a second erm for CM Yogi Adityanath.

While their emergence as an ‘independent voter’ category whose participation has increased in every poll may not necessarily point to a preference for a political party, it marks a social change that suggests women may no longer be taking political cues from the reining patriarchs.

In UP, where 62.2% women voted against 59.6% men, BJP’s free ration scheme, combined with the improved law and order, appears to have worked in its favour.

In village after village, women posed with bags of rations plastered with photos of PM Modi and CM Yogi. When the Covid-induced lockdown left hundreds of migrants marching back home, the centrally-sponsored free ration, along with rations by the Yogi government, served as the “double dose” that women said helped keep their families alive.

But women voters were on parties’ radar well before the pandemic. BJP wooed them with rations, toilets (‘

Izzat Ghar

’) and cooking gas (Ujjwala). In last year’s Tamil Nadu polls, DMK and AIDMK promised monthly monetary incentives, maternity leave and solar stoves. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar’s poll plank of prohibition — popular among women — worked for him. Not surprisingly, women are being handed the credit for victory marches in Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa.

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