Modi, the provider, and women labharthi

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has scored a comprehensive victory in the three Hindi Belt states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan — that went to the polls in November, even outperforming some of the most optimistic exit polls. It is no secret that the BJP has built a solid base of support in these states: The party won 62 out of the 65 Lok Sabha seats in these states in both the 2014 and 2019 national elections. But the Congress remained optimistic while heading into the 2023 state elections, as it had won all three states in 2018.

- Neelanjan Sircar

The Congress had pinned its hopes on welfarism (particularly concerning women voters). This model of gender-based welfarism had yielded great benefits to Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal in 2021 and, arguably, was a factor in the Congress’s victory over the BJP in Karnataka. Given this assessment, one would have expected the Congress to perform particularly well among female voters. However, data and field observations show the exact opposite phenomenon.

In the Axis My India poll, one of the few exit polls to pick up the magnitude of the BJP’s victory in Madhya Pradesh this time, 50% of women supported the BJP as compared to just 40% of women for the Congress, a massive gap of 10 percentage points. In contrast, 44% of men supported the BJP while 41% (of men) backed the Congress — a gap of just 3 percentage points. In short, the scale of the BJP victory in MP was enhanced by the backing it received from female voters. Some of this is attributable to the popularity of the Ladli Behna scheme, a direct cash transfer to women in the 23-60 age group implemented by the incumbent chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, that reached a huge majority of MP’s households.