Maharashtra polls: How direct benefit transfer scheme for women helped Mahayuti

On the morning after the Maharashtra Assembly election results, Shaina N.C., former BJP spokesperson who switched to the Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) to contest from the Mumbadevi constituency in Mumbai, broadcast a message on WhatsApp. She had polled over 40,000 votes, more than any previous Shiv Sena candidate in Mumbadevi, “despite not one Muslim vote”, she said of her loss to Amin Patel of the Congress. Patel won his fourth election from the iconic constituency named after a temple to a goddess who gives the financial capital its name.

Shaina told THE WEEK that 40,000 women, including 15,000 Muslims, had enrolled for the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana in the Mumbadevi assembly constituency. The scheme entails a payment of Rs1,500 every month to all women aged between 21 and 65 years in families with an annual income below Rs2.5 lakh.

“It was a game-changer and a phenomenal endeavour by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde,” she said, “and it changed the way women voted because these kinds of welfare schemes really impact their lives.”

Much like in other states―Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh owe huge victories to similar schemes―the Ladki Bahin programme is being acknowledged as a major driving force behind the Mahayuti victory. It is little wonder then that Devendra Fadnavis and Shinde both thanked the state’s women voters―the state recorded a 6 per cent increase in women voters’ turnout compared with the 2019 election.

Another significant increase in voter turnout was in Thane district, Shinde’s home turf. It was seen as an outcome of his personal goodwill and the flurry of sops introduced in the final weeks of his government, including a removal of road toll tax at key entry points into Mumbai city. The district recorded a turnout of 53.1 per cent against 48.03 per cent in 2019. Shinde’s own assembly constituency of Kopri-Pachpakhadi recorded a rise of nearly 6 per cent from 2019.

In contrast, citizens’ groups, trade unions and farm unions said they found the Maha Vikas Aghadi’s agenda limited to boilerplate promises, failing to address the most urgent issues until it was too late.

“Soybean prices were a core issue,” said Kishore Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan Aandolan, a farmers’ rights advocacy group, “and the Congress was instead speaking to farmers about the Constitutional limit on reservations for different communities.”

The soybean harvest ahead of the assembly election had deepened the prevailing agrarian distress in the state as prices of the commodity collapsed to their 2011-2012 levels. Paddy farmers, too, were being forced to sell well below the government-assured minimum support price (MSP) while public procurement centres were still to open.

With only days to go for polling, the Union government made a small but significant tweak to rules regarding public procurement of soybean, permitting the off-take of farm harvest with a marginally greater percentage of moisture than usually allowed under the price support scheme. It was nimble work, at no cost to the Centre. And, it provided relief to farmers who were otherwise faced with disposing of their soybean to private traders at around Rs4,100 a quintal, well below the MSP of Rs4,892 a quintal. As it turned out, rural Maharashtra voted with decidedly more enthusiasm, clocking a 70 per cent turnout in comparison to urban constituencies’ turnout of 55 per cent.

Farm activist Nilesh Khobragade in eastern Vidarbha’s Tirora constituency, who undertook a weeks-long hunger strike outside the Tirora tehsil office before entering the electoral fray himself, said the mood had begun to turn in favour of the Mahayuti in the last two weeks before polling day. Khobragade finished fourth.

Around the same time, in Sangli in western Maharashtra, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge likened the BJP and the RSS to poison. It was a windfall moment in the election season for the RSS, which played an unprecedented role across the state during the assembly election campaign after showing no more than lukewarm interest in the Lok Sabha election. “Kharge’s comment hurt Hindus, and the Shiv Sena (UBT) paid the price,” said Tiwari.

A farmers’rights activist for more than four decades, Tiwari said the MVA also turned Other Backward Class (OBC) communities and open-category communities away from it with their comments on extending reservations. “The opposition leaders kept playing on the BJP’s pitch instead of marking out their own pitch,” said Tiwari.

Chandan Kumar, a labour rights activist who has mobilised thousands of workers in Maharashtra in sectors ranging from gig work to load carriers, travelled through Marathwada on counting day and met workers in the sugar industry, most of them from OBC groups such as Dhangars, Banjaras and Vanjaris.

“Remember that Mahatma Phule gave us the memorable phrase Stri-Shudra-Atishudra, connecting the oppression of all categories of women with the untouchables in the brahminical order,” he told THE WEEK. “That’s why there is a certain emotional connection in the Ladki Bahin scheme; it gives women cash, and also the right and the agency to use it.” He said women workers he met across Beed and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar districts in Marathwada voted for Mahayuti candidates as a rejection of the so-called progressive politics of parties that had been in power for generations but had failed to bring any real change in their conditions.

These cane harvest workers, who have continued to endure a debt bondage system that has survived for decades and believe their interests have never been adequately represented by politicians, were now in receipt of a small, but material gift from the government. For families with three or more beneficiary women, it was not an insignificant sum at all.

It was unfortunate, said Kumar, that handouts had nearly entirely replaced election-time discourse on building public institutions or demanding public services such as better health amenities and education. “It was good to see, however, that women made their electoral choice themselves, and they did so vocally,” he said.

Prachi Hatiwlekar of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-affiliated All India Democratic Women’s Association, said the rural poor had been wooed, first with the use of public money through schemes such as the Ladki Bahin Yojana, and then with the significant money power in play during the election through parties’ and candidates’ expenditure. “In Dahanu assembly constituency, which is along the state’s border with Gujarat, it was clear that the ruling parties tapped into their very deep pockets,” said Hatiwlekar, who, in recent years, led demonstrations of rural women from Thane and Palghar districts to demand, among other things, better implementation of the Right to Food Act.

The CPI(M) retained the Dahanu assembly seat, from where Vinod Nikole was re-elected. In the 11 assembly elections since 1978, the CPI(M) has won the Dahanu seat (named Jawhar assembly constituency before delimitation) 10 times.

Hatiwlekar said the Ladki Bahin scheme had also cashed in on a kind of collective morality among Maharashtra’s women voters, to acknowledge through their vote the party that had for the first time given women a cash dole.

Ruben Mascarenhas, working president of the AAP’s Mumbai unit who campaigned for MVA candidates across the state, conceded that they had been rejected even though the anger against the Mahayuti government had appeared palpable at rallies and campaign meetings. According to him, the direct benefit transfer schemes had swayed large sections of voters. “Post-Covid distress has persisted,” he said, “and people are still struggling, so voters think something is better than nothing.”

The continuing adverse economic conditions for the poor, alongside the aggressive marketing of the scheme with a campaign advertisement warning that the scheme could be withdrawn unless the Mahayuti was voted back to power, led to a euphoria around it, said political analyst and author Prof Surendra Jondhale. Eventually, the Congress, having opposed the scheme at the outset, appropriated it in their own manifesto, even promising to outdo the Mahayuti’s payouts.

Jondhale said that from his conversations with grassroots activists, his students across the state and political workers, it appeared in retrospect that the MVA’s electioneering was perceived as negative. Uddhav Thackeray did little beyond playing the victim card, and Sharad Pawar appeared to have a single-minded intent to take down the Mahayuti government, he said. “These leaders left core voter issues at the peripheral level,” said Jondhale.

Additionally, it did not help the Congress that its top two leaders in the state, Maharashtra chief Nana Patole and incumbent leader of the opposition Vijay Waddetiwar, belong to Vidarbha and have little or no rapport or emotional connection with the culturally and socio-economically distinct rural landscapes of Marathwada and western Maharashtra. As Jondhale said, “The Congress lacks a pan-Maharashtra leader.”