According to some scholars, the worst tragedy in human history was an outcome of a misleading media narrative. Responding to the Allied Forces’ terms of surrender in July 1945, Japan’s prime minister used the word ‘mokusatsu’ to mean ‘silence’. Western media mischievously interpreted it to mean ‘ignore’. Enraged, the US president decided to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to devastation. It triggered a nuclear arms race that the world is still suffering from.
Misleading narratives in quest for sensational headlines can wreak havoc. The 2025 Bihar election outcome is a case in point. Nearly every political leader and policymaker in the country believes that the cash scheme of ₹10,000 to a woman in every family, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi just two months before the election, was the game-changer.
As a result, this will further intensify the race among parties in other states to distribute ‘cash for women’ in the belief that it is the magic bullet. This competitive populism can send the entire nation spiralling down a path to eventual fiscal catastrophe, political emptiness, and social disorder. Worse, this is a false narrative much like the ‘mokusatsu’ misinterpretation.
Contrary to the Election Commission’s boast that women’s turnout percentage in the 2025 election was the highest in 75 years, it was nothing extraordinary in number. About 1.4 crore women voted in the 2010 Bihar election, 1.9 crore in 2015, 2.1 crore in 2020 (Covid year), and 2.5 crore in 2025. If a student scores 75/100 (75 percent) one year and 77/90 (86 percent) the next, her score has only increased marginally; but her percentage increase looks much higher because the denominator is lower. This is exactly what happened with the EC’s women turnout percentage. Due to the cleaning up of voter lists through the special intensive revision, the denominator of total women electors was smaller than it would have been otherwise and inflating the turnout percentage.
Yes, for the first time, slightly more women than men voted, but that is as much a result of fewer-than-expected men voting due to male migration out of Bihar than any sudden increase in women voters. The women’s turnout in this election was merely a continuation of previous trends and was neither extraordinary nor sudden.
It is not even the case that women voters, lured by the cash scheme, shifted their support en masse from the opposition Mahagathbandhan alliance to the ruling NDA. The percentage of women who voted for the opposition MGB in both the 2020 and 2025 election was the same at 37 percent. The NDA vote share increased by nearly 10 percentage points in 2025, driven by Chirag Paswan’s LJP party joining the alliance, and not by a shift of women’s votes. The increase in NDA vote share came equally from both men and women. This is clearly seen in districts such as Begusarai and Khagaria, where the NDA vote share increased by 18 percentage points; but the share of women voters remained the same as in 2020. So, neither was there a sudden sharp increase in women voters, nor was there a huge shift of them from the MGB to the NDA.
The cash scheme for women in Bihar cost ₹12,000 crore, which is the same as the annual health budget for the whole state for 2023-24. To put it simply, the amount of money needed to provide medical facilities for the entire population of Bihar for one year was given away as free cash in two months.
Bihar was the 12th state to indulge in such election throwaways in the last two years. It began with Karnataka in 2023, when the Congress party announced ₹2,000 a month for women just before the election and won. Election consultants and the media painted a narrative of this scheme being the clincher, when in reality the Congress would have won even without this scheme due to a heavy anti-incumbency then.
But that false narrative set off a series of such pre-election announcements in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Delhi, and now Bihar. Six of these states do not even have enough money to pay salaries for government staff. Many have cut their development expenditure on hospitals, schools, roads, water, and roads to fund their cash schemes.
This misguided race has burnt a ₹2-lakh-crore hole in state finances annually, about the amount the Union government spends on rural jobs, drinking water, and rural roads combined for the country. The total debt of these states has doubled in three years. When states cut back on development and borrow heavily, it is the same poor woman who received the cash that is impacted the most.
Further, merely throwing cash before elections hollows out the essence of democratic politics. Such blind faith in a ‘cash for women’ magic wand to win elections breaks the connection between governance and elections, and renders leaders lazy and redundant. Why have an entire political party apparatus if all one needs to win is to throw money a few months before elections and have paid ‘jeevika didis’ go door-to-door to campaign?
Such cash transfer schemes also hollow out the very essence of governance. After all, without adequate health infrastructure, well-paved roads, or high-quality public education, people cannot just wave a bunch of currency notes to improve their lives. Distributing free cash by reducing other development expenditure and letting people fend for themselves can turn societies chaotic.
Misleading narratives of electoral outcomes, while seemingly innocuous, can be extremely dangerous. In the interest of the nation, it is time all political parties learned from the ‘mokusatsu’ mistake and stopped this race to the bottom.
Praveen Chakravarty | Chairman, All India Professionals’ Congress and AICC Data Analytics Department
(Views are personal)