Maharashtra polls: What spurred more women turned out to vote this time around?

In Maharashtra's assembly elections, women's voter turnout outpaced men's in 15 constituencies, with overall turnout at 65.22% for women

MUMBAI: At least one result is already out: More women turned out to vote in this week’s Maharashtra assembly election. In at least 15 of the state’s 288 assembly constituencies, in fact, woman voters outnumbered their male counterparts. (It should be noted that some of these constituencies did have a few more women registered than men, with this gap ranging from 94 to about 9,000.)

More women turned out to vote in this week’s Maharashtra assembly election. (PTI Photo)

Four key districts of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region — Mumbai City, Mumbai Suburban, Thane and Palghar — saw a higher percentage of women voters than male voters too.

In fact, the share of women voters, as a percentage of total women registered to vote, was higher this time around than in the previous two assembly polls, and higher than in the Lok Sabha elections held earlier this year, data from the Election Commission has shown.

Overall, 65.22% of the total number of women registered to vote in the state, turned out to be heard on Wednesday. That’s 30.64 million of the 46.99 million women voters registered with the Election Commission.

That’s a turnout of just 1.62% less than the corresponding figures for male voters. There, 66.84% of total men registered to vote turned out. (Or, 33.43 million of the 50.02 million male voters registered in Maharashtra.)

Incidentally, that gap of just 1.62% was far higher — standing at 4.41% — in the Lok Sabha election held in April-May. That figure stood at 3.51% in the last assembly polls, held in 2019; and it stood at 2.64% in the assembly polls in 2014.

Traditionally, a higher-than-usual turnout, particularly by women, is seen as a sign of anti-incumbency.

This time’s assembly polls saw the highest turnout (65.11%) since 1995 (when turnout stood at 71.7%). In that year too, the turnout of women was higher than usual, and the gap between the turnouts of men and women was low, at just 2.64%. That proved to be an anti-incumbency vote, seeing the reigning Congress-led government fall, to be replaced by a Shiv Sena-BJP government.

Back to the four MMR districts, 53.42% of women registered to vote turned out, against 51.99% of men, in Mumbai City; and 56.75% of women against 56.09% of men in Mumbai Suburban.

Thane saw 57.11% of registered women cast their vote, against 56.79% of registered men. In Palghra, it was 67.01% of women and 66.28% of men registered to vote.

The gap between male and female turnouts, meanwhile, was lower than the state average in the districts of Dhule, Gondia and Latur. Here, more men turned out to vote, but not by much. The gap between the male and female turnouts ranged from 0.77% to 1.3%, according to the Election Commission data released on Friday.

The 15 constituencies where women voters outnumbered men included Guhagar and Dapoli in Ratnagiri, Dahanu in Palghar, and Chandgad in Kolhapur, and Nandurbar.

Within Mumbai Suburban, the constituency of Anushakti Nagar showed a sharp difference in the turnouts of men and women, but 55.69% of registered women voting, against 52.59% of registered men.

What could also account for the high turnouts, overall and of the women, is micro-level management by the Bharatiya Janata Party, says election analyst Vijaykumar Kohad.

“The high turnout among women voters could be attributed to schemes such as Ladki Bahin or it may because of anti-incumbency,” he said. “The micro-level management of voters by parties such as BJP resulted in high volumes of voting in the last three hours, and the percentage of women and youth among these was large. It could mean that the floating voter will vote in that party’s favour,” he said.

In a bit of a reality check, it should be mentioned that there are still just 936 women registered to vote, for every 1,000 men, a number that has risen but marginally, from 925 women per 1,000 men, in 2019.