The general perception in the media is that a sizeable percentage of women are still inclined towards Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar. What is not discussed in our television studios and Op-ed columns of the newspapers is that a big chunk of men hold an opposite view on their prohibition policy and the state government’s decision to give 35% reservation to women in all its jobs.

Of late, almost every day, these men are being lathi-charged by the police in Patna as they are either demanding the filling of thousands of vacancies or an end to contractual jobs. On September 15, sub-inspector and constable aspirants were badly thrashed by the police when they were on the way to the chief minister’s bungalow demanding filling of vacant posts. Many of these agitating youths are now often seen protesting outside the office of the Bharatiya Janata Party. On September 13, the meeting of the Bihar BJP Core committee to be held in the party’s headquarters was abruptly shifted to the State Guest House as thousands of dismissed special land survey contractual workers had laid siege to it. Among those who attended the meeting were the BJP chief J P Nadda, Union ministers Giriraj Singh and Nityanand Rai, party’s general secretary B L Santosh, deputy CMs Samrat Chaudhary and Vijay Kumar Sinha and other functionaries.

Exaggerated perception

The truth is that women’s support for Nitish is not as overwhelming as it is being made out to be by many of our public opinion makers. Had it been so, why would his party, Janata Dal (United), have won only 43 seats in the Assembly election held in 2020 when it put up candidates in 115 constituencies—leaving the rest of the seats for alliance partners. Barring 2010 Assembly election, Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) had won lesser number of seats in comparison to its alliance partners RJD or BJP in 2015 and 2020, respectively.

The percentage of turnout of women voters is increasing because their population outnumbers men. As per an estimate, five million or more Bihari migrants, an overwhelming number of them male, live outside the state to earn a livelihood or pursue education. Only a small proportion of them return to home at the time of the election.

The fact is that the involvement of women in rural sector work had started in the 1990s or even earlier—yes, during the era of so-called Jungle Raj. (Now late) Ms Viji Srinivasan, a social worker from Tamil Nadu, had, through her organization Adithi, extensively worked among the Women Sharecroppers of north Bihar between 1988 and 2005 when she died. She had also worked for the uplift of the tribal women in the real jungles of Bihar, from which Jharkhand was carved out in 2000.

Similarly, Kerala-born Sister Sudha Varghese, who got Padma Shri in 2006, through her organization Nari Gunjan, has been working among women belonging to the Musahar community, the weakest of the Scheduled Castes of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, since 1987. She lives with them in Jamsaut village of Patna district. These efforts by women from non-Hindi speaking states to empower lakhs of them more than three decades back may sound unpleasant to the ears of those who still believe in the baseless and absurd propaganda that nobody, particularly women, used to come out after sunset in Bihar then. The irony is that Nitish Kumar has himself debunked this falsehood several times when he shared power with RJD twice, but started parroting it once he joined hands with the BJP.

Freebies for women

In a bid to woo 50% voters earlier this month, the state government started disbursing Rs 10,000 as the first installment to one woman in each family under Mukhiya Mantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana. If they show signs of improvement in their business another aid of Rs 200,000 would be given to them in the next six months. Around 2.50 crore women are likely to be benefited.

These freebies for women have been announced at the time when thousands of shops and business establishments run by men across the state, including in downtown Patna, have to shut them down following haphazard construction of flyovers in the middle of narrow and congested streets. Several reputed markets in Patna’s Ashok Rajpath are now struggling to survive because of the totally unnecessary construction of a double-decker flyover. Not only that, several business establishments had to be demolished because of the simultaneous construction of the Patna Metro.

Rampant construction of greenfield road projects has dislocated thousands of families. For example, there already exist two highways linking Patna to Rajgir in the chief minister’s home turf of Nalanda district. Now, a third project has been undertaken for which land acquisition work is going on. In the same way, in the last Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced an expressway linking Patna and Purnia. This new project has been announced when there already exists National Highway 31 and the East-West Corridor connecting these two cities. It is another thing that a person travelling by car has to pay the toll tax of Rs 700-800 for a distance of less than 300 km.

Incidentally, on September 2, former Bihar BJP chief Sanjay Jaiswal, MP, sent a legal notice to Jan Suraaj Party supremo Prashant Kishor, who had charged that he had manipulated the alignment of a road over-bridge in Bettiah to suit his petrol pump.

Though the media is not giving enough coverage to the protest against the land acquisition policy, CPI ML (Liberation) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya raised this issue while delivering his speech in Patna at the conclusion of a fortnight-long Voters Adhikar Yatra against special intensive revision on September 1. He later told this correspondent as to how the Narendra Modi government’s land acquisition law has diluted the Land Acquisition Right Act, 2013.

Ironically, on March 14, 2015, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar (then not in NDA) sat on a day-long fast in protest against the enactment of the new land acquisition law by the Modi government.

It is alleged that these construction works have less to do with people’s welfare and more to do with corruption. While the big and powerful get more than due compensation, the claim of the weaker section of society is ignored.

Gender divide

If the infrastructure construction boom is causing massive displacement to both men and women, there is a gender divide on the ban on liquor and a 35% reservation for women in all the state government jobs.

Journalists who have recently fanned out to the interiors of Bihar, especially during the campaign against special intensive revision of voters’ list, felt that a huge majority of men think that prohibition has totally failed and that it should be lifted as youths are using new types of intoxicants and drugs. Contrary to this, many women still stand for dry Bihar, though they too agree that the policy has not succeeded—in fact, it has given birth to a new type of mafia.

Election issue

Political parties are making it an election issue. Prashant Kishor of Jan Suraaj Party is candid enough to announce that his party would lift the ban the moment it is voted to power, as prohibition has wreaked havoc in Bihar. Tejashwi Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal has adopted a slightly cautious stand and has promised to remove the ban on toddy once it comes to power. The Oasis, the Dalit castes engaged in this business, are elated over this decision and declared support for the Grand Alliance.

The problem with the National Democratic Alliance is that one of its constituents, Hindustani Awam Morcha, is dead against the liquor ban. Its patron and Union minister Jitan Ram Manjhi had repeatedly said that only Dalits and people belonging to the weaker section of the society are being caught and penalized, while the affluent are let off after lighter punishment. The crackdown by police has ruined lakhs of poor families, he alleged.

Besides, unlike the upper echelon of society, at the lower level, some women also drink. They too have become victims of the police action.

Why was the job quota resisted?

So far, the 5% quota for jobs is concerned the frustration of the unemployed men is quite palpable. They may be reluctant to openly share their anger as they fear that mediapersons may dub them as misogynists. Yet try to provoke them, and the real anger will be out.

What irks the people most is that in the absence of any domicile policy, female school teachers from across India got an opportunity to get jobs in a big numbers. Though there is no specific data, a principal of a training college told this correspondent that about one-third of women school teachers who got the jobs are from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, and even from Kerala. It is after widespread protest from candidates and demand by RJD that the Nitish government had in July 2025 introduced domicile policy with a 35% reservation for women.

Now, female candidates from outside the country will fall under the general category. In the last three years, the Bihar government has appointed over three lakh school teachers—the process started when Nitish was sharing power with RJD and Congress between August 10, 2022, and January 28, 2024.

The mass-scale selection of female school teachers from far-off states has exposed the quality of women candidates from Bihar. The tragedy is that after 20 years of empowerment of women by the Nitish government, the distribution of bicycles, uniforms, books, and scholarships to girls from Bihar cannot compete with their counterparts from other states. The menfolk are upset that a 35% quota for women led to the appointment of inferior and less talented female candidates, a sizeable number from outside Bihar. They allege that many qualified male candidates fail to get jobs.

When the same Nitish government two decades back fixed a 50% quota for women in the urban and rural local bodies, it was not resisted by men. This was simply because men knew that there was scope to operate from behind the scenes. Soon, a new breed called Mukhiya Pati (Husband of Mukhiya) and Sarpanch Pati (Husband of Sarpanch) emerged. Actually, they still call the shots in many panchayats and urban bodies.

But this cannot happen in the case of jobs. That is why there is so much resentment.

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