The ongoing Lok Sabha election is beyond the half-way point, and while the central question of the polls remains the same — Prime Minister Narendra Modi and whether he gets a third term — there are three significant mini narratives within this meta narrative on which the election hinges, namely, women, the youth, and the Scheduled Castes (SCs).
It was in the 2019 Lok Sabha election that women, for the first time in independent India, surpassed men as voters, and while some parties, including the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) under J. Jayalalithaa, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) under Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, and the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) under Nitish Kumar in Bihar wooed women voters even before this reversal in electoral participation, it is in the 2024 parliamentary election that their voting preferences have become crucial and their variations interesting.
In various States, women are voting more than men or in large numbers, and not necessarily for the same party as another State. In Karnataka, for instance, in the second phase of polls in 14 Lok Sabha seats, women outnumbered men in five seats. They have come out in large numbers and observers feel that their support may be affected by the schemes of the Congress-led State government aimed at women, including free bus travel and income support schemes.
