Bihar Assembly polls: The votes that built Nitish Kumar's stronghold

Ahead of Assembly polls, Bihar CM sharpens women-focused agenda with domicile quota, banking on female voters' rising clout and support

Just months before Bihar heads to the polls, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has reached again for his trusted lever of social engineering: Women. His Cabinet recently approved a 35 per cent reservation for women in all government jobs, but this time restricted exclusively to those who are the state’s permanent residents. 

First introduced in 2016, the horizontal quota had also extended to women from outside the state. This tightening of domicile rules signals a blend of political calculation and electoral choreography in the run-up to polls. 

For nearly two decades, Kumar has cultivated women as a distinct constituency. Their presence