Four things to watch out for in Bihar results | Number Theory

.

Updated on: Nov 13, 2025, 23:12:09 IST

By Roshan Kishore, Nishant Ranjan, Abhishek Jha

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Counting for the 2025 Bihar assembly elections will take place tomorrow. The key question is whether or not Nitish Kumar’s political juggernaut, which started in October 2005, will continue to roll in Bihar. The answer to this question will depend on the intricate dynamics within the two major alliances, namely the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Mahagathbandhan (MGB). Then, there is the question of the debutant Jan Suraaj Party launched by Prashant Kishor. Here are four key data points which can help us understand these factors.

A poster of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar outside the JD(U) office, in Patna (ANI)

Will the RJD continue its recovery?

Will the RJD continue its recovery?
Lalu Yadav held power in Bihar for 15 uninterrupted years from 1990-2005. However, the fortunes of his party Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) fell sharply thereafter and it plummeted to just 22 MLAs in the 2010 Bihar assembly elections against the NDA, creating an almost existential crisis for the party. Things changed for good in the 2015 elections which the RJD fought with Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) and the Congress and it won an impressive 80 assembly constituencies (ACs). Even in the 2020 elections, the RJD did well and finished as the single-largest party slightly ahead of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with 75 ACs. But the 2015 and 2020 assembly elections were not normal as far as Bihar and RJD were concerned. In 2015, the coming together of RJD and JD(U) created a large Mandal consolidation and in 2020, the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) actively sabotaged the JD(U) with tacit approval from the BJP’s top leadership – the LJP continued to be a part of the NDA at the centre while doing this. With the NDA’s house in order, the RJD enjoys no such tailwinds this time, and a credible performance in 2025 would indicate that it has overcome its 2010 crisis.
Will Nitish Kumar regain his mojo?
Nitish Kumar’s coronation as chief minister in 2020 was more a sign of weakness than strength for Bihar’s longest serving chief minister. His party JD(U) managed to win only 43 ACs, largely because of sabotage by the LJP and it was the BJP which was the biggest constituent of the NDA in the Bihar assembly. Nitish has also had to offer more room to the BJP in the alliance of late. The number of ACs contested by the JD(U) and the BJP was 141 and 102 in 2010 elections, fell to 115 and 110 in 2020 and is now 101 each in these elections. Unless the JD(U) manages to perform as well as, if not outperform, the BJP in these elections, its control over power in Bihar could very well be ceremonial rather than the dominance which Nitish Kumar used to enjoy in the pre-2014 period.
The bipartisan bet on smaller allies
Both the MGB and the NDA have ceded more ground to their smaller allies in these elections . The NDA has offered 41 ACs to its smaller, largely caste-based party allies, namely the LJP (28 after the nomination of one canddiate was rejected) and six each to Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and Rashtriya Lok Morcha (RLM). The MGB has a wider ideological gamut of allies ranging from the Congress (61) to the Communists (33) and two smaller caste-based parties, namely, the Vikassheel Insan Party (VIP) and Indian Inclusive Party (IIP) , which are contesting 14 and 3 ACs respectively. The overall fortunes of these smaller allies will be crucial in deciding whether or not the NDA or MGB make it past the halfway mark in the state. A lot of these smaller allies are also pitted against the bigger parties in the state. To be sure, there are 12 ACs where there is an intra-alliance conflict in MGB.
The Prashant Kishor factor
The 2025 elections have seen both the major formations in Bihar consolidating their alliances by adding newer parties to their fold. Amid this quest to make the polity more bipolar, Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party is hoping to open a third front in the state by fielding candidates in almost the entire state (238 out of the 243 ACs). How exactly this debutant impacts the electoral math in these elections will be interesting to watch . While a credible performance by Jan Suraaj will be a statistical outlier, what remains to be seen is whether it does create a consolidation or sorts, by ensuring most of its candidates are placed third .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roshan Kishore
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.Read More
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nishant Ranjan
Nishant Ranjan has been working as a data journalist with Hindustan Times since 2023. In this short period, he has established a niche for creating original datasets and utilising them to produce journalistic work that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The list of datasets and stories done by him include the following: a dataset of all 717 chief ministers India has had since 1952, a dataset of all 3,350 members of India’s council of ministers, a dataset of all 190 deputy chief ministers in India and a dataset of all 279 Supreme Court judges in India (1950-2025). He has also profiled each elected Muslim MLA/MP since 1952. He is a mining engineer by training who decided to pursue a Master's in Development Studies from TISS after working in a coal mine for 10 months. He also worked as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, researching local governance in India. He also has a keen interest in analyzing electoral politics and political executives in India.Read More
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abhishek Jha
Abhishek Jha is Assistant Editor-Data at Hindustan Times. He uses statistical programming to generate newsworthy insights from large datasets. He is part of the team that produces Number Theory, a daily data story feature of the paper’s print edition. Since March 2024, he has been writing Weather Bee, a weekly column for the Hindustan Times website. He is a chemical engineer by training, who specialises in stories related to weather, climate, and the environment. Jha has been at HT since 2018, where he offers data-driven perspective and analysis on politics, environment, weather, climate, economy and society. His work includes data coverage of elections in India and abroad, including the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections; the disasters and extreme weather resulting from changing climate, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, and dwindling snow cap in the Himalayas; the factors that drive poor air quality in northern India; the changing patterns of land use; the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on labour market conditions; the changing pattern of consumer spending seen in the new consumer spending surveys; and social norms seen in the surveys such as the National Family Health Survey.Read More