Not conspiracy, political economy explains Bihar results | Number Theory

Here are three charts which tell us why Bihar results fit perfectly well with the long-term political trajectory of the state

Election results are not easy to predict, especially in a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. However, when the difference between the winner and runner-up is as high as 10% of the votes cast, as was the case in Bihar this time, there ought to be some inkling, at least directionally, of what the results could have been. However, the opposition, and a section of the commentariat sympathetic to it, seem to be in denial about why the results are the way they

AFP picture (AFP)

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  If there is one election statistic which can explain the shock in the opposition camp after the Bihar election results it is the vote share of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) led Mahagathbandhan (MGB). It actually went up by 0.7 percentage points between the 2020 and 2025 elections, and yet, the MGB’s seat share collapsed from 45.3% to just 14.4%. This is primarily a result of the NDA adding 9.3 percentage points to its vote share between 2020 and 2025, not at the cost of the MGB votes, but by making a large dent into what was non-NDA and non-MGB vote in the 2020 elections. The collapse of the non-aligned vote in Bihar is nothing short of spectacular: it has fallen from almost 49% in the 2005 February elections -- the first in which Lalu Yadav’s RJD could not secure a majority since 1990 -- to just 15.5% in 2025.
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  Tejashwi has more popular support than his father ever had, but he is faced with a huge counter-polarisation thanks to his father’s legacy

  The instinctive political reaction to the latest Bihar results -- and the 2019, 2020 and 2024 results as well -- would be to say that Tejashwi Yadav does not have his father’s political acumen. The latter won every election in Bihar from the 1990 assembly to the 2004 Lok Sabha. There is a good reason to argue that such a conclusion lacks nuance. The vote share of RJD or its alliances in the last three assembly elections in Bihar (2015, 2020 and 2025) is greater than what it was in 1990, 2000, 2005 February, 2005 October and 2010, and less than one one percentage points below the 1995 vote share. Lalu Yadav won the three elections from 1990 to 2000, February 2000 produced a hung assembly, and the October 2005 and 2010 elections were won by the NDA. And yet, the RJD and its allies have faced defeat in 2020 and 2025 elections simply because the NDA’s vote share has been greater. Instead of introspecting on the reasons behind the counter-polarization against it, the RJD, its allies and the denialist commentariat is crying electoral fraud. The biggest disservice they are doing by such an attitude is to their voters, who are more in number than in Lalu Yadav’s political heydays.
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  The counter-polarisation against RJD is not just nostalgia: it’s a shrewd mix of power and populism

  This is what most people do not understand about Bihar’s politics today. While the NDA made a very big deal of the so-called ‘Jungle-Raj’ of Lalu years in its campaign, the material basis of the political appeal was more than just nostalgia. NDA’s political appeal worked on a two-pronged approach. First is a consolidation of the elite from upper castes and non-Yadav backward classes (BCs), both of which have a disproportionate share among MLAs compared to their population. However, its popular support in these elections came from the really poor among lower OBCs or EBCs and SCs, which put together have a 55.7% share in the state’s population and have an even bigger share in the number of poorer households in the state. A lot of these sub-castes do not have the material wherewithal to produce leaders who can compete in electoral politics, but some token representation – as was pointed out in these pages yesterday – along with populist benefits for the larger population has been more than enough to bring them decisively in the NDA’s fold. Of course, this strategy is not very different from what incumbent parties, including those opposed to the BJP, have been doing to win elections. Obviously, the incumbent has an advantage here. The only indictment of Tejashwi and RJD on this count is that they did have a stint in power with Nitish Kumar twice, 2015-2017 and 2022-23 and could have done what the NDA did in terms of its pre-election cash transfer. Perhaps, this suggests a bigger ideological handicap of the RJD: it still thinks only caste matters in politics and not class.