The Election Commission of India (ECI) has announced the schedule for Bihar elections. After a two-phase poll beginning November 6, results will be declared on November 14. What will happen in the 2025 Bihar assembly elections? A longer data story gives a slightly long-term perspective on Bihar's politics to understand the dynamics of the present election. However, there is an equally interesting question to be asked about the recent past of Bihar's electoral competition. Here are four charts which try
2020 assembly election was the closest Bihar has seen in a long time2020 assembly election was the closest Bihar has seen in a long time
The vote share difference between the two major alliances was less than one-tenth of a percentage point in the 2020 assembly elections. Even in terms of seat share, the difference was less than 10% of total seats. This was very different from most past Bihar elections, where the winning alliance had a clear edge over its main opponent.
2020 becoming close was because of the JD(U)’s collapse
The Janata Dal (United) was the senior partner in the NDA and contested 115 assembly constituencies (ACs) compared to 110 contested by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). However, the JD(U) could win just 43 ACs, its strike rate falling to the lowest in any assembly election since the 2000 assembly election, when Nitish Kumar was part of the Samata Party and still three years away from the merger with JD(U). 2020 was also the second consecutive assembly election in the state when the JD(U) fell behind the RJD in seat share. To be sure, the RJD and JD(U) were allies in 2015, but the former finished ahead with a better strike rate.
And part of JD(U)’s poor showing was sabotage engineered by LJP, tacitly supported by the BJP
Ramvilas Paswan, the third of the three social justice musketeers of the socialist camp of Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar’s generation, was a part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in the Centre but critically ill. He passed away in October 2020 just over a week after the Bihar poll announcements. Despite being a part of the NDA and from Bihar, Ramvilas’s son Chirag fielded 135 candidates in the 2020 elections: 113 in ACs with JD(U) a candidate and only six in ACs with a BJP candidate. This deliberate targeting of JD(U) candidates and a shrill campaign against Nitish Kumar – he had been Bihar’s chief minister for 15 years and therefore faced anti-incumbency headwinds – severely damaged the JD(U)’s performance. This is best seen in the seats lost by the JD(U) where LJP finished third or below. The LJP had a vote share more than the victory margin in 64 ACs where it finished third or lower, and JD(U) was the runner-up in 42% of these 64 ACs. This sabotage is likely to have been one of the factors behind Kumar’s 2022 desertion of the NDA, although he returned before the 2024 election.
2024 suggests that BJP and JD(U) have buried the hatchet and rediscovered their mojo
The NDA, which included the LJP this time, won 30 out of the 40 parliamentary constituencies (PCs) in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. When disaggregated at the AC level, it won 174 out of the 243 ACs in the state. This improvement over 2020 performance was achieved by a ten-percentage point improvement in the NDA’s vote share – 4.3 percentage points if one adds LJP’s vote share to NDA in 2020 elections – even as the RJD-led alliance also added about two percentage points to its vote share. However, it was the NDA which saw a big jump in its seat share to vote share ratio – it is always a useful metric to compare a party’s efficacy in converting votes into seats in a first-past-the-post system – between 2020 and 2024.
If the 2020 election results were shaped by BJP’s ploy for undercutting Nitish Kumar going wrong, the JD(U) could do badly in 2025 even without sabotage. Nitish Kumar has now been in power for 20 years, is keeping indifferent health; and, worst of all, being seen as non-responsive on serious allegations of corruption against senior ministers in his cabinet by his one-time Man Friday Prashant Kishor. There was a time when electoral permutations and combinations in Bihar were only about its caste calculus. 2025 could continue the trend started by the 2020 elections where narrative matters more than caste.
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