E-Paper
Bihar election results: Twelve Ds that explain the Bihar results
Bihar election results: 2025 is another proof that Bihar is a contest between the Muslim-Yadav and the ‘coalition of extremes’, and the latter is far ahead
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has achieved a landslide victory in Bihar, winning 202 out of the 243 assembly constituencies (ACs) in the state. While this is marginally short of NDA’s tally of 206 ACs in the 2010 elections, its 2025 vote share of 46.6% is the highest ever for a winning alliance in the history of the state. What really happened in the 2025 elections? The question is best answered by twelve Ds.
Déjà vu wins over Dogma
The alliance of Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has never lost an election they have contested together – they did part ways in the 2014 Lok Sabha and 2015 assembly polls – since they won Bihar in October 2005. An uninterrupted, invincible run for twenty years in a state as large as Bihar is not a small feat. What explains this resilience of the JD(U)-BJP combine? The proverbial ‘coalition of extremes’ of lower Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and upper castes explains its electoral strength. This coalition emerged as a backlash to Lalu Yadav’s Muslim-Yadav or MY politics, which exploited the first-past-the-post system to win Bihar in the pre-2005 era. 2025 is another proof that Bihar is basically a contest between MY and the ‘coalition of extremes’, and the latter is far ahead. This should also disabuse people of the frequently held dogma that Bihar can give a model of politics where Mandal (OBC politics) can defeat Kamandal (Hindutva). Kamandal wins in Bihar because it has muted the Mandal binary by allying with Nitish Kumar.
Default model of doles
Social alliances are only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for winning elections because they would amount to taking the electorate for granted on the basis of just its social identity. This is where Bihar has followed what is now the default model of doing politics in India: populist doles. From ₹10,000 cash transfers to women to 125 free units of power, Nitish Kumar’s NDA government opened the floodgates of populist doles in Bihar before the elections. While the NDA will bask in the glory of the populist victory, Bihar’s fiscal math will bear the hangover of this spending.
Deluded by two decoys
This should be the most damning indictment of the opposition in Bihar. They were pitted against a chief minister who has virtually held power for 20 years in a state which continues to be the poorest in the country. Instead of making this the central strategy of their campaign, the opposition spent the most critical two to three months before the elections behind the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise by the Election Commission of India (ECI), which, as has been pointed out in these pages, did not bring any politically motivated changes to the state’s electoral roll. To make matters worse, the opposition decided to go in with a narrative that the BJP was being unfair to Nitish Kumar during the election campaign, thereby generating sympathy rather than anger towards Nitish Kumar, who continues to be the mascot of the NDA in Bihar. Had the opposition built a smart, focused and organic anti-incumbency campaign, things could well have been different.
Dissonance in Opposition, dominance up for grabs in the NDA
Anybody who followed the campaign in Bihar would have noticed the dissonance in the campaign rhetoric of the RJD and the Congress’s top leadership. While the former was all about proclaiming Tejashwi Yadav as the chief minister designate, the latter was interested in mounting a larger ideological critique of the BJP, without any concern for the organic realities of Bihar’s politics. The disaster that the MGB has faced is a result of exactly this: RJD’s unabashed quest for power, coupled with Congress’s hollow rhetoric bordering on a rant. While the MGB destroyed itself, even the NDA will enter a new phase of churning. While Nitish Kumar is widely expected to take oath as chief minister again, there is no doubt that the BJP now has greater say and hegemony in Bihar’s politics than it has ever had at the state level. Sure, it has realised that it still needs Nitish Kumar’s face and social appeal to stay in the fray in Bihar -- but it will do all it can to usurp not just larger control in the government but also usurp Nitish Kumar’s legacy. The latter, given his indifferent health, is anything but the future of the NDA in the state.
Development sans demography
What do these elections mean for the state’s development? Anybody who argues that Bihar has not seen an impressive augmentation of its physical infrastructure under Nitish Kumar is simply lying. This has made things better for the entire state, which was left in shambles under Lalu Yadav’s regime. But this development is detached from the state’s demography: the youngest and poorest in the country. They will continue to leave the state to earn a living. This will perhaps continue, and it indicates a larger failure of the state’s political economy.
Dialectics of democracy
This is the most important takeaway from today’s results if one takes a longue durée view. What has now become the dominant social coalition in the state, where a non-dominant (in terms of population) OBC chief minister is winning election after election, thanks to a coalition of upper castes, lower OBCs and Dalits, would not have been possible had Lalu Yadav not challenged and destroyed the toxic upper caste dominance in Bihar’s politics. There would be no Nitish Kumar in Bihar if Lalu Yadav had not preceded him. Of course, it is democratic dialectics at its best where Nitish’s success has come on the back of a political destruction of Lalu Yadav, the political agent who laid the ground for the former’s success.
No matter what naysayers of Indian democracy say, its dialectics have shaped Bihar’s politics, making it (democracy) a fascinating and humbling thing at the end of the day.
The views expressed are personal
