Bihar will vote in two phases to elect a new assembly on November 6 and November 11. We will know the mandate of the 74 million strong electorate on November 14. Predicting electoral outcomes in India is something best avoided. Psephologists have had to regularly eat crow in the recent past. What is more useful is to flag the fault lines which shape an electoral contest. There are five of them which can be underlined for the forthcoming Bihar contest.
The first is to avoid the cocktail of stereotyping and confirmation biases that marks analyses by armchair commentators who fail to differentiate between top-down and organic narratives in an election. The run-up to Bihar elections has been dominated by the cacophony around the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise that has been conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI). Its tangible impact has been the deletion of 4.8 million or 6% of the state’s voters between June 24 and September 30. While a lot of SIR’s critics — there are valid reasons to critique the way in which the exercise was done and also the way ECI has conducted itself during the process — have linked this exercise to the targeted deletion of anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) voter groups (this did not happen according to data analysed by HT) and some sort of a concerted effort to undermine the universal franchise (and, therefore, the cornerstone of democracy itself), there is nothing on the ground to suggest that the idea has widespread resonance. The short point is, whatever the result is, it will not be a referendum on SIR.
The second is the question of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)’s political future in the state. From a purely ideological perspective, the RJD, at least as of now, is heading into these elections with the most diluted version of its core politics. Lalu Prasad, the RJD’s patriarch, captured power by acing the factional fight in what was then the Janata Dal in 1990. He improved his showing by achieving a perfect mix of class and caste politics in 1995 but triggered an erosion of his wider social base because of his sectarian tendencies in sharing power and eventually lost it to Nitish Kumar, one of his comrades who walked out to build a successful coalition of extremes, namely, lower OBCs (other backward classes; aka extreme backward classes or EBCs) and upper castes. 2010 only continued the RJD’s decimation and it was in this context that RJD tried to (unsuccessfully) patch-up with the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) twice, once in 2015 and then in 2022. The first time was when Nitish had an ideological beef with the Narendra Modi-led BJP and the second was in the context of an overhyped demand of conducting a caste census with the aim of resurrecting Mandal politics to overwhelm Kamandal (popular shorthand for the BJP’s) politics. A failure to capture power once again is bound to raise existential questions for the second-generation leadership of the RJD both within the party (family) and outside it.
{{/usCountry}}The second is the question of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)’s political future in the state. From a purely ideological perspective, the RJD, at least as of now, is heading into these elections with the most diluted version of its core politics. Lalu Prasad, the RJD’s patriarch, captured power by acing the factional fight in what was then the Janata Dal in 1990. He improved his showing by achieving a perfect mix of class and caste politics in 1995 but triggered an erosion of his wider social base because of his sectarian tendencies in sharing power and eventually lost it to Nitish Kumar, one of his comrades who walked out to build a successful coalition of extremes, namely, lower OBCs (other backward classes; aka extreme backward classes or EBCs) and upper castes. 2010 only continued the RJD’s decimation and it was in this context that RJD tried to (unsuccessfully) patch-up with the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) twice, once in 2015 and then in 2022. The first time was when Nitish had an ideological beef with the Narendra Modi-led BJP and the second was in the context of an overhyped demand of conducting a caste census with the aim of resurrecting Mandal politics to overwhelm Kamandal (popular shorthand for the BJP’s) politics. A failure to capture power once again is bound to raise existential questions for the second-generation leadership of the RJD both within the party (family) and outside it.
{{/usCountry}}The third is the question of the BJP, which seems to be stuck in a low-risk low-reward game in the state. It has now made peace twice with Nitish Kumar after the realisation that winning Bihar on its own might not be something which can be achieved in the near future. The problem with this strategy is that the more it takes the low-risk option, the further it will get away from the reward of winning Bihar. What adds to the irony is the fact that in its eagerness to promote Brand Modi it has failed to cultivate a state-level leadership which can push the party over the line. To be fair, it is next to impossible for a party like the BJP to avoid the minefield of caste politics while promoting one clear leader in a state like Bihar.
Four, perhaps the most important question in these elections in Bihar is the fate of the JD(U). Its biggest leader and one of India’s most successful state-level politicians, Nitish Kumar is now walking into oblivion on account of his indifferent health. Nitish Kumar will be the mascot rather than the vanguard of the NDA’s campaign in these elections. JD(U) is one of the few regional political parties in the country which was not run as a family enterprise and whether or not it can survive without its founder is a question which will matter the most going forward in the state’s polity. It is an important question not just in terms of future leadership of the state government or opposition but also because a reconfiguration of the motley social coalition that the JD(U) could maintain under Nitish could produce very different outcomes depending on who gets what.
Five, all of this is exactly what makes the entry of the son-of-the-soil political start-up Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party very interesting in these elections. Lalu’s regime signified a social revolution which eventually mutated into “democracy against development” to borrow anthropologist Jeffrey Witsoe’s phrase. Nitish perfected a coalition of extremes to usher in good governance but which could not change the state’s economic fortunes. What Kishor seems to be promising is the so-called triumph of the will (not necessarily in the fascist connotations attached with it) where a successful consultant can revive Bihar and its people’s fortunes. Will Kishor’s entry in the fight take away some of the anti-incumbency tailwinds which could have helped the RJD as the only opposition by default in a bipolar contest? This could well be the X-factor in the 2025 Bihar contest. To suggest this isn’t to propagate conspiracy theories about Kishor being a prop but the political limitations of the entrenched opposition in the state and the opportunities of creative destruction in Indian democracy.
The views expressed are personal