Terms of Trade: Has the political narrative shifted in Bihar?

Unless there is some major breakdown in either of the alliances, the seat sharing and candidate announcement will eventually settle and fade into the background.

Nominations will close for both phases of the elections in Bihar in four days from now (this column is being written on Thursday morning). Through this week, it is the tussle within and between parties in the two major alliances that has dominated the news cycle from the poll-bound state.

Janata Dal (United) supporters wear masks of CM Nitish Kumar in Patna on Tuesday. (Santosh Kumar/ HT Photo)

In the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the friction primarily seems to be an account of discomfort within the Janata Dal (United) and two smaller allies Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and Rashtriya Lok Manch (RLM) because of the small ally Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) being offered 29 seats. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the first to announce candidates for all101 assembly constituencies (ACs) in its quota and looks the most organised as of now. By Thursday, though, the JD(U) had also done so -- for the 101 seats it is contesting.

Things are worse in the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) led alliance where even a basic seat sharing formula is yet to be announced at the time of writing this column, with just a day to go before nominations close for the first phase of the election. Once again, individual parties have been announcing their candidates.

Unless there is some major breakdown in either of the alliances, the seat sharing and candidate announcement will eventually settle and fade into the background as campaigning begins from next week. It is this phase which this edition of the column is more interested in.

Bihar is a state where electoral battle lines and narratives around them have been crystal clear in the past . In 1995 and 2000, it was the social justice plus secularism plank of Lalu Yadav that was the central contradiction in the elections. Once Nitish Kumar was able to dislodge the RJD in the October 2005 elections, the NDA under his leadership, fought the 2010 elections promising to prevent a relapse of the ‘Lalu Raj’ in the state. The scale of the mandate to the NDA in 2010 underlined how strongly this pitch resonated. Things took a turn for the NDA after Narendra Modi took over the reins of the BJP before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, making Nitish’s coalition of extremes an untenable one. He jumped ship to join his arch rival Lalu. The 2015 political battle in the state saw the best ever performance of Mandal in all of its fights with Kamandal since the 1990s in north India. The victory, more Mandal’s than either Lalu or Nitish’s individually, proved short lived as two of Mandal’s best protagonists were unable to resolve their contradictions. Nitish walked back to the BJP, only to repeat the cycle once more between 2022 and 2024, once again on the Mandal plank of caste census.

Before delving into the question of what is the central narrative in the 2025 contest, it is useful to spend some time on what shaped the 2020 narrative in Bihar . Nitish Kumar, had already been in power for 15 years in 2020 and Bihar continued to be among the poorest states in the country. BJP leaders who were seen as close to Nitish were eased out of the party’s affairs in Bihar and the BJP took a calculated bet by allowing a controlled fratricide of sorts within the NDA’s ranks by letting Chirag Paswan target Nitish and his party in the elections despite being a part of the NDA at the Centre. The result was a disaster for the JD(U) and a narrow shave for the NDA as a whole, while the RJD walked away with a pretense of being as big a party as the BJP in the state. Basic electoral numbers prove that this is not true.

The friction within the NDA this time is nothing compared to what it was in 2020. The only takeaway from this is that the BJP has realised that any tactic to weaken Nitish Kumar is bound to backfire in a bad way. Nitish to the BJP today is a politician like a really old general who is not necessarily dictating battle formation or leading the charge himself but still has controls a lot of missiles . He is also too respected and decorated to be purged lest the masses turn against the people purging him. This unease within NDA ranks will likely continue even after the results.

What is surprising -- to its detriment -- is the lack of political sharpness in the RJD led alliance’s campaign this time. Having made peace twice with Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) since 2015, the RJD has in a way diluted its anti-incumbency plank which it could have enjoyed as the primary opposition party in the state for 20 years now. This has only been compounded by the widespread narrative in the state that a section of the JD(U)’s top leadership is working more closely with the BJP than doing what Nitish Kumar wants them to do. An election where a chief minister of 20 years is practically out of campaign, but also out of the firing line of the opposition and becomes an object of passing sympathy is not necessarily in favour of the opposition. While a sharp policy level and political attack on the incumbent government could have helped the RJD led alliance, the opportunity has been curbed because of two factors. One, a slew of populist announcements by the NDA which focuses on the poor, especially women voters. And two, Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party , with its polemics in attacking entrenched politics in the state has stolen some of the anti-establishment wind out of the RJD’s sails. The RJD’s campaign, as of now, sounds like some sort of an assertion of Tejashwi Yadav’s birthright to become the chief minister of the state. Forget voters or his alliance partners, even his siblings do not seem really excited about the idea.

This is not to denigrate Tejashwi or undermine his party which continues to have a formidable social base in Bihar even today. It is to flag a larger shift in Bihar’s political economy contradictions. The peak of Lalu Yadav’s politics was the dominant OBC playing vanguard to lead a subaltern assertion against entrenched and obnoxious feudal assertion in the state. Nitish Kumar dislodged Lalu’s Mandal by tactically marrying Mandal and Kamandal but tried to practice a politics of empowerment rather than vendetta. This politics, while it did bring peace and order, could not unleash a structural transformation of the state. Also ironic as it sounds, Nitish’s core politics became a victim when Kamandal became the hegemonic force in the country.

After a turmoil of about a decade or so, Bihar is witnessing an election where there seems to be no differentia specifica about the state’s politics compared to the rest of the country. The incumbent is trying to renew power via the plain vanilla method of freebies even as palace coups, both within the ruling and the opposition camp, continue to animate usual political discussion. It is always foolish to predict results before they are declared, but recent experience shows that the passive provide-freebie model of politics mostly favours the incumbent irrespective of its ideological hue.

Its poverty notwithstanding, Bihar’s politics was always richer than many of its better-off peers with history and society engaged in a dialectical dance. From 2025 onwards, this might not be the case.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa.