THE 2025 BIHAR ASSEMBLY ELECTION EXPLAINED
Ajachi Chakrabarti
Bihar’s eighteenth assembly election was held, on 6 and 11 November, under extraordinary circumstances. It was preceded by the Election Commission of India conducting a Special Intensive Revision of the state’s voter rolls—an exercise that the ECI is poised to conduct nationwide in the near future.
As my colleague Sagar reported in the August issue of The Caravan, there are serious questions about the necessity, design and execution of the SIR process, which could not only disenfranchise people who do not have the required documents but also cast doubt on their citizenship status. Petitioners challenging the SIR in the Supreme Court estimated that around 1.75 million Muslims were excluded from the electoral rolls, making up over a quarter of all deletions in a state where they constitute a sixth of the population. The ECI disputed the methodology used to arrive at this estimate but refused to reveal the caste and religious breakup of those who were excluded, and the legal status of the SIR remains pending in the Supreme Court even as votes are cast and counted.
The SIR controversy erupted amid allegations by the leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, over irregularities in the electoral rolls used during the 2024 general election, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi held on to power despite his Bharatiya Janata Party losing its parliamentary majority, and in subsequent assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana, both of which the BJP unexpectedly won. Having been one of the few widely trusted democratic institutions in the past three decades, the ECI has increasingly come under intense scrutiny for allegedly playing a partisan role, with the Congress leader Jairam Ramesh calling it the “B-team of the BJP.”
Although the opposition did not end up boycotting the Bihar election over the SIR, the issue of election integrity looms large. The draft electoral rolls, published on 1 August, excluded 6.56 million voters. While preparing the final electoral rolls, the ECI added 2.15 million names despite receiving only 1.69 million requests challenging exclusions in the draft rolls or seeking enrolment as a new voter. It also deleted a hundred and fifty thousand more names than it received exclusion applications. The Congress alleged, and Scroll confirmed, that the ECI has disproportionately appointed bureaucrats and police officials from BJP-ruled states to act as its observers. Moreover, Jairam pointed out, “in some assembly constituencies, the number of voters’ names being deleted exceeds the victory margin from the previous elections.”
Those margins are extremely thin. In the last assembly election, in 2020, the National Democratic Alliance won 125 seats—three more than required for a majority. Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party fought that election separately, splitting the NDA vote. Hypothetically, even if the LJP’s 2020 vote is added to that of the NDA, a uniform swing of five percentage points to the opposition Mahagathbandhan would see the ruling alliance lose 42 of those seats. The LJP has since split, but both factions remain within the NDA, which would gain 60 seats with a swing of just one point in its favour.
By contrast, more than ten percent of voters were excluded in each of the 20 constituencies with the most deletions in the draft electoral rolls published on 1 August. The NDA holds 13 of these 20 seats but underperformed in them during the 2024 general election, improving its vote share by an average of 1.7 percentage points as opposed to a statewide gain of 4.1 points.
The election could prove to be a watershed moment in the career of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. As Sagar chronicles in the November issue, Nitish has, through a series of betrayals, held on to power in the state for the past two decades, taking the oath of office nine times. Since the last assembly election, which he fought as part of the NDA, he has switched sides twice. Having helped establish the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance to take on Modi in the 2024 general election, he returned to the NDA fold in January last year. His Janata Dal (United) won 12 Lok Sabha seats to become the third-largest party in the alliance—a position of considerable influence, since the BJP failed to win a majority on its own.
Modi has never before been beholden to an ally, and it remains to be seen how he deals with Nitish. The BJP has refused to commit to him continuing as chief minister even if the NDA wins. The 2020 election was the first time since 2000 that it won more assembly seats in Bihar than the JD(U), and, although Nitish continued as chief minister, 21 of the 36 members of his current cabinet, including his two deputies, are from the BJP. With questions swirling around his declining cognitive faculties, Nitish’s public appearances have been restricted to controlled settings in recent years, with the deputy chief ministers increasingly speaking for the government—including in the assembly debate over the SIR—and a troika of upper-caste JD(U) leaders, Vijay Kumar Choudhary, Lalan Singh and Sanjay Jha, speaking for the party. Despite Nitish’s manoeuvring, the JD(U) has been in decline for a while, and he needs his party to continue the resurgence it showed in the last general election if he wishes to remain central to Bihar politics.
Demographics
According to the final electoral rolls, Bihar has 74.2 million voters, drawn from an estimated population of more than 130 million. The 2023 caste survey conducted by the state government found that 63.1 percent of the population belongs to the Other Backward Classes. This category includes 142 individual communities, which are grouped into two subcategories: 30 Backward Classes that are relatively well off, including Yadavs, Kurmis and Kushwahas; and 112 Extremely Backward Classes, including 88 Hindu and 24 Pasmanda Muslim communities.
Yadavs are the single largest caste, with 14.3 percent of the total population, about thrice as large as Kushwahas and almost five times as large as Kurmis. Over the past century, these agrarian castes have wrested away their share of power from the upper-caste Brahmins, Rajputs and Bhumihars, who make up about three percent each. A similar assertion is now being seen among EBCs. In recent years, for instance, around two dozen riverine EBC communities, collectively making up a tenth of the population, have consolidated behind the Nishad identity. Scheduled Castes make up almost a fifth of the population, while Muslims account for a sixth.
For the purposes of this analysis, Bihar has been divided into ten regions, roughly contiguous with the state’s administrative divisions. The largest of these is Tirhut, with 41 assembly seats, located along the border with Uttar Pradesh, north of Saran (32 seats) and Bhojpur (22). Three other regions correspond to ancient kingdoms: Mithila, in north Bihar, with 30 seats; Magadh, in the south, with 26; and Anga, along the West Bengal border, with 12. Much of the state’s Muslim population is concentrated in the Seemanchal and Kosi regions of north-eastern Bihar, which have 17 and 20 seats respectively. The Munger (22 seats) and Patna (21) regions, located along the banks of the Ganges in central Bihar, make up the state’s economic and political heartland.
Election History
In 1994, Nitish broke with Lalu Prasad Yadav, his colleague since their days in student politics. He spent the next decade establishing himself as the leader of the opposition, wresting away the chief minister’s post in 2005. The NDA ousted Lalu by bringing together a formidable social coalition, with the BJP bringing in upper-caste support and the JD(U) developing a base among Kurmis and Kushwahas. The JD(U) had also begun making inroads among Dalits and Pasmanda Muslims, as well as among the EBCs.
Like his Andhra Pradesh counterpart, N Chandrababu Naidu, Nitish represents a small but relatively prosperous—and aspirational—agrarian caste. Both chief ministers have successfully positioned themselves as being devoted to good governance and economic development through neoliberal reforms, winning plaudits among the upper castes as well as from their own communities. Nitish, the political scientist Ashutosh Kumar wrote in 2013, “comes across as a pragmatic politician without any pretensions to be a practising socialist. As a ruler, his government has stoutly refused to hurt the dominant interest groups in order to ensure his political survival in the volatile electoral field of Bihar.” He also built a strong personal following among women and EBCs by targeting several schemes towards them and eventually gave Mahadalit status to every Scheduled Caste in the state. He handily won re-election in 2010, with the JD(U) winning 115 of the 243 seats in the assembly.
Nitish broke off the alliance, in 2013, over the BJP’s decision to have Modi lead its campaign in the upcoming general election. Although his government was still very popular, with almost two-thirds of respondents in a post-election survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developed Societies saying they were satisfied with it, Nitish’s decision to fight the 2014 election without any allies split the anti-Modi vote in the state. The BJP also benefited from its past association with the state government, the historic unpopularity of the Congress-led union government and its own efforts at social engineering. The NDA won an unprecedented 78 percent of the upper-caste vote, according to the CSDS, as well as 53 percent of EBCs, while splitting the Kurmi–Kushwaha vote with the JD(U), thanks to the inclusion of the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party, led by Upendra Kushwaha, a former protégé of Nitish. Another member, the LJP, helped the NDA win 42 percent of the Dalit vote, including 68 percent of Paswans.
The Mahagathbandhan—a grand alliance of the JD(U), the Congress and Lalu’s Rashtriya Janata Dal—was founded before the 2015 assembly election. This aligned the electorate along traditional lines: the BJP was trying to replicate the Congress’s old “coalition of extremes,” bringing together upper castes, Dalits and EBCs, while the Mahagathbandhan built, as the various socialist parties had in the past, around a core of the dominant BCs, with Yadavs and Kurmis on the same side after twenty years. However, the decline of the Congress had demonstrated the low ceiling, in contemporary Bihar, for a coalition of extremes, especially one that did not have the support of Muslims. After Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, called for a review of caste-based reservations, Dalits deserted the NDA in droves, despite the inclusion of Jitan Ram Manjhi, whom Nitish had named chief minister after the 2014 election before deposing him a few months later. The NDA won 84 percent of the upper-caste vote, according to the CSDS, but lost over ten percentage points among Dalits and EBCs. It was reduced to just 58 seats.
Respondents to the CSDS post-election survey had a much better image of Nitish than of Lalu, but the RJD outperformed the JD(U), winning nine more seats and half a million more votes despite contesting the same number of constituencies. Nitish remained chief minister, having been projected as the Mahagathbandhan’s candidate for the post before the election. In 2016, he consolidated his personal support among women by imposing prohibition in the state. The following year, after central agencies raided Lalu’s family on corruption charges, he deserted the Mahagathbandhan. His defection greatly strengthened the NDA, which was able to once again consolidate the non-Yadav OBC vote—despite losing Upendra Kushwaha to the Mahagathbandhan. It won all but one of Bihar’s Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 general election.
The 2020 assembly election produced virtually the same outcome as 2015, with both alliances winning the same number of seats as their constituent parties had in the previous election. The unchanged figures, however, masked a major churn caused by the realignments precipitated by Nitish’s defection—111 seats changed hands among the various alliances. Jitan Ram Manjhi and Upendra Kushwaha had both left the NDA after the JD(U) returned to the fold, contesting the 2019 election as part of the Mahagathbandhan. In 2020, Jitan Ram’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) was back in the NDA, which was also bolstered by the Vikassheel Insaan Party, led by Mukesh Sahani, a former Bollywood set designer who had entered politics to fight for the rights of Nishads. However, Chirag Paswan’s decision to test his party’s strength by contesting separately hurt the NDA. The LJP put up 135 candidates in the election, many of whom were BJP rebels, but only six of them ran in seats the BJP was contesting, while all but two JD(U) candidates had to contend with an LJP opponent. The LJP won only one seat, but, of the 73 seats where its candidates received more votes than the margin of victory, the NDA won only 32.
Upendra’s RLSP, meanwhile, had formed the Grand Democratic Secular Front with the Bahujan Samaj Party and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. The GDSF hurt both major alliances. The AIMIM won five seats in the Seemanchal and Kosi regions—two each from the JD(U) and Congress, and one from the RJD—and helped the JD(U) hold on to the Raniganj seat by just two thousand votes, despite the presence of an LJP candidate in the SC-reserved constituency. The RLSP and the BSP influenced dozens of close contests throughout the state, particularly in southern and western Bihar. In the Magadh and Bhojpur regions, where the two parties had been strongest in 2015, the GDSF received more votes than the margin in 18 seats, 16 of which were won by the Mahagathbandhan. These were the only regions where the NDA lost vote share despite the addition of the JD(U). The Mahagathbandhan won 39 of the 48 seats in the two regions.
The JD(U) lost all 21 seats it contested in Magadh and Bhojpur. It was reduced to just 43 seats overall, its lowest tally in twenty years. In the 67 seats it contested in both 2015 and 2020, its vote share fell by an average of 8.2 percentage points. The CSDS found that almost half of all traditional BJP voters had refused to back candidates from the JD(U) or the HAM(S), a much lower rate of vote transfer than with any other combination of allies. The BJP base appeared to be turning against Nitish. Around ten percent of respondents to the CSDS survey—most of whom had voted for the NDA—said that they wanted the coalition to remain in power without him at the helm. However, a majority of respondents remained satisfied with the Nitish government, albeit at lower rates than in previous elections.
The Mahagathbandhan replaced the JD(U) with the Left Front, which had, over the years, built pockets of support across the state, especially among Dalits, EBCs and Kushwahas. This appears to have helped, since, according to the CSDS, the alliance won a plurality of voters from the Ravidas community—the second-largest Dalit caste, after Paswans. It made some minor gains among the upper castes, which had not coalesced behind the NDA as before, but lost seventeen percentage points among EBCs. Without Nitish, the Mahagathbandhan fell back on Lalu’s Muslim–Yadav axis, winning, respectively, 76 percent and 83 percent of the two communities, which together make up around thirty percent of the population. This was not enough to win a majority. The Mahagathbandhan won 110 seats in the election. Had the parties been aligned as they currently are, with both Chirag Paswan and Upendra Kushwaha back in the NDA, it would have won 61.
In the 2015 election, the Congress seemed to have finally turned a corner in Bihar, arresting years of decline by winning 27 of the 41 seats it contested. It was allocated 70 constituencies in 2020. This was a mistake. While the RJD won 75 of the 144 seats it contested, and the Left Front won 16 of 29, the Congress won only 19 seats. It won just seven of its 37 direct contests against the BJP, and ten out of 28 against the JD(U). Party members carped at being assigned unwinnable seats by the RJD, noting that the Congress had not won in 45 of the 70 constituencies over the previous four elections. However, even in the 23 seats it was defending, it won only ten, losing an average of 8.6 percentage points. Rahul Gandhi was criticised for holding just eight rallies during the entire campaign, and the party’s lack of organisational strength was exposed yet again.
By the time the 2024 general election came around, Bihar had seen a couple of further realignments. Nitish had interpreted Chirag’s actions in 2020 as an attempt by the BJP to break the JD(U), and, soon after the VIP suffered such a fate, in early 2022, he jumped ship to the Mahagathbandhan. The greatest achievement of the new state government was the conduct, despite several legal challenges, of a caste survey that provided updated demographic figures for the state for the first time in almost a century. Nitish promised to expand OBC reservations to better reflect the share of these communities in the population, and the INDIA proposed a nationwide caste census as a campaign promise for 2024. However, after not being named convenor of the opposition alliance, Nitish returned to the NDA months before the election. Besides the BJP, his partners now included the HAM(S), the two warring factions of the LJP and the RLSP, which had rechristened itself the Rashtriya Lok Morcha. The Mahagathbandhan inducted the VIP, hoping to expand its appeal among EBCs.
Despite the absence of a nationwide Modi wave for the first time in three general elections, the reunited NDA won 30 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state. It led in 174 assembly segments, eight fewer than what it could have managed in 2020 had the LJP and RLSP vote remained within the alliance. It slightly improved its position in Bhojpur and Magadh, and virtually swept the Anga, Kosi, Mithila, Munger, Saran and Tirhut regions, leading in 139 out of the 157 assembly segments in those six regions. Crucially for Nitish, the JD(U) held its own in this election, winning 12 of the 16 seats it contested and leading in 72 assembly segments, four more than the BJP. It led in eight of the nine segments it contested in the Patna region—most of them in the Kurmi heartland of Nalanda district, Nitish’s home turf—while the BJP only did so in five out of 12.
According to the CSDS, the Mahagathbandhan made modest gains among all demographic groups in the state. Despite the presence of the LJP and the HAM(S) in the NDA, it considerably improved its position among Dalits, with 35 percent of Paswans and Pasis, and 42 percent of other SCs, voting for Mahagathbandhan candidates. Meanwhile, Upendra Kushwaha was defeated in his pocket borough of Karakat by another Kushwaha candidate, Raja Ram Singh of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (Liberation). Upper-caste support for the NDA hovered around the 2020 mark, rather than the unprecedented heights of the previous two general elections. The EBCs, however, continued to resist the overtures of the Mahagathbandhan, with a majority again voting for the NDA.
Contenders
The JD(U)’s strong performance in the 2024 general election indicates that any succession-planning by the BJP might yet be premature. Nitish leveraged that success to ensure that both the BJP and the JD(U) contest 101 seats in the 2025 assembly election. This means that his NDA partners have to win 122 out of 142 seats in order to govern without requiring his support. A poor performance for the JD(U), however, would weaken his bargaining position, especially if the NDA does well enough to render a Mahagathbandhan government unviable, with or without his support. The BJP does appear to be looking for ways to replicate the NDA’s social coalition with its other partners, presumably under the assumption that, in the absence of a committed cadre, the JD(U) might not be able to hold on to its voters without Nitish at the helm of the state government.
While Nitish remains the undisputed leader of the state’s Kurmis, both Upendra Kushwaha and the BJP’s deputy chief minister Samrat Choudhary have established themselves as leaders of the numerically larger Kushwaha community. Chirag Paswan and Jitan Ram Manjhi remain popular among their respective Dalit communities, with the former being touted as a potential chief minister, or at least a deputy, after his Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) was allotted 29 constituencies. Having deployed its partners to corral the votes of OBCs and Dalits, the BJP has chosen to focus on the upper castes, whom it has given 49 out of its 101 tickets. It has backed down from its strategy in previous elections to court Yadavs, nominating only six members of the community, down from 22 in 2015 and 15 in 2020. Having absorbed most VIP legislators from 2020, it has given ten tickets to EBCs. For his part, Nitish has rewarded his core constituency, nominating 37 BCs and 22 EBCs.
In its manifesto, the NDA promises to expand its cash transfer schemes, offering financial assistance that is meant to empower 10 million women to pursue entrepreneurial ventures that can earn them at least Rs 1 lakh a year. It also plans to provide assistance up to Rs 10 lakh to a number of marginalised communities and to appoint a commission to study the socioeconomic conditions of EBCs. Besides a number of large infrastructure projects, the manifesto promises that the government will create 10 million jobs a year and set up skill development centres throughout the state.
These promises build on the goodwill Nitish has built among these demographics over the years but, read alongside the BJP’s greater influence over government policy and its decisions to announce a nationwide caste census and a Bharat Ratna for the late EBC leader Karpoori Thakur, stake a claim for the national party to also benefit from that goodwill, as it did in 2010 and 2014. The BJP has accompanied these offers with fearmongering about a return to Lalu’s “Jungle Raj” should the Mahagathbandhan win. In Seemanchal, where it has benefited from communal polarisation in the past, the SIR has come amid a BJP campaign about illegal immigration by Muslims.
The Mahagathbandhan has continued its efforts to expand beyond its Muslim–Yadav base. While it has nominated 67 Yadavs and 30 Muslims, with the RJD having absorbed four of the five AIMIM legislators in 2022, it has also continued its outreach to Kushwahas in recent elections, giving the community 23 tickets. It has also nominated more EBCs than the NDA, having added the VIP to the alliance. Sahani had previously styled himself as “Son of Mallah,” referring to his caste, but has now been rebranded as “Son of EBCs” as he seeks to widen his party’s social coalition. Earlier this year, the RJD named Mangani Lal Mandal, a member of the EBC Dhanak community, its state president. The Bihar Congress, meanwhile, is led by Rajesh Kumar, a Dalit. The alliance’s manifesto promises a 30 percent quota for EBCs in local bodies, as well as cash transfers and scholarships for a number of Dalit and EBC communities. It also proposes a constitutional amendment to do away with the 50 percent ceiling on reservations imposed by the Supreme Court.
Tejashwi Yadav’s big pitch in order to get elected chief minister is to focus on unemployment. The Mahagathbandhan manifesto promises that, within twenty days of forming his government, he will order that each family be entitled to one government job. With the 2023 caste survey having identified 27.7 million households in the state, this would amount to expanding the public workforce by more than tenfold, since the Bihar government only employs around 2.1 million people at present. The alliance has also promised to waive fees for competitive examinations, provide free travel for candidates and to crack down on paper leaks.
The AIMIM has returned to the fray, putting up over two dozen candidates—mostly in Seemanchal—while the BSP has nominated over a hundred. However, the real wild card in the election is the Jan Suraaj party of Prashant Kishor, a consultant who got both Modi and Nitish elected before embarking on his own political startup. Kishor has spent the last few years trying to build traction for Jan Suraaj’s electoral debut, travelling extensively across the state. He aims to disrupt Bihar politics by building cross-caste support for a development agenda, particularly among the youth, by focussing on systemic issues such as unemployment, access to credit and mass migration. In his speeches, he often hectors audiences for accepting easy answers to Bihar’s travails, promising to be fiscally prudent by avoiding targeted welfare schemes. He has also said that he wants to lift prohibition.
It remains to be seen whether the media hype around Jan Suraaj translates into actual votes and whether this form of neoliberal incrementalism, without even the pretence of a social safety net, can take root in Bihar. Kishor’s natural constituency appears to be the upper castes, who are no longer as fervently behind the NDA as they once were. Of the 239 candidates he has nominated, 98 are from the upper castes, while 54 are BCs and 26 are EBCs. He had promised to give 40 tickets each to women and Muslims, but has ended up nominating 25 women, more than any other party, and 28 Muslims, just two fewer than the Mahagathbandhan. Jan Suraaj candidates include a number of turncoats from other parties, and dozens of them have declared serious criminal charges in their election affidavits—undercutting the promise to end the crime and corruption that have long characterised Bihar politics.
Close Contests
In the 2020 election, there were 20 constituencies, including eight in the Munger region, that were decided by less than one percentage point. The closest verdict was in Hilsa, in Nalanda district, where Krishnamurari Sharan of the JD(U) defeated Atri Muni of the RJD by just 12 votes. The NDA won ten of these seats—with the JD(U) accounting for seven of them—while the Mahagathbandhan won eight and the LJP and an independent won the other two. Given the structural disadvantage it faces due to the subsequent consolidation of the NDA, however, the Mahagathbandhan would need a swing of around seven percentage points in its favour to win these seats. In the 2024 general election, the average swing in these assembly segments was 0.75 points towards the Mahagathbandhan, but the NDA led in 14 of the 20.
Bellwether Seats
There are 67 constituencies in Bihar that have voted for the winning alliance in the last three assembly elections, as well as in the 2024 general election. That is an extraordinarily high number but understandable, since each of those successful groupings have included the JD(U). These seats include half the constituencies in each of the Anga, Kosi and Mithila regions. The JD(U) won 37 of them in 2020, while the BJP won 26 and the HAM(S) and VIP won two each. The NDA led in these seats by an average of 15,385 votes in 2020. It gained an average of 1.3 percentage points in 2024, while the average Mahagathbandhan vote share in these seats grew by 2.5 points. If the Mahagathbandhan were to lead in a number of these seats during counting, it would likely be on its way to forming a government, since this could indicate a statewide swing of around eight points towards the alliance.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a senior associate editor at The Caravan.
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