All eyes on Bihar as state vote becomes barometer of political promises

Millions of voters in India’s poorest state head to the polls Thursday in a contest seen as a barometer of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s support after his tumultuous year in office.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules Bihar state in a coalition with regional parties, will be looking to retain its power in the 243-member legislature. Voting will take place over two days — Nov. 6 and 11 — with results announced on Nov. 14.

A victory is crucial for Modi to reassert his authority more than a year into his third term in office. He’s battled numerous challenges in recent months, from a four-day armed conflict with Pakistan to a collapse in US-India trade ties, which is weighing on economic growth prospects. He’s also having to fend off a vocal opposition who’ve stepped up their attacks over claims of election fraud.


“They badly need to score a win now to counter this impression that things are getting a little bit out of hand for the government,” said Gilles Verniers, a political analyst covering South Asia at CERI, Sciences Po research center in Paris. “Electoral politics becomes important because whichever win they score can be used to counter that growing negative impression on his third mandate.”

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Bihar has an outsized influence in national politics with its 127 million people, equivalent to the entire population of Mexico. The state accounts for 40 of the 543 seats in the lower house of the national parliament.

The BJP has teamed up with the regional Janata Dal (United) party, led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who wields deep influence in state politics. Together with smaller allies, the bloc has wooed voters with social welfare programs and infrastructure projects.

The opposition’s campaign has been led by the Indian National Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and regional politician Tejashwi Yadav, who have highlighted lackluster job creation, and criticized Modi’s handling of the Pakistan conflict and failure to secure a trade deal with the US. They also accuse the ruling party of using federal agencies to influence polls — an allegation the ruling party has denied.

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Opinion polls suggest the BJP-led alliance may have a slight edge over the opposition. A C-Voter survey suggests a 5.2 percentage-point lead for the ruling coalition over its main rival. However, voter surveys are notoriously unreliable in India and proved inaccurate in predicting last year’s national election outcome.

Modi has sought to woo voters with cash handouts, especially for women. On a rainy day last week in Muzaffarpur, one of Bihar’s largest cities, Modi spent a chunk of his campaign speech to thousands of supporters highlighting the government’s welfare programs.

With unemployment and mass migration key issues for voters, he focused on the millions of dollars worth of cash handouts being paid to women and farmers, subsidized cooking gas and the free supply of food grains. Modi recently announced cash payments of 10,000 rupees ($113) to 13 million women in Bihar.

The state, a landlocked region bordering the Himalayan nation of Nepal, is the country’s poorest with a per capita income of just 32,227 rupees ($364) for the year ending March 2024, compared with the national average of 106,744 rupees.

A lack of jobs means a large proportion of the state’s population migrate to seek work elsewhere. The unemployment rate for people aged 15 and 29 years in Bihar was 29.62% in 2022, much higher than the national average, according to the most recently available data from the International Labor Organization.

The opposition is seeking to capitalize on the unemployment problem by promising to give a government job to a member of every household in the state. The BJP-coalition has countered with a pledge of creating over 10 million positions and promising more cash handouts if elected.

Freebies allow the government to escape some accountability for undelivered promises, said Sarthak Bagchi, a political analyst based in Ahmedabad. “This also squarely puts the incumbent in a very advantageous position because the incumbent is able to deliver this.”

Senior BJP and alliance leaders gathered last week at a local hotel in Bihar to release their manifesto and whip up voter support. Dharmendra Pradhan, a minister in Modi’s federal cabinet who is overseeing the party’s campaign, spoke about the improvement in law and order in the state, which he said helped to attract more investments to the state.

For voters like 18-year-old job seeker Satyam Giri, it’s those policies that matter.

“We need jobs and we don’t want to leave the state to earn,” said Giri. The government should get “companies to come to Bihar,” he said.