Bihar elections: In a battle that went down to the wire, BJP saved NDA’s day, RJD 2.0 has entered

By: Gilles Verniers

The NDA is poised to form the government in Bihar with a narrow majority, with the BJP leading the alliance for the first time in terms of seats and votes. While it is too early to tell the exact government configuration that will emerge from these results, a few observations can be made.

First, this election confirms a long tradition in Bihar of political fragmentation. Since the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in 2000, no party has obtained more than 25% of vote share on its own due to the fragmentation of the electorate and the prevalence of pre-electoral alliances. Given Bihar’s chronic low turnout, a party can be ahead of others with as little as 13% of the entire state’s registered voters. Fragmented outcomes do not produce clear mandates, other than the reality that the electorate did not choose to put its faith decisively behind one party or one alliance.


Second, the result already shows a vast gap in performance between members of both coalitions. The BJP and the Janata Dal (United) have very different strike rates -- 66% and 43%. The JD(U) has always been the weaker member of any alliance it has been part of. But never in the past had the gap between the two main partners of its alliances been so wide. In 2015, there was a 9% difference in strike rate, in favour of the RJD, in an election that they won.

People will point at Chirag Paswan’s the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) as the spoiler of Nitish Kumar’s election. The LJP contested 135 seats -- 113 fielded against JD(U) candidates and only six fielded against the BJP. The LJP also fielded a large number of upper-caste candidates (nearly four LJP candidates out of ten) and non-Yadav other backward classes (OBCs), which could have cut into both the BJP and the JD(U) support bases wherever LJP candidates contested.

Rumours abound that the BJP let the LJP -- a member of the NDA -- contest on its own to diminish Nitish Kumar’s influence within the alliance. While one cannot confirm or deny the existence of such a Machiavellian plan, the fact remains that the LJP’s lone ride cost many seats to the JD(U), ultimately to the benefit of the BJP.

If Paswan succeeds in harming Kumar by cutting into the NDA vote base in seats where the JD(U) ran, it is not clear what he will actually gain from it, as the LJP won a single seat. In politics, one’s strength is measured by one’s representation in elected assemblies. By this measure, Paswan played the role of the spoiler during this election without obtaining the pivotal position he hoped to get -- to leverage other parties and extract benefits.

On the other side, the RJD may regret having ceded to the Congress’ demand to contest 70 seats, a high number for a marginal party in the state. While the RJD has won 44% of its contests, the Congress strike rate lagged at only 30%. Once again, the Congress has dragged down a coalition partner.

But that is not the only reason for the relatively poor performance of the RJD. As political scientist Neelanjan Sircar has noted, the BJP’s strike rate was much higher against the RJD (nearly 70%) than the JD(U)’s (30%). This means that the RJD was very competitive when pitted against JD(U) candidates but not up to the task when challenging BJP candidates. This also implies that the JD(U)’s poor showing cannot be attributed to the LJP factor alone.

Third, commentators tend to discard the importance of local factors. The combined vote share of both alliances crosses just about 75%, which means that one voter out of four opted for a different party or candidate. Local parties, independent candidates retain quite a lot of space in many localities, where elections are fought along local lines, defined by caste, religion, political families or other kinds of factions. Bihar also has a tradition of rejecting incumbent candidates. In the past, more than half of all re-running sitting MLAs lost their seat, which indicates that local volatility is an important factor contributing to the aggregate outcome.

At the end of the day, it will fall to Nitish Kumar to decide whether he wants to remain chief minister. He retains enough weight to impose his will on the BJP, who cannot form a government without him, though one may ask whether he has the moral right of claiming the seat after such a poor return. The fact is that, in politics, such decisions are usually not impeded by moral considerations. The real question is whether he will be able to restore the public trust that he has clearly lost during his last term as chief minister.

Whatever happens, the BJP will be glad to have won a major state election after a long series of regional setbacks. It will need any good news it can have before preparing for even tougher challenges in the next round of state elections.


(The writer is assistant professor of political science and co-director, Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana.)