Resounding Mandate

After months of witnessing high-stakes campaigning, Bihar has delivered a political verdict of unusual clarity. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) comprising of the ruling BJP and Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and their allies swept the State’s 243 assembly seats to register a landslide victory. The thumping win hands Chief Minister Nitish Kumar a fifth term and gives Prime Minister Narendra Modi another emphatic endorsement in the Hindi heartland. The scale of this victory, which echoes the NDA’s 2010 win, is striking and deeply symbolic.

At one level, the outcome is an affirmation of incumbency, not a rejection of it despite the narrative put out by the Opposition Grand Alliance. Bihar’s record turnout of 67.13 percent suggests that voters were not merely compliant participants but active arbiters in choosing continuity this time. Nitish Kumar had campaigned on the promise of orderly governance, restored law and order and incremental welfare. The BJP supplied organisational muscle and the Prime Minister’s brand of national leadership. Between them, they offered a narrative of stability and future promise that was eagerly embraced by Bihar’s electorate.

The NDA’s appeal drew strength from two constituencies central to any durable majority. Women, buoyed by targeted welfare programmes voted in unusually high numbers. The youth, meanwhile, backed an aspirational agenda of industrialisation and job creation. The NDA’s promises sounded feasible in stark contrast to the Opposition led by Tejashwi Yadav and an embattled Congress.

The Mahagathbandhan was totally routed, with the Congress putting on an abysmal performance. It was a firm rejection of decades of misgovernance by the RJD and the Congress, especially the dark days of Lalu Yadav’s ‘Jungle Raj.’ The RJD’s decision to field an unusually high number of Yadav candidates rekindled the spectre of caste consolidation and revived memories of the turbulent 1990s. The Grand Alliance was fractious from the outset, weakened by seat-sharing quarrels, the RJD-centric tone of the campaign and the conspicuous sidelining of its allies. Rahul Gandhi’s Congress, spending heavily on social-media amplification of ‘vote-theft’ conspiracies, emerged with little to show for it.

For Nitish Kumar, the mandate offers stability but also scrutiny. His long stewardship of Bihar has been marked by improvements in crime control and service delivery, yet the state remains among India’s poorest, its industrial base stunted and its migration rates high. Having campaigned on credibility, he must now deepen reforms that have often arrived in hesitant increments.

For Tejashwi Yadav, the loss is existential. The RJD cannot be a party trapped between nostalgia and reinvention. The party’s messaging, at once tethered to past grievances and defensive about them, convinced neither loyalists nor fence-sitters.

It is the electorate that emerges strongest from this contest. The peaceful conduct of polling, without reports of violence or re-runs, reflects a maturity that Bihar was once denied. Voters have rejected chaos, caste absolutism and rhetorical excess by choosing competence, however imperfect, and development. That is a mandate any democracy would envy.