Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves to Bharatiya Janata Part (BJP) supporters in New Delhi as his ruling alliance secures massive victory in Bihar. © Reuters
Bihar, India’s third most populous state and home to 130 million people, voted in a two-phase election on Thursday last week and Tuesday this week, recording its highest voter turnout (around 67%) since 1951, when the country voted for the first time following independence from Britain in 1947.
After voting in both phases ended, exit polls pointed to a victory for the NDA, which currently governs the state, despite analysts having predicted a tight race between Modi’s coalition and the opposition alliance ahead of the polls.
Bihar remains in the NDA’s hands, helped by the popularity of Modi — whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the pillar of the alliance — and his ally Nitish Kumar, the leader in the Janata Dal (United) party. Kumar, 74, is Bihar’s longest-serving chief minister and has held the top post for 20 years, except for a brief period between May 2014 and February 2015.
Posting on X, Modi said, “Good governance has won. Development has won. Pro-people spirit has won. Social justice has won,” and added that “this mandate gives us renewed strength to serve the people and work for Bihar.”
“In the coming times, we will do even more for Bihar’s progress, Bihar’s infrastructure and Bihar’s culture,” he added.
Chief Minister Kumar also wrote on X that the people of the state have expressed their confidence in the NDA government “by giving us a massive majority.”
After the final vote count, the Election Commission website showed the NDA had won 202 races for the 243 Bihar state assembly seats, with the BJP alone accounting for 89, and Kumar’s JD(U) 85. The opposition alliance — of which the country’s main opposition Indian National Congress (INC) is a part and whose chief ministerial candidate was Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) party — had clinched 35 races.
Yadav’s parents — Lalu Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi — were also chief ministers of the state. But analysts say their time in charge from 1990 to mid-2000s, often called the “jungle raj” due to widespread lawlessness in Bihar at the time, haunted the young leader, who turned 36 this month.
“The opposition has lost its reliability [among voters in Bihar] and people of the state are also not able to forget the jungle raj of the past,” Sanjeev K. Sharma, general secretary of the Indian Political Science Association, told Nikkei Asia.
According to Rimmi Sharma, who runs her content development firm in New Delhi, a direct transfer of 10,000 rupees ($113) each into the bank accounts of 7.5 million women across the state totaling 75 billion rupees — a Bihar government scheme launched by Modi in September promoting self-employment and economic independence — also “worked in favor of NDA as female voters turned out in huge numbers to vote for it, outnumbering male voters in many districts.”
“There has been a strong pro-incumbency wave and no resentment for the NDA government in Bihar, which is something unusual … while the opposition alliance has failed to capitalize on the gains it reaped in the 2020 state elections, when they had lost only by a fraction of votes,” said V.S. Chandrasekar, a New Delhi-based political observer and former executive editor of the Press Trust of India news agency.
“One reason for this is Kumar, who despite his long innings in power and who is said to be losing his sheen, has proved that he is still the man in charge. And there has been a positive sentiment toward him — that he is a governance man with no corruption attached to him, and no charge against him of [taking forward] a family or dynasty politics,” Chandrasekar added.
The stakes in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, remain high as a victory there could give an advantage in the 2026 regional elections, when states such as Tamil Nadu, Assam, West Bengal and Kerala vote.
“Modi’s BJP is now a very strong force in West Bengal, and in Assam also they have an edge. But in southern Tamil Nadu and Kerala the situation is different. … [But] the latest results give them the strength to carry on with their campaign,” Chandrasekar said.
Later on Friday evening, Modi said in an address at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi that the Bihar victory has infused “new energy” in the party workers in other poll-bound states, including West Bengal. “The victory in Bihar has paved the way for the BJP’s triumph in [West] Bengal as well,” he said.
The article was published in the asia.nikkei