The strong “badlav” or change vote that made itself seen and heard on the Bihar ground in this election campaign was addressed overwhelmingly to the 20-year-old incumbent. Be it on corruption or price rise, unemployment or afsarshahi (rule of the bureaucrat), the wayward policy of prohibition, or most of all, the missing “factory” responsible for the unstanched “palayan” or migration from the state, voters said they wanted better and more — from nine-time Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, not from his challengers.
To understand the why of the outcome, it may be necessary, first, to say what it isn’t.
An outsized section of punditry attributes the NDA victory to the election-eve transfer of Rs 10,000/- to women under the Mahila Rojgar Yojana, a first instalment in a scheme that aims to promote female entrepreneurship. While the cash transfer only days before the election was problematic, pointing to the need for stricter norms and protocols on last-minute offers made by ruling parties, it may not quite be the election-winner it is painted to be.
To hold up the Rs 10,000-transfer as the decisive explanation of a result such as this one is much too glib – and unfair. It assumes that the woman voter is not at all sceptical or discerning, that even as she turns out to vote in far greater numbers than before, she does not ask questions about the cash transfer’s timing, that she is only unresistingly swayed by it. It also disregards the fact that the Nitish government’s Mahila Rojgar Yojana was not a one-off or standalone scheme, that it came on the top of a long series of policies and measures which were, and were seen to be, pro-women — from bicycles for schoolgirls in 2006 to reservation in panchayats and government jobs, from entrenching the Jeevika network of women’s self-help groups across the state, to, despite its excesses and misdirections, the prohibition policy.
The women’s vote, fulsome as it may be, is not enough to explain the scale of the JD(U)-BJP victory. It doesn’t tell the full story of why Nitish Kumar, chief minister almost without pause since 2005, and prolific switcher of political sides, swam more into focus in this campaign than he has done in previous elections — since 2010, in fact, when he reaped the rich rewards of the irrefutable work done by his government in its first term, from law and order to schools and roads and bridges, with electricity following subsequently.
Travelling in Bihar on election-eve, it was impossible not to bump into an irony — while stories in Patna’s power corridors paint a picture of a leader who is no longer what he was and knows it, a leader shielded from public view by a circle of trusted advisors he increasingly depends on, Nitish was, among the people, the “vikas purush” with a visibly renewed mantle and sheen.
One reason for what seems to be Nitish’s emphatic second coming could be this: while new player Prashant Kishor could not lift off the ground because Nitish was not in retreat, Kishor may have in fact contributed to turning the spotlight back on Nitish.
In an election campaign teeming with extravagant and improbable promises, Nitish was the leader who was seen to have delivered, even if the delivery was patchy, leaky and incomplete. “Kaam toh bahut kiye hain (he has worked a lot)”, voters began, even those who were his critics. Like they did in 2010, those who supported him counted the achievements on his watch — on law and order, roads/bridges/airports, electricity, women’s empowerment — and on law and order especially.
“Sambhav hai kya?”, is it even possible, was a question that many voters asked in the days leading up to the election. That question spoke of the disbelief Bihar’s aam aadmi and aurat (outside the RJD’s core bastions) wrestled with when Tejashwi said he would give one government job to one family. Or when Prashant Kishor said he would bring all the migrants home immediately.
In fact, Kishor’s saturation of social media spaces may have boomeranged on him in more ways than one. In an electorate acutely conscious of its own rich and layered political history — Bihar was the site of Gandhi’s first mobilisations, staging ground for the JP movement, rise of Karpoori Thakur, and of the Mandal upheavals in the 1990s — Kishor was seen as the leader who incredibly talked of starting afresh on a clean state while lacking a ground-level grip.
At the same time, even though they did not believe his promises, or trust him with finding the way forward, voters borrowed the new player’s issues and his framing. If palayan or migration rose to the surface as the main talking point in this election, it was almost single-handedly because of the man who is leading Bihar’s newest party. If he stays on, Kishor may well see that as an opening he can seize on in a future election.
But that large numbers of voters began their sentences with a cautionary invocation of the past, “paanch baje ke baad… (after five pm in the evening…)” — you could not step out safely from your home after sunset, the story goes, due to the lawlessness on the watch of the Lalu Prasad-Rabri Devi regime — became this election’s defining theme.
It is a pointer, also, to the continuing political failure of Nitish’s main opponent and challenger, Tejashwi Yadav, and key to understanding this landslide verdict.
Twenty years after the Rabri Devi government fell, Lalu’s son and political heir has not been able to salvage his father’s legacy of radical social justice politics from the stickiness of the “jungle raj” narrative and memory. Nor has he been able to persuade voters that he is remaking the RJD into a party less burdened by the past, and more future-facing.
This is not something the RJD leader can entirely blame on the BJP’s propaganda machine. Quite simply, Tejashwi has not done enough politically to sidestep or counter the accusations of being a Yadav-centric party which, when in power, allows lumpen sections of the caste group to run amok in a climate of impunity. From the visual imagery — the coterie that tightly controls access to Tejashwi lacks caste diversity — to more substantive political signalling, there has been little outreach to non-Yadav castes, and far too few attempts to pitch its tent wider by the RJD.
Add to the RJD’s failure to climb out of its caste box, its largest ally’s incapacity to take its own message to the ground, and it’s a recipe for the Mahagathbandhan cave-in. Congress in Bihar could not build on either the mobilisation during Rahul Gandhi’s “Voter Adhikar Yatra”, or follow up on the powerful symbolism in the months before the election of appointing a Dalit leader as the new president of its Bihar unit. The party latched on to “vote chori” that did not strike sparks on the ground, and then there was the prolonged and self-defeating Congress vs RJD wrangling.
In the end, on one side was Nitish who is seen to have delivered, combined with the force-multiplier effect of his powerful ally, the Narendra Modi-led BJP, their combined array of welfare schemes, plus their social coalition in which the core vote was small, but the plus vote was spread widely. Hindutva was a subterranean current — the leadership that grew out of the JP aandolan and continues to shape Bihar’s politics has ensured that, on this count, the state does not go the way of neighbouring UP.
On the other side, Tejashwi was seen still too much as the leader of one caste, still unwilling or unable to frame a less monochromatic appeal, and on issues of governance, still lacking in credibility. And instead of making the contest triangular, newbie Prashant Kishor ended up reinforcing the reassurance of Nitish.
Going ahead, the burden of change is on the victorious incumbent. In his new term, Nitish must give priority to a new and so far neglected set of themes – from urbanisation to industrial investment and tourism, not in that order necessarily. As he confronts the task that lies ahead, he will surely draw immense succour and encouragement from the JD(U)-BJP sweep in an election in which voters said that Tejashwi stands for caste and family, Prashant Kishor for “bhashan (speeches)”, and that “kaam (work)” is associated only with Nitish.