Back in 2010, I, like scores of development researchers and policy wonks, was a frequent traveler to rural Bihar. The joke was that if you wanted a job in “development”, all you had to do was to stand in Patna’s (then rickety) airport. There were no fancy hotels, malls or highways, but Bihar was abuzz with possibility. ,Sushasan Babu” — Nitish Kumar — had won a landslide re-election.
Credited with freeing Bihar from the dark days of “jungle” Raj”, his second term held the promise of transformation based on a politics that married social justice with material progress. Women were at the center of this promise through a triad of path-breaking interventions from enhancing access to education (every morning as we set out to administer our surveys, we would be greeted by uniformed girls cycling to school), Jeevika (a network of women’s self-help groups; every village I went to had a recently appointed Jeevika Didi serving as a much needed conduit between citizens and the bureaucracy), and enhanced representation through 50% reservation in local governments. Long before Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar had recognized the power of women as a mobilized political constituency.
By 2025, the rickety Patna airport, has transformed into a glittering 21st century one, alongside malls and highways but the promise of good governance (good governance) has faded into the sunset.
Slowing economic growth alongside the lived realities of entrenched unemployment, price rise, and corruption, are a daily reminder that good governance stopped short of unleashing an economic transformation. In 2025, hope has been replaced with discontent.
As Bihar gets ready to vote, its failures from the possibilities of Lalu Prasad’s upending of caste equations in the 1990s to Nitish’s good governance and present-day cynical caste and welfare calculations, has excited much commentary. Missing in this is a serious engagement with the state’s governance model, itself a product of Bihar’s complex political economy, and the limits it has set on the possibilities of realizing radical transformation. Regardless of who wins, the state’s future will depend on the new government’s ability to transcend these limits and enable genuine social and material progress.
To understand Bihar’s present dilemmas, it is important to look back at the era of “jungle Raj” and the governance breakdown it enabled. As scholars like Jeffery Witsoe have carefully documented, the governance breakdown of the Lalu era was by design, part of the political project of wresting control over state institutions from upper-caste dominance. Power was transferred to local politicians, who openly undermined the bureaucracy, creating new networks of Yadav patronage and “jungle raj”. State capacity was hollowed out both through political interference and a preference for keeping. posts vacant and government funds unspent over appointing upper-caste officials.
For Lalu, the politics of social transformation could not be divorced from governance, even if this meant de-capacitating governance to achieve the transformation.
In its heyday, Nitish’s governance model was a technocrat’s delight. In 2005, he rode to power on the back of a unique alliance with BJP upper caste supporters and the disparate group of non-dominant lower castes (the extremely backward castes and Maha Dalits). Freed of Lalu’s constraints Nitish was able to fuse social justice with governance by wresting power back from politicians to bureaucrats. Fiscal transfers from the Center increased and the administration was slowly repopulated, including by appointing Jeevika Didis, whose pay hike is a key promise of the Tejashwi Yadav-led Mahagathbandhan. Recapacitating the government enabled Kumar to present himself as “Sushasan Babu”, as he set about restoring law and order and implementing a development agenda.
This model was essentially technocratic, seeking to insulate governance from the excesses of politics, particularly at the grassroots, where citizens encountered the State and entrenched patronage networks indulged in active corruption. To achieve this, power was centralized, and it fell to a small group of elite senior bureaucrats to govern from the top down. This model served Bihar well. Between 2005-2011-12, annual per capita GSDP grew at an average of 8.8% and the foundations of key welfare programs from providing cycles to school-going girls to women’s self-help groups were laid.
However, it also contributed to trapping the state in a low equilibrium. Nitish’s model of technocratic governance was simply not designed to challenge the patronage networks at the grassroots. Thus, while it successfully erected school buildings, distributed cycles and set up self-help groups, it hit a wall when it came to challenging entrenched interests that built on these gains — ensuring that teachers and doctors showed up and performed, and protecting labor rights.
The two-decade long reign of Nitish raises an important question: Can governance stripped of politics achieve the goal of radical social transformation? Lalu’s politics decapacitated governance even as it upended upper caste dominance of the state. Nitish chose governance, while his model of technocracy without politics restored order, it stopped short of dislodging entrenched patronage networks, leaving the state trapped in a low equilibrium.
The challenge for the new government, regardless of who wins, will lie in marrying politics with sustaining the State rather than suppressing State capacity. Biharis are impatient for transformation, but are its politicians up to the task?
Yamini Aiyar is senior visiting fellow, Brown University. The views expressed are personal
