Bihar has long functioned as a paradox, a transparent enigma. Its ideas market never loses its sheen, and its caste codes refuse to retire. This duality is not incidental. It is woven into Bihar’s political evolution. The state’s public sphere has historically allowed sharp ideological contestation, yet its political structures return, almost faithfully, to familiar anchors of caste arithmetic, welfarist governance, and a deep suspicion of unregulated economic mobility. The 2025 election recommits Bihar to this older vocabulary, even as its demographic realities press urgently for a new one.
This paradox has deep historical roots. The Congress governed Bihar almost continuously until the 1970s, but its governance left structural vulnerabilities unaddressed. Floods, affecting nearly 68% of the state’s geographical area and displacing millions each year, elicited a negligible systemic response. Poverty remained entrenched. As late as 1973–74, Bihar accounted for nearly 14% of India’s poor while representing less than 8% of its population. Writers such as Phanishwarnath Renu and Nagarjuna chronicled this stagnation with anthropological precision. They described a political order that was inert, fatigued and unable to imagine developmental transformation. Their critique mirrored a growing public disillusionment, one that set the stage for the Janata movement.
The Janata Party’s sweeping victory in the 1977 assembly elections (214 seats out of 324) was more than a rejection of the Congress-era managerialism. It signaled a reorientation of Bihar’s political imagination. Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for “Total Revolution” introduced a moral vocabulary into politics. Under Karpuri Thakur, Bihar institutionalized a new grammar of social justice. His 1978 recommendations, which later fed into the Mandal framework, established dignity and representation as the central political claims of the state. In Bihar, redistribution of dignity preceded redistribution of opportunity.
The Mandal era transformed this grammar into durable political structures. Bihar’s caste field is among the most densely layered in India. The Other Backward Castes constitute roughly 52% of the population — the Extremely Backward Castes around 30% within that bloc — and the Scheduled Castes nearly 16%. Electoral politics responded by refining these layers. The EBCs were carved out as a distinct category, and the Dalits were subdivided into Mahadalits. Caste gradually shifted from a grammar of social correction to a mechanism of competitive patronage. The rise of bahubali (strongmen) networks, the consolidation of caste pride, and the instrumentalisation of identity politics reflected a deeper shift. Empowerment gave way to assertion.
Into this architecture entered Nitish Kumar in 2005, offering a model of governance-led social justice. His early interventions were striking: Law and order stabilised; crime rates fell; school attendance improved; rural roads expanded rapidly; women-centric initiatives — from the cycle scheme to reservation in Panchayati Raj institutions — altered both mobility and governance. For several years, Bihar even recorded double-digit GSDP growth. Yet this growth did not translate into rising per capita incomes. Bihar’s per capita GDP in 2022–23 remained around 54,000, barely a third of the national average. This divergence reinforced public faith in state-led welfare rather than market-driven opportunity. The social justice paradigm thickened rather than thinned.
Within this political architecture, women emerged as Bihar’s most consequential voters. Female turnout has exceeded male turnout in almost every election since 2010, with the current cycle continuing the trend. Nitish Kumar’s policies created not only welfare beneficiaries but a vast, informal political workforce. The Jeevika network alone touches nearly one in three households. However, this mobilization has not yielded proportional leadership.
Women remain underrepresented as legislators, organizational leaders and policy shapers. Bihar thus represents a distinctive feminist paradox — women as the infrastructure of political participation but rarely its architects. This pattern has historical precedents. From the Swadeshi From songs sung even during weddings of the independence era to Prabhavati Devi’s organizational prowess during and after the JP movement, women have shaped Bihar’s civic energy but rarely shaped its institutions.
Against this backdrop, the 2025 election unfolded as a layered verdict. On the surface, it reflected gratitude toward Nitish Kumar, a “Thank You” moment magnified by public concern over his age and health. Beneath the surface, the results reaffirmed the structural dominance of OBC political preference, supported by EBC and Mahadalit alignments, and shaped by the calculated participation of Muslim voters operating within an increasingly securitized political environment.
Deeper still, the verdict revealed a persistent hesitation to transition from welfare socialism to a more entrepreneurial economic imagination. Bihar sends some of the highest numbers of inter-state migrants in India. Over 8 million Biharis work outside the state at any given time. But migration has been normalized as a cultural destiny rather than treated as a developmental failure requiring structural redress.
What emerges, then, is a portrait of a state that experiments politically but not economically. Bihar has absorbed ideological rebellion through the JP movement, social re-engineering through Mandal, governance innovation through Nitish, and gendered mobilization through Jeevika. Yet it remains cautious, even skeptical, of liberalizing reforms, private capital, or market-led growth. This tension between political and economic transformations endures.
Bihar continues to respect intellect and intent, but it tests both against entrenched caste hierarchies, administrative fragility, and socio-economic precarity. It is a state that has mastered the art of political reinvention while hesitating to imagine economic modernity. The election reaffirms this continuum.
Social justice as inheritance, welfare as expectation, and structural reform as deferred aspiration. The question that lingers is not whether Bihar has changed, but whether it is ready to change in ways it has never previously dared.
Shubhrastha is co-author of The Last Battle of Saraighat: The Story of the BJP’s Rise in the North-East. The views expressed are personal
