The 2025 Bihar verdict looks, at first glance, like a familiar story. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has retained power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has emerged stronger, Nitish Kumar has once again proved indispensable, and the Mahagathbandhan has suffered a bruising defeat. Yet what unfolded in Bihar is not simply a Hindutva sweep. It is the story of a national party that has learned to live inside a very local political repertoire, and of an opposition that misread both the arithmetic of alliances and the psychology of its own support base.

Bihar has still not voted for Hindutva, or has it?

Bihar’s politics has not been shaped by technocrats or media managers but by leaders produced through long, sometimes bruising, political labour. Karpoori Thakur, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Ram Vilas Paswan, none of them arrived as ready-made icons. They were forged through decades of agitation, organisational work and compromise. Out of that history, Bihar developed a political repertoire, a shared vocabulary in which the social, cultural and political constantly spill into one another.

Here, caste is not just a demographic variable. It is a language of dignity, humiliation, aspiration and claim making. Religious idioms, festivals, everyday slang and electoral slogans cross over all the time. The political is personal in the most literal way. Lalu’s rustic oratory, Nitish’s image as sushasan babu, Paswan’s role as a bridge between Dalit assertion and coalition politics, each drew from that repertoire and then reshaped it.

The BJP has been the biggest beneficiary of this ecosystem in the past few years, but not by overriding it with a pure Hindutva template. It succeeded by learning to inhabit Bihar’s existing vocabulary. It struck bargains with Nitish Kumar, borrowed the language of social justice when useful, mixed Hindutva with local caste equations, and slowly refitted its national project to Bihar’s social common sense. The party has changed the field in part because it was willing to change itself.

This is why it is misleading to say Bihar has simply “voted for the BJP.” It has voted for a BJP-JD(U) arrangement that is still mediated through Nitish’s administrative network, women’s support, EBC welfare and a sense of continuity. Hindutva is present, but it does not stand alone.

Muslims are not a fixed RJD-Congress bloc

The results from Seemanchal and other Muslim-heavy constituencies underline a point that is often missed in commentary. Muslims in Bihar are not a fixed, homogenous Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) bloc. They can also vote tactically.

The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen's (AIMIM’s) surge in Seemanchal did not come from nowhere. It drew on frustrations that had been accumulating for years, about representation, about the balance between symbolism and delivery, and about the feeling that both “secular” and Hindutva formations treat Muslim insecurity as a talking point rather than a governance priority. Where AIMIM fielded credible local candidates, the Muslim vote fractured, often allowing the NDA to win with a consolidated Hindu vote and a divided minority vote.

This pattern forces a hard question for parties like the RJD and Congress. Given the manoeuvres between Hindutva, anti-corruption rhetoric, and chequered histories of representation, should they treat smaller Muslim and subregional parties as spoilers to be contained, or as partners to be co-opted into a coalition?

There is a case for the latter. In an environment where minorities are deeply skeptical, localised Muslim parties, rooted in specific districts, languages and grievances, can sometimes represent community interests more credibly than large umbrella parties that invoke secularism but under-deliver on tickets, leadership positions or everyday protection. A more honest coalition politics would recognise this and bring such forces into structured alliances, instead of relying on assumed loyalty that clearly no longer exists.

Tejashwi’s misreadings: Two Yadavs he did not fully learn from

Tejashwi Yadav went into this election as the face of the Mahagathbandhan, with an evolving image that blended social justice with jobs and governance. Yet his strategic choices suggest he did not learn enough from two other Yadavs.

The first is his own father. Lalu Prasad Yadav once remarked in Parliament that “Nitish has teeth in his stomach,” a colourful way of warning that Nitish should never be underestimated. Tejashwi did exactly that. He ran a campaign that seemed to assume Nitish was in terminal decline and that the BJP would eventually discard him.

In reality, Nitish’s grounded administrative network, embedded among EBCs, Mahadalits and women, remained intact. When aligned with the BJP’s resources and cadre, that network was more than sufficient to hold the line. At his weakest – he has as similar number of seats as the BJP.

The second Yadav is Akhilesh in Uttar Pradesh. Whatever his limitations, Akhilesh’s seat distribution in 2024 showed a willingness to cede space to social allies where they were organisationally stronger. In Bihar, by contrast, the RJD candidate pool remained heavily Yadav dominated, with a visible dip in EBC nominees, even as EBC anger against Yadav assertion was rising.

Congress, for its part, fielded a relatively weak and less electorally viable slate in many constituencies. As soon as the seat distribution matrices were announced, this election became less about Nitish’s legitimacy and more about whether a Yadav-heavy RJD plus a hollowed-out Congress could credibly claim to represent the breadth of Bihar’s social coalitions. The answer from the electorate was a clear no.

A complementary BJP-JD(U) alliance: Is this an approach?

Unlike 2020, the BJP-JD(U) partnership in 2025 looked more complementary than competitive. The BJP focused on upper castes, sections of OBCs and urban voters, while the JD(U) doubled down on EBCs, Mahadalits and women who had benefitted from Nitish’s welfare and governance measures. The two parties’ social geographies overlapped less and aligned more.

That complementarity made it easier for the NDA to present itself as stable and broad-based. It also holds a lesson beyond Bihar. If the BJP is able to strike a similarly complementary deal with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu, one that respects the AIADMK’s Dravidian social base while inserting the BJP into specific caste and urban niches, then Tamil Nadu too could see a reconfigured field. Bihar, in that sense, is less an exception than a laboratory for alliance logics that the BJP may seek to replicate elsewhere.

Cash transfers, Delhi wallets and Bihar’s relational democracy

This election was not free of money power. The “local boots with a Delhi wallet” model, where national resources are funnelled through local operatives, gave the BJP an impressive campaign apparatus. Direct transfers, such as schemes promising 10,000 rupees to women to start small enterprises, added another layer.

Yet field conversations from Bihar suggests that such schemes work only when they are embedded in a relationship of credibility. Voters distinguish between welfare as entitlement and welfare as inducement. A one-time transfer is not enough to overwrite years of neglect or arrogance. What matters is who is seen as the guarantor of those benefits, who visits the village, who resolves bureaucratic bottlenecks and who appears reachable after the election.

That is why it was politically necessary to badge key schemes in Nitish Kumar’s name even when they were backed by central funds. Bihar’s democracy remains relational. It filters spectacle and money through older infrastructures of caste networks, ward-level mediation and a moral assessment of leaders’ niyat, or intent. In that sense, Bihar is not anti-modern but post-spectacle.

SIR and the battle over the electoral infrastructure

The controversies around the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process added a darker layer to this election. Mass voter deletions, opaque criteria and the near impossibility of real-time verification created a procedural fog that is especially dangerous in a society already marked by institutional discrimination.

India’s political culture has a relatively low appetite for dry procedural debates. For most voters, politics is about proximity, representation and dignity, not about the granularity of electoral rolls. The SIR system, with its technocratic language and limited transparency, sits uneasily in that context. It has the potential to exacerbate the magnitude of a result even if it does not, in a given election, fundamentally alter the direction. That distinction matters analytically, but it does not remove the normative problem.

As Tamil Nadu minister Dr. PTR Thiagarajan has argued, the timing and duration of the SIR exercise, combined with the Election Commission’s reluctance to release machine readable data, smack either of extreme incompetence or of malintent. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's (DMK’s) response is instructive. It has launched a three-pronged fight: legal challenges in court, procedural work through training cadres and booth agents to document every deletion, and agitational politics that turns an abstract technical issue into a question of dignity and rights for ordinary voters.

Since 2014, Narendra Modi and the BJP have demonstrated that campaigning is a yearlong affair. SIR adds another dimension. In India, it now appears that the polling part of elections is also becoming a yearlong affair, fought not only in rallies and WhatsApp groups but inside databases, deletion lists and on the ground.

Where does the opposition go from here?

The verdict ultimately exposes a deeper structural weakness in the opposition: a tendency to mistake visibility for organisation, sentiment for coalition, and arithmetic for social chemistry. Bihar’s electorate did not reject the opposition’s ideas as much as it rejected the absence of a disciplined, broad-based political machine capable of carrying those ideas to the ground.

For the Congress in particular, Bihar underlines the cost of existing as a junior partner without a credible local face or a rooted organisational network. Its Voter Adhikar Yatra helped surface issues around voter deletions and democratic erosion, but that visibility did not translate into booth-level presence or candidate strength. The gap between performative unity and organisational depth proved fatal.

For the RJD, the lesson is harsher. A politics built on dignity and representation has real value, but it must evolve into a politics that also convinces EBCs, Dalits and minorities that they will not be permanently subordinated to a single caste core. That requires rethinking candidate selection, shared leadership and coalition with smaller parties, including those that speak specifically for Muslims in particular regions.

Bihar 2025 is therefore not simply a story of BJP dominance. It is the story of a state where a relational, bottom-up democracy still constrains the ways in which national projects can advance. The BJP has learned to adapt to that reality. The question after this election is whether its opponents are willing to do the same.

Vignesh Karthik KR is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden.

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