Hijacking Elections and Diverting Attention: The BJP’s Playbook in Bihar

With the new government formed after Bihar’s 18th Assembly elections, much of the “mainstream” media is obsessed with a notice from the state’s Building Construction Department asking Rabri Devi and Lalu Prasad Yadav to vacate their official residence at 10 Circular Road and shift to a new bungalow on Harding Road in Patna.

It was the same Nitish Kumar government that allotted 10 Circular Road to Rabri Devi in 2006, after she lost the November 2005 election to the NDA. As a sitting member of the Bihar Legislative Council and leader of opposition in the upper house, she remains entitled to a bungalow of the same size and standard she has occupied for the past 19 years. Her political status and entitlement have not changed. So why the sudden relocation notice now?

Deputy chief minister Samrat Choudhary and other ministers insist they have followed “all legal parameters” and accuse the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leaders of “obstinacy” and “greed” for clinging to “public property.” Most television channels are happily devoting hours of airtime to this supposedly burning post-election issue.

Hijacking the Bihar Polls

In reality, a section of the media is helping the NDA – now completely dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – shift public attention away from serious allegations of manipulating and hijacking the Bihar election in unprecedented collusion with the Election Commission (EC).

The facts are on record: on October 31 and November 6, the Bihar government transferred Rs. 10,000 each to the bank accounts of women beneficiaries under the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana – exactly six days before the first and second phases of polling on November 6 and 11. In total, around 1.51 crore women across the state received this money.

Worse, while the model code of conduct was in force, the EC allowed “Jeevika Didis”– the very women who had just received these payments – to be deployed as “volunteers” at polling stations to “assist voters.”

In the past, the same EC has promptly stayed long-running welfare schemes in non-BJP-ruled states like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Delhi the moment the code came into effect. Beyond this open favouritism, the Railway Ministry ran special trains from Haryana to ferry voters to Bihar (as highlighted by Kapil Sibal in a press conference), and several BJP workers were caught on camera boasting that they had voted in multiple states including Bihar, Delhi and Uttarakhand.

These “duplicate” or “fake” voters remained on the rolls despite the supposedly thorough Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls carried out earlier. Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraj Party has accused the state government of diverting World Bank funds meant for other projects to bankroll the NDA’s campaign.

Yet, instead of ordering a probe into these glaring violations, the EC has remained silent while BJP supporters file scores of defamation cases against opposition leaders who dare call it “vote chori.” Rahul Gandhi alone faces over 130 such cases.

The strategy is clear: tie the opposition up in courts and leave the field open for further manipulation.

Another classic instance of controlling the narrative is the alleged Rs. 2,300-crore Srijan Scam that took place under the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government between 2006 and 2011 and is now being investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The modus operandi was virtually identical to the 1990s fodder scam: politicians, bureaucrats and contractors siphoned money from district treasuries. In the fodder scam, Lalu Prasad Yadav and former Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra were prosecuted, convicted and jailed for “conspiring” with the mafia.

In the Srijan case, the story has been allowed to fade quietly into the background. The pattern never changes: hijack the election, bury the evidence, and keep the media busy evicting Rabri Devi and ailing Lalu Prasad Yadav from their home.

On the other hand, there is irrefutable evidence that the then Bhagalpur district magistrate transferred hundreds of crores of rupees in multiple instalments to the accounts of a private NGO run by one Manorama Devi. And yet, Lalu Prasad Yadav continues to carry the lifelong stigma of “chara-chor,” while the CBI keeps framing him and his family in a string of fresh cases – land-for-jobs, IRCTC scam and more – while maintaining a studied, almost conspiratorial silence on the Srijan scandal.

Meanwhile, the post-poll narrative on television has moved on seamlessly. Anchors and panellists are now breathlessly debating how the new home minister will “end mafia raj” in Bihar on the Yogi Adityanath model and how Kishor became a victim of his own “arrogance.”

Kishor, for his part, is quietly reviewing the reasons for his party’s debacle with his workers. He observed a day-long fast at Gandhi’s Bhitiharwa ashram, donated all his property except his family home in Delhi, and pledged to contribute 90 per cent of his future earnings to the Jan Suraj campaign.

Prashant Kishor vs Samrat Choudhary

It was Kishor who had publicly exposed the brazen manner in which Choudhary secured relief in a 1990s case involving the murder of seven persons – by producing, at the Supreme Court stage, a convenient document that suddenly declared him a “minor” at the time of the crime. Kishor also produced evidence of Choudhary possessing multiple fake educational certificates carrying different dates of birth and even different names.

Today, the same Choudhary is Bihar’s home minister and deputy chief minister, second only to chief minister Kumar in power. He controls the police and investigative agencies, speaks of running bulldozers over “illegal houses” and “mafia property,” and is widely seen as the BJP’s most favoured leader in the state under the Modi-Shah dispensation.

The Mahagathbandhan parties – Congress, RJD and their allies – are still struggling to come to terms with their crushing defeat. But BJP leaders, having secured a comfortable majority with 202 seats amid a litany of alleged irregularities, are busy shifting the spotlight elsewhere: to Rabri Devi and Lalu Yadav’s supposed “greed” for a government bungalow; to Rahul Gandhi “defaming” the party by crying “vote chori”; and to Kishor’s “arrogance and loud mouth.”

And a large section of the media – whether by design or by default – is dutifully helping normalise what was patently abnormal in the conduct of the Bihar elections.

Nalin Verma is a senior journalist, author and media educator.

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