Social composition of candidates in the fray

NEW DELHI: The Bihar elections are being fought, at least on the face of it, on such issues as development, unemployment, migration etc. This rhetoric notwithstanding, the election is also a quest by both major alliances to ace the caste calculus of politics in the state.

- Nishant Ranjan, Roshan Kishore and Abhishek Jha

It is here that caste composition of candidates plays a big role.

What is the caste composition of candidates fielded by the two major alliances in Bihar? How representative or non-representative is it, visa-vis the overall population of the state? How useful are broad social categories such as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in dis-aggregating the caste composition of candidates?

The first author of this story prepared a caste database of all candidates fielded by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Mahagathbandhan (MGB) in the 2025 Bihar elections. This two-part series based on the database of the candidates, which complements the larger caste-database of all MLAs in Bihar since 1962 which was launched in these pages on Monday.

Summary stats of Bihar's social demography

The broad social categorisation of population is usually on the lines of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and non-SC-ST-OBC or the proverbial upper castes. From a political standpoint however, it makes more sense to take Muslims as a separate group (they are divided into OBCs, non-SC-ST-OBCs and even STs in some places).