A HIGH STAKES BATTLE

A DO-OR-DIE VERDICT FOR NITISH, TEJASHWI'S BEST CHANCE YET, A DISRUPTIVE DEBUT FOR PRASHANT KISHOR... ELECTION 2025 WILL BE A PIVOTAL CLASH WITH NATIONAL IMPACT

- By AMITABH SRIVASTAVA / Illustration by SIDDHANT JUMDE

The timing was telling. For Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar, it was a final flourish of governance before the Model Code of Conduct came into effect. At 10 am on October 6, barely six hours before the Election Commission of India announced the polling schedule for Bihar, Nitish transferred Rs 10,000 each into the accounts of 2.1 million women, taking the total number of beneficiaries of the Mahila Rojgar Yojana to 12.1 million. An hour later, he inaugurated the first phase of the Patna Metro and also took a ride on it, putting Bihar’s capital on the map of Indian cities with metro connectivity. The messaging was unambiguous: he was not just Bihar’s past but its future too.

A day earlier, Tejashwi Yadav, Nitish’s onetime deputy and now chief rival, was busy wooing Dalits in Patna, promising to hike women’s compensation to Rs 2,500 a month and widen the net of reservations. On October 7, he upped the ante on social media platform X, posting a clip of Nitish greeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi with folded hands, and pointedly asking: “Do these odd gestures make the chief minis- m mentally fit to you?”, alluding to the rumours swirling around Nitish’s health.

The sequences captured the story of Bihar's politics in miniature: transactional at its core, symbolic in its language, and competitive to the last breath. For Nitish, the long-serving patriarch of the Janata Dal (United), this election doubles as a referendum on two decades of his stewardship; for Rashtriya Janata Dal scion Tejashwi, it's a generational battle for validation—this duality applies as well to the larger wholes they are part of.