NDA TURNED A TIGHT BIHAR CONTEST INTO A SWEEP

Until the mid-point of campaigning, both alliances privately believed the race could go either way. But then Nitish Kumar intensified his outreach, women voters began consolidating, welfare benefits visibly hit the ground, and the caste arithmetic stabilised with the return of Paswan, Kushwaha and Manjhi.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

The NDA did not win Bihar because of any single wave, scheme or caste bloc. It won because five different streams of politics—women’s mobilisation, welfare saturation, caste recalibration, development optics and opposition disarray—aligned almost perfectly in its favour, transforming what began as a tight, uncertain contest into one of the most decisive mandates in the state's recent political history.

Until the midpoint of campaigning, both alliances privately believed the race could go either way. But as Nitish Kumar intensified his outreach, women voters began consolidating, welfare benefits visibly hit the ground, and the caste arithmetic stabilised with the return of Paswan, Kushwaha and Manjhi, the contest tilted and eventually broke open.

By the end of polling, the NDA had built a broad, layered coalition that the Ma-hagathbandhan could not counter—neither in message, nor in organisation, nor in credibility.

What followed was a sweeping victory: the NDA won 202 of 243 seats. The JDU surged to 85 seats, nearly doubling its 2020 tally. The BJP rose to 89 seats. Chi-rag Paswan’s LJP(R), fielding candidates across a defined spread, captured 19 seats. HAM added five seats, and the RLM won four. Together, they stitched a durable bloc of OBCs, EBCs, Dalits, women voters and lower-middle-class households that proved unbeatable.

A large part of this mandate was driven by an unprecedented mobilisation of women voters. Bihar has 3.51 crore women voters, and 1.34 crore of them are part of the Jeevika SHG (self-help group) network. The government's transfer of Rs 10,000 each to 1.21 crore Jeevika Didis created a political shockwave on the ground. The benefit touched roughly 35% of all women voters and influenced more than 3.6 crore votes when measured at household level.