Twelve Ds that explain Bihar election outcome

NDA’s smart campaign trumped the opposition Mahagathbandhan’s failure to build an organic narrative

- Roshan Kishore

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has achieved a landslide victory in Bihar, winning 202 out of the 243 assembly constituencies (ACs) in the state. While this is marginally short of NDA’s tally of 206 ACs in the 2010 elections, its 2025 vote share of 46.6% is the highest ever for a winning alliance in the history of the state. What really happened in the 2025 elections? The question is best answered by twelve Ds.

Déja vu wins over dogma: The alliance of Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has never lost an election they have contested together — they did part ways in the 2014 Lok Sabha and 2015 assembly polls — since they won Bihar in October 2005. An uninterrupted invincible run for twenty years ina state as large as Bihar is not asmall feat.

What explains this resilience of the JD(U)-BJP combine? The proverbial “coalition of extremes” of lower Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and upper castes explains its electoral strength. This coalition emerged as a backlash to Lalu Yadav's Muslim-Ya-dav or MY politics which exploited the first-past-the-post system to win Bihar in the pre-2005 era. 2025 is another proof that Bihar is basically a contest between MY and the “coalition of extremes”, and the latter is far ahead. This should also disabuse people of the frequently held dogma that Bihar can give a model of politics where Mandal (OBC politics) can defeat Kamandal (Hindutva). Kaman-dal wins in Bihar because it has muted the Mandal binary by allying with Nitish Kumar.