Shikha Mukerjee | ‘Anti-incumbency’ in Bihar? Ousting Nitish Won’t Be Easy

Designing an election strategy for ruling sides and Opposition challengers is neither simple nor easy when the likelihood of an emotional wave that sweeps away doubts and complicated calculations is remote, more so when the contest is essentially bipolar.

With two coalitions, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, of which Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) is the senior partner, and the INDIA bloc, led by two parties of similar weight, the Congress and the RJD, facing off, the Assembly elections in Bihar will test the management skills of every political party in the game.

The Bihar Assembly election has only agenda – change, which is also anti-incumbency; it has been on the agenda since the 2020 Assembly election, when the NDA scraped together 125 seats and the “Mahagathbandhan” won 110 seats, with the RJD winning one seat more than the BJP’s 74 seats, out of a total 243 seats. The mechanics of the campaign is all about the Nitish Kumar-BJP alliance preventing change by staving off the challenge from the collective Opposition under the banner of the RJD and the Congress.

Elections in Bihar are never easy to manage, to begin with. The competition acquires an entirely different edge in Bihar, making it even more difficult for party managers. Bihar’s political culture and traditions are unique, which means there may not be many lessons to learn and draw on as India in 2026 heads into a critical phase of elections in five politically consequential states, for both the NDA as well as the INDIA bloc. By piloting the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and linking it with a disguised exercise in verification of citizenship, the Election Commission, reportedly at the behest of the ruling BJP at the Centre, has added to the complexities of election management.

After nine terms as chief minister, Nitish Kumar is familiar, but with that comes contempt, because of his capacity to switch sides to remain in power. Despite his reputation of being “Paltu Ram”, Bihar’s politics has not thrown up more than one prospective chief ministerial candidate, that is, Tejashwi Yadav. The BJP does not have a unifying leader or a charismatic potential chief minister candidate; for that matter, neither does the Congress. What it does have are two leaders, both outsiders and neither a candidate, competing against each other to win over the hearts and hopes of Bihar’s voters. As star campaigner for the BJP, Narendra Modi’s appeal has been time-tested; even he is not sure how far that will go to prevent a regime change in Bihar. Therefore, as an advance on the bounty that the BJP can bestow on Bihar’s seriously poor people, he has resorted to unloading packaged cash transfers of about Rs 62,000 crores, of which the Rs 10,000-crore Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana for one crore women, is only one scheme. The “double engine sarkar” model, of the NDA in power at the Centre and in the state, seems to be the best mechanism to keep discontent at bay.

Taking a cue, Tejashwi Yadav has announced he will introduce a programme to provide government employment to every household in the state, meaning every household where no member is already a government employee. The pre-emptive declaration of himself as the alternative chief minister is one of the many ways in which coalition building in Bihar is a precarious project. Even though the INDIA alliance has functioned as a cohesive coalition on the ground in the past five years, including the hugely popular Bharat Jodo Yatra led by Rahul Gandhi and his follow-up recent Vote Adhikar Yatra, the pulls and tensions of seat-sharing between the RJD and the Congress have not diminished significantly. The Congress sees the RJD leader’s reputation as a hindrance while the RJD obviously cannot think of a chief ministerial face other than Tejashwi Yadav.

In the coalition versus coalition contest, the oddball is former election strategist Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party. He is the dark horse, the unpredictable factor; he could cut into the BJP-JD(U) vote share or he could cut into the Mahagathbandhan vote share. He could be a spoiler for one side or the other. After spending months on focusing on the issue of corruption, especially during the Lalu Prasad Yadav years and failure to deliver development at the grassroots, Prashant Kishor seems to have shifted attention to stoking the anti-incumbency discontent. Observers, political leaders and election watchers do not give Prashant Kishor much chance in doing anything more than winning, at best, a handful of seats, if he selects the right candidate for the right constituency. In Bihar, getting it right is a complex chemical reaction of caste loyalties, political loyalties and personal preferences.

There is one other player in the competitive politics of Bihar, who, if he can tilt voters, can make a difference to the INDIA bloc’s final tally: Mukesh Sahani of the Vikashsheel Insaan Party, representing the Economically Backward Castes, or rather one section of perhaps six to seven per cent votes. And then, there is Jitan Ram Majhi, a veteran Dalit leader of the Hindustan Awam Morcha, and the equally ambitious Chiraj Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party, representing a section of Scheduled Caste interests.

In the chaotic mosaic of Bihar’s politics, where today’s coalition partner was yesterday’s political foe, where regional politics and regional parties matter more than national parties, the emergence of the CPI(M-L) as an organised, dependable and coherent contestant is significant. The CPI(M-L) is holding constituency-wise, that is, 12 centralised meetings in which the party is sharing a report card on what it has done, what it has failed to do and what it will do in the future. This transparency and accountability is a new initiative that brands the CPI(M-L) as a party representing the people. In contrast, the Congress is a party of the past with ambitions for the future, and the BJP is the party of the present with ambitions for the future.

Bihar’s politics is and has always been about Bihar. Even the war cry of “Sampoorna Kranti” by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974, that then became the rallying call against the 1975 Emergency, was about Bihar’s governance. The 2025 state Assembly election may bring change in Bihar or voters may prefer the status quo, unsatisfactory as it is and has been since 2020. The best that can be said is that anti-incumbency, however long it may have simmered, is not the real reason why regimes change; there has to be a plus factor and in Bihar, this time, there does not seem to be one.