Campaigning as the BJP’s chief strategist, Union home minister Amit Shah had predicted a never-before victory for the ruling alliance in Bihar.
It did not quite materialise on Friday, the alliance falling short of its 2010 tally of 206 seats, but the voters of impoverished Bihar handed the NDA a landslide that carried shades of the Modi-Shah duopoly’s famed “Gujarat model”.
Nitish Kumar, chief minister for two decades, led the grouping to its triumph while nearly doubling his own party’s disappointing 2020 tally, thus erasing any possibility of being dethroned by a dominant BJP.
On Children’s Day, the birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s favourite target of criticism, the BJP-led NDA made the elections look like child’s play.
The bragging rights perhaps belonged to the BJP. It did not just re-emphasise its status as the senior partner in the NDA by size but emerged as the top party in the state — a feat unprecedented for a non-regional party since Mandal politics began dominating Bihar in the 1990s.
In 2020, the BJP was the top dog in the NDA with 74 seats — compared to 43 for Nitish — but trailed the RJD’s tally of 75.
On Friday night, the NDA comfortably bagged 200-plus seats — out of the state’s 243 — with the BJP winning 89 seats and the JDU not far behind with 85. They had contested 101 seats each.
The verdict mirrored what Gujarat had witnessed in 2022, five years after the BJP nearly lost the state to the Congress.
In 2017, when Modi’s popularity was deemed to be at its peak, the BJP had retained Gujarat with a razor-thin majority, winning 99 of the 182 seats. In 2022, the party totalled an astonishing 156 seats.
Bihar has now delivered a similar turnaround. In 2020, the NDA had just about managed to retain power, crossing the halfway mark of 122 by winning 125 seats, as the Tejashwi Yadav-led Mahagathbandhan snapped at its heels with 110.
If Modi-Shah’s election management skills were a key factor in Friday’s victory, so was Nitish Kumar’s personal charisma and the goodwill he enjoys among the non-Yadav backward castes.
The state government’s pre-poll, one-time cash dole of ₹10,000 to 1.25 crore women and the hike in pension for the aged, widows and the disabled too helped counter two-decades of anti-incumbency. The turnout among women was nearly 9 per cent higher than that among men.
As for Nitish, all the talk about his poor health, faltering concentration and loosening grip seems to have been laid to rest.
While Shah had hinted at a possible leadership change — and later issued a half-hearted retraction under pressure — the BJP will feel compelled to stick with Nitish, at least for now.
The chief minister’s imprint on the mandate is too strong for the BJP to try and do a Maharashtra, where Eknath Shinde of the Shiv Sena had to step aside for Devendra Fadnavis.
Posters featuring Nitish with the slogan “Tiger abhi zinda hai” had mushroomed at different points in Patna, including the JDU office, since Thursday.
“Pachis se tees, phirse Nitish (2025 to 2030, Nitish Kumar once again),” declared the JDU’s Patna president, Ashok Kumar, firmly rejecting the possibility of the BJP
taking over the top post after winning more seats than his party.
Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) leader Chirag Paswan, who has emerged as a big winner, unequivocally endorsed Nitish despite crediting the victory to the “Modi-Nitish double engine”.
“I firmly believe that Nitish Kumar will remain the Bihar chief minister,” Chirag, who had been a thorn in the JDU’s side in 2020, told reporters.
He blamed the “arrogance of Tejashwi and Rahul” for the Opposition’s humiliating defeat.
Nitish remained closeted in his official 1 Aney Marg residence through the day
and thanked the people
of Bihar for the historic mandate. He did not forget to mention Modi.
“The people of the state have expressed their confidence in our government by giving us a massive majority. For this, I bow to all the esteemed voters of the state, and express my heartfelt gratitude and thanks,” Nitish posted on X.
“I express my heartfelt gratitude and thanks to the Honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi Ji for the support received from him, while bowing to him.”
Modi seemed to taunt the RJD’s famed “MY” (Muslim-Yadav) voter combination in his victory speech at the BJP headquarters in Delhi.
He renamed the “MY” combination as “Mahila aur Yuva” (women and the youth), stressing that the two segments had reposed their faith in “Phir ek baar, NDA sarkar”.
The scale of the NDA’s victory is far bigger than what the erstwhile Janata Dal of Lalu Prasad had achieved in the heyday of Mandal in 1995. Of the 324 seats in undivided Bihar, the Janata Dal had bagged only 167.