Apart from the recent episodes of Bahubali violence that briefly gripped public attention, there is little of the tremor one associates with an election season in Bihar.
Published Nov 07, 2025 | 2:00 PM ⚊ Updated Nov 07, 2025 | 2:00 PM
A group of women at a polling booth on Bihar. (X)
Synopsis: With the Assembly elections underway in Bihar, the state appears curiously detached from its own electoral theatre. For a generation of young Biharis, neither the rhetoric of the fear of Jungle Raj nor the unbelievable fantasy of universal state employment carries conviction.
Probably the most evocative way to describe contemporary Bihar would be that it is a state caught in motion without movement. A state where the processes of politics hum with frenetic energy, yet the substantive and imaginative purpose that should animate it remains conspicuously absent.
All grander visions of economic transformation and programmatic policy changes seem to get tunnelled in the dark alleys of a state, an exception which political economists have come to mark as an anomaly to the larger story of economic change in India.
Overflowing with politics, akin to a psephologist’s dream filled with numbers, caste arithmetic, and competitive mobilisation, Bihar probably stands as an inconvenient reminder that electoral vibrancy need not necessarily translate into developmental purposes.
From a distance, one hears the usual refrains about how pivotal these Bihar elections are, about how they will shape not only the state’s political landscape but also the national political mood. Long-view analysts who link these elections with the impending delimitation exercise invoke their significance with ritual solemnity.
Yet, as one lands in Patna, the noise recedes into an odd, uncharacteristic quietness. In contrast to previous elections, the state appears curiously detached from its own electoral theatre.
Apart from the recent episodes of Bahubali violence that briefly gripped public attention, there is little of the tremor one associates with an election season in Bihar.
This is unmistakably a no-wave election, and as experience tells us, such elections tend to favour incumbents. The Opposition insists there is an undercurrent, but that undercurrent seems confined to the narrow reservoirs of the vote bank that have long sustained the Mahagathbandhan’s base.
Any cross-cutting sentiment that transcends caste or class — the kind of collective political surge that Bihar witnessed to some degree in the last elections — seems to be absent. That absence is striking, since the opposition had come tantalisingly close to victory in the previous contest. The flattening of the political mood this time speaks not merely of fatigue but of a deeper stasis in Bihar’s public imagination.
In a state that ranks among the poorest and most deprived, serving as the labour reservoir of the nation, it is a striking irony that both major alliances have chosen to fight an election on planks which its larger population stand unmoored by.
Over the past decade, Indian elections have witnessed what some call the“professionalisation” of politics. Data analytics, war rooms, and digital management firms have transformed campaigns into meticulously choreographed spectacles.
Paid professionals now design slogans, draft manifestos, and in some cases even vet bureaucratic transfers.
Their interventions have lent a certain polish — PayCM in Karnataka, Didi Ke Bolo in Bengal, Bina Parchi Bina Kharchi in Haryana — turning elections into an interesting exercise of branding aggregated collective interests and the grander political vision to follow.
In Bihar as well, you would find hotels and furnished flats filled with these professional managers. The architect of this model, Prashant Kishore (PK), is himself in the fray this time, though his prospects stand slender.
And yet, in these Bihar elections, parties and the professionals working for them seem to have largely missed the plot in reverberating grander political planks that would capture the imagination of ordinary Biharis.
Bihar is not short of issues; unemployment, agrarian distress, corruption, migration, and extreme poverty remain the everyday burdens of its people. Yet neither the incumbent nor the principal Opposition has managed to translate these lived anxieties into a coherent, state-wide transformational agenda for them to vet on.
The incumbent leans on the fading memory of stability; the Opposition, on overblown promises like Tejashwi Yadav’s implausible assurance of a government job for every household.
For a generation of young Biharis, neither the rhetoric of the fear of Jungle Raj nor the unbelievable fantasy of universal state employment carries conviction.
The only other party which seems to have put forth a transformational governance agenda as the major poll plank seems to be PK’s Jan Suraaj Party. However, for now, his startup seems to be hardly finding sizeable buyers.
This is perhaps the biggest paradox of Bihar politics; for a state mired having long-standing structural issues, neither the buyer (voters) nor the seller (parties) seems to be successful in undertaking a wholesome transaction for a big-ticket transformational agenda. Why is this so?
Probably, beyond the veneer of electoral competition reflected in a high effective number of parties (ENOP) in a constituency, lies a more sobering reality: The processes of state politics in Bihar have, over time, produced a remarkably stable structure in which accountability in matters of governance has been decoupled from voter decision-making across the political spectrum.
This is not a coincidence born of a political culture based on social identities, but the outcome of two reinforcing trends — the gradual elitisation of Bihar’s politics in class terms over the past two decades, and the peculiar political economy in which its politics now operates.
The effective churn in candidate selection for major parties has virtually ceased, giving way to a circulation of entrenched elites as the costs of political entry have risen steeply.
For instance, the fact that Bahubalis — or their wives and children — continue to secure party tickets even when their social relevance has visibly waned, is not simply a symptom of the lack of political imagination, but of deeper structural constraints that define the terrain of politics itself.
In the absence of a regional capitalist class capable of underwriting political competition or generating a continuous cycle of private investment, Bihar’s political financing has come to depend on a systematic pilferage of state-directed expenditure.
Networks of bureaucrats, contractors, and local strongmen channel public funds from development schemes and infrastructure projects into the arteries of political survival.
In this sense, the sabotage of the state’s service delivery mechanisms is not an aberration but a constitutive feature of its political economy. These very networks of bureaucrats, contractors, and musclemen have also become the recruitment pools for its political class.
The result is a narrowing of choices in the political field, where politics becomes transactional rather than transformational. Until these long-standing structural constraints are confronted, Bihar’s political theatre will continue to absorb, muddle and eventually dissipate every grand vision of socio-economic change.
(Views are personal. The author is an Assistant Professor at GITAM University, Hyderabad and is associated with People’s Pulse, a Hyderabad-based research organisation. Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
