The existing political alliances are expected to remain almost the same, and the state is likely to witness a contest between ‘Janata Dal (United)-led National Democratic Alliance’ and ‘Rashtriya Janata Dal-led United Progressive Alliance’.

However, there is a sudden clamour in political and media circles that the BJP is strong enough to win Bihar on its own, and hence could abandon the JD(U). This claim – that the BJP could win Bihar without Nitish Kumar – appears fallacious and ahistorical, ignoring the specific socio-political dynamics of the state.

Fallacious assumptions

As the ground reports suggest, migrant workers returning to Bihar are reportedly not happy with the state government’s administrative response. This development came after another massive embarrassment for Nitish Kumar, when floods wreaked havoc in Patna and his administration came out looking clueless.

It was claimed that the ‘development man’ of Bihar has lost his central plank – good governance – and is now an electoral liability for the BJP. This line of thinking commits the fundamental analytical fallacy of treating political criticism of a leader by the electorates as a sigh of his declining support base. A decline in the popularity of a leader doesn’t necessarily translate into the desertion of his core support base. Therefore, it is the state of Nitish’s appeal among his core support base – the extremely backward castes (EBCs) and Kurmis – accounting for 26% and 4% of the total electorates, that will affect his indispensability in Bihar.

Conversely, his unpopularity with upper castes, dominant OBCs (primarily Yadavs) and Muslims, besides within political parties like the RJD, Congress and a majority of the local BJP leadership, doesn’t make him dispensable. Therefore, it is crucial to place political equations concerning EBCs in Bihar in the state’s own specific context, rather than extrapolating from insights gathered from Uttar Pradesh. UP’s political dynamics have of late been applied uncritically to other Hindi-heartland states.

UP and Bihar: Comparable yet so not-comparable

In most election studies, people try to superimpose learnings from UP politics on Bihar. Like the commonsensical usage of the term UP-Bihar, experts tend to believe that the two neighbouring states are not different from each other. That’s not true, though.

In UP, there are various social blocks claiming political power like upper castes, OBCs, EBCs, Muslims and Dalits, with their various regions of influence in the state. The fight between them is intense, and the reason lies in the state’s demography. In UP, no caste has pan-state dominance. While Brahmins alone comprise around 10% of the population, Yadavs are not too far ahead. The total upper caste population goes beyond 20%, that of SC-ST groups stands at around 22%, Muslims at around 19% and the rest is the OBC-EBC block.

Things are quite different in Bihar, where Yadavs alone comprise around 15% of population, thereby neutralising the upper castes who too account for around 15%, while Muslims are around 17% and Dalits around 16%. The OBC block in Bihar stands at a whopping 52% and due to these factors, politics in Bihar has always been an intra-OBC affair, with Dalits generally aligning with the OBCs since 1990. On the contrary, in UP upper castes play a dominant role and the primary contradiction has mostly remained between the Dalits and OBCs (the only exception in the last 15 years being the 2019 Lok Sabha elections). Even now, the chief minister of the state is an upper-caste Rajput, while one out of two deputy chief ministers is a Brahmin. In Bihar, upper castes lost their claim to power as far back as in the late 1980s.

Further, in UP, the BJP managed to steal the show not just because it had been investing in non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalit leadership since the early 1990s. Though these efforts produced strong leaders like Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharti and in a symbolic way Vinay Katiyar, BJP could manage to capture the imagination of a few OBC-Dalit castes like the Lodh Rajputs or Valmikis. Most of the dominant OBCs like Yadavs and Kurmis were aligned with the Samajwadi Party, while most Dalits and EBC castes like Kushwahas, Rajbhars etc. were aligned with the Bahujan Samaj Party.

It was only when both these parties, in their attempt to excessively concentrate power within their Yadav and Jatav cores respectively, alienated the EBCs and non-Jatav Dalits that the BJP got an opportunity, which it encashed by giving greater representation to these disenchanted sections. No such thing has happened in Bihar, as is evident from the lack of any massive shift of OBC-EBC leaders and mass bases till now.

Nitish Kumar and Bihar’s legacy of OBC politics

Unlike UP, the intra-OBC dynamics in Bihar emerged quite emphatically in the immediate aftermath of independence. The famous rivalry between B.P. Mandal and Karpoori Thakur, hailing from a dominant Yadav caste and weaker barber caste respectively, shaped the political trajectory of OBCs in two distinct delineated blocs of dominant OBCs and weaker EBCs.

Thakur’s hegemony in Lohiaite socialist politics, which was the main platform for backward caste assertion, ensured that EBCs were conscious of their micro interest against both the upper castes as well as dominant OBCs. These intra-OBC characteristics were institutionalised in 1979, when the Thakur government implemented the Mungeri Lal Commission report. In this, 20% of the reservation quota was earmarked for backward castes, 12% was reserved for EBCs and just 8% for OBCs.

This pitted not only the upper castes against Thakur, but also created a sense of deep consternation among the dominant OBCs, particularly Yadavs, who saw his leadership as a denial of their own natural claim of being the vanguard of backward castes. This led to the complicit alliance of many Yadav MLAs of his own party along with the upper caste dominated Congress MLAs in 1987, when he was unceremoniously removed from the post of ‘leader of opposition’. He died shortly after.

Thakur’s death marked the ascendency of both Lalu Prasad Yadav and dominant OBCs leadership of the backward castes, particularly in the wake of Mandal movement. Ironically, implementation of the Mandal report in Bihar by the Lalu government pitted EBCs as much against OBCs as OBCs against upper castes. That was on account of the Lalu government’s decision to discard the Thakur-era reservation scheme, which had a separate quota for EBCs and OBCs, and implement the Mandal scheme, thereby denying the internal differentiation. Expectedly, there were protests by the EBCs and the matter was taken to court. In that moment, Nitish and other leaders prevailed upon Lalu and the decision was reversed; the Thakur model stayed.

As the differences between Lalu and Nitish deepened in the wake of intense Yadavisation of the party, Nitish carefully started following in Thakur’s footsteps. Since the formation of the Samta party in 1994 until his catapulting to power in 2005, he made consistent efforts to be seen as a votary of non-Yadav OBCs. This political constituency was institutionalised during his first term by implementing special policies in favour of EBCs. In fact, he superseded Thakur in creating EBCs as a consolidated political bloc. It is this core social base that has always stood by Nitish in the last three state elections, their swing towards BJP in Lok Sabha notwithstanding.

Here, it is pertinent to note that unlike UP, the BJP’s Hindutva discourse didn’t have the chance to win over the EBCs in Bihar as the space was captured meticulously by Nitish. In other words, the intra-OBC split in Bihar remained confined to splinter parties of socialist discourse, rather than veering towards Hindutva, as has been the case in UP.

Further, a significant section of these EBCs feel aligned to Nitish on account of his good governance and welfare policies. While the subpar governance of his third term may dent Nitish’s image, the continuance of welfare measures initiated by his government to a majority of EBC families is a ground enough to ensure their continued support to the JD(U). That the BJP won over them in the last two Lok Sabha elections, on account of the Narendra Modi wave, shouldn’t be taken as an indication of people’s rejection of Nitish. The 2015 assembly election is a case in point.

On the BJP

Predominantly, the BJP is still an upper caste-Baniya party in Bihar. Further, OBC leaders or faces of the BJP in Bihar are at best district-based and at worst assembly constituency-based, with no echo among their respective communities across the state. While Nand Kishor Yadav continues to be a Patliputra-based leader, Nityanand Rai’s influence is limited in Vaishali parts of Samastipur and none of them has the capability to sway Yadav voters in Madhepura or Banka. Same is the case with Prem Kumar of Gaya, who has a strong hold over Kahar voters in his region, but no pan-state influence. And the party lacks any credible face among the Mandals, the Nishads, the Koeris and Kurmis along with many smaller subgroups of EBC castes like Nuniya, Badhai, Lohar etc.

These smaller groups have less numbers in a constituency but when taken together, they provide the winning margin. That is why in local parlance they are called panchforan, or the spice that alters the taste of the dish. Nitish’s JD(U) has a range of seasoned leaders from these communities and most smaller groups, who also depend on state welfare, still consider him their leader.

Any party that wants to win cannot afford to lose these votes, and Nitish, his friends and his foes all know this quite well. So, maybe if left alone Nitish Kumar will come third in terms of overall votes gathered and BJP may come first (as was the case in the 2015 assembly elections), but in terms of seats, the BJP may still fail to reach the threshold despite being the biggest party due to a split verdict.

In terms of seats, in the first-past-the-post system of elections, the margin that Nitish brings to the winning side has always acted as the game changer. In the last 15 years, there have been both NDA and non-NDA governments, but the only constant factor in the government of Bihar is Nitish leading it from the front, more so because of the above reason.

In this backdrop, most ‘reports’ of disenchantment against the Bihar chief minister seem to be mere strategy by the BJP to keep up the pressure on him and wrest as many seats as possible for the party. But when it comes to state BJP leaders with greater ambitions taking this pitch too seriously, the party high command should act very cautiously. For in the 2015 elections, some of these claimants to the chief minister’s post had to bite dust when they either failed to win themselves, or could not make the party win in their own districts. No wonder that Amit Shah is not taking their views too seriously this time, which is why he is quite clear that Nitish will lead the NDA in this election.

Further, the RJD, despite its lacklustre leadership, has a sizeable support base among Yadavs and Muslims, accounting for around one-third of the total electorate. The fact that despite being in an alliance, the party’s own vote share has been around 18% consistently in the 2010 and 2015 assembly elections, is proof that its hold on these communities continues to persist. Thus, the BJP would be ill-advised to go for a triangular electoral contest in Bihar, wherein the most likely outcome would be a hung-assembly.

The Bengal factor

It’s an open secret that of all the ensuing election-bound states, the BJP is eying Bengal the most hungrily. The state is both a political and emotional project for the party, on account of it being the place of three iconic figures that the discourse of Hindutva celebrates – Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Vivekanands and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder president of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh.

Also, the National Register of Citizens and Citizenship (Amendment) Act issues that the BJP has created have the biggest implication in the state of Bengal, besides Assam. The BJP wishes to capitalise on this aspect. Therefore, after having lost Jharkhand, the BJP would prefer not to lose another neighbouring state, Bihar, just before the crucial state elections in Bengal.With a strong adversary like Mamta Banerjee in Bengal, the confidence that will come from winning Bihar may be required for the BJP’s battle. Hence, Amit Shah has chosen to ignore the dominant sentiment among state BJP leaders instead of discarding Nitish. The chief minister remains indispensable, as of now.