Friday saw the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) storm back to power in Bihar with an unprecedented majority.
The NDA's victory was predicted by most observers, but what was surprising in the end was the sheer scale. This raises a pertinent question: What propelled NDA to such a sweeping win, and what went wrong for the Mahagathbandhan?
Here are six reasons that we feel played a key part in forging the final result.
Bye, bye, Love
Nitish Kumar has been a decisive factor in securing the electoral outcome in Bihar. Only the alliance which he is part of has managed to win assembly elections in the recent past. The Bihar CM has steered both the NDA and Mahagathbandhan to victory on earlier occasions.
This is because the 74-year-old leader personifies the middle path in Bihar's politics. Through policies and action, he has consolidated his position among that section of voters who neither want RJD's lawlessness nor the BJP's upper-caste domination. This has made Kumar indispensable.
He had declared that the 2020 election would be his last election, but the voters did not believe him then. However, this time around there was consensus that this will be Nitish babu's last election. It appears that the voters were keen on giving him a grand farewell.
Getting the caste math right
Caste has always played a very significant role in Bihar. This is the reason why the parties of Upendra Kushwaha and Chirag Paswan have publicly declared the caste background of their candidates. Put simply, the NDA did its caste arithmetic better.
This can be seen in the manner in which the alliance was built and the way candidates were nominated keeping the caste equation in mind. Bihar's two topmost Dalit parties—the LJP and HAM—were constituents of the NDA. Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Morcha was also part of the NDA.
Both the BJP and JD(U) nominated their candidates with a tactical understanding. The former targeted upper castes by nominating around half of its candidates from these castes, while the JD(U)'s focus remained firmly on the extremely backward castes (EBCs). The RJD and Congress, despite campaigning for EBC votes, refrained from nominating candidates from among these castes.
That Rs 10000 transfer
Women have become an important factor in elections. This was definitely the case in an election that saw 2.52 crore women turn out to vote— a figure higher than the 2.47 crore men voters in 2025. Nitish Kumar had made inroads among women voters through his policies such as the distribution of free bicycles and the prohibition of liquor.
Just before this election, he went on to seal the deal by transferring Rs 10000 to 25 lakh women voters across the state. There were also further promises for the upliftment of women through schemes such as the one to create one crore 'lakhpati' didis. Most women in the state lapped up these announcements.
Friction within the Mahagathbandhan
The Mahagathbandhan did not help themselves by generating avoidable friction. That all was not well was underlined when the parties failed to thrash out a seat-sharing formula. This ended up sending the wrong signals to their supporters.
Senior leaders then got caught up in resolving differences that cropped up in the nomination of candidates.
Also unseemly was the failure on the part of the RJD and Congress to agree upon the the chief ministerial and deputy chief ministerial candidates till the last moment. Grassroots workers ended up thinking that their party leadership did not fancy their chances and were not taking the election seriously. This was to prove very costly in the end.
The drama within the Yadav family
The disunity within Lalu Prasad Yadav's family also didn't help. Lalu had expelled his eldest son, Tej Pratap Yadav, from the family as well as the party. The episode continued to remain in the spotlight with the brothers even failing to acknowledge each other in public.
Against this backdrop, Tejashwi Yadav led the RJD campaign. The separation seemingly sent a wrong signal to the voters. If one cannot carry the family along, how can one carry the whole state might well have been the question in the minds of voters.
RJD's refusal to learn from Akhilesh Yadav
Political parties need to learn from each other. They need to adopt effective strategies that have been shown to yield results.
There has been a growing realisation that the BJP mobilises voters of marginalised castes against the Yadavs in north India. To counter this, Akhilesh Yadav had come up with a formula that saw him field fewer candidates from the Yadav caste. This strategy of Akshilesh bore fruit during the 2024 Lok Sabha election that saw the Samajwadi Party pull off an upset in the hindutva heartland of Uttar Pradesh.
The RJD should have treated that as a wake-up call. However, the party did not seem to have learn its lessons. In this assembly election, it nominated most of its candidates from the Yadav caste again. This reduced its scope of accommodating diverse castes and reworking the election equation in its favour.
The results that have followed speak eloquently of the price the RJD has had to pay at the end of the day.
(Arvind Kumar is a visiting lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Pankaj Kumar is a PhD scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia.)
