What drove NDA to landslide victory

ThE Bihar Vidhan Sabha verdict today has given an unprecedented victory to the Nitish Kumar-led National Democratic Alliance. Since the campaign of the BJP was led by India's Home Minister Amit Shah, it is undeniably an affirmation of his capacity to lead elections, especially in a state like Bihar, which is characterised by extensive poverty and large-scale migration of labourers seeking jobs across India.

In the 243-member Assembly, the NDA has notched up over 200 seats, and the Mahagathbandhan has scored just over 30 seats. This is an abysmal showing by the MGB as it had 114 seats in the outgoing Assembly, and Tejashwi had also served as Deputy Chief Minister in 2015 (until 2017) in an alliance government with Nitish Kumar. Besides, both its alliance partners, the Congress and the Left parties, have managed less than 10 seats between them.

The ten percentage points difference in the vote share between the two alliances — the NDA at 47.2% and the MGB at 37.3% — gave a massive advantage to the NDA. In what became like a two-party bipolar race, the NDA has notched up an overwhelming electoral tally.

How do we make sense of this mandate? The answers lie in a range of electoral maneuvrings — from tidying up the fragmented electoral arena to a bipolar line-up and programmatic offerings of cash transfers to women. In what was a minutely contested election, each side was onboarding even the smallest of parties. The BJP managed Chirag Paswan, Jitan Ram Manjhi and Upender Kushwaha, giving the alliance an image of having a formidable consolidation of backward caste votes. The Mahagathbandhan too had the Congress, the Left parties, VIPs Mukesh Sahni and Mallah votes, and IP Gupta's taanti votes.

In the end, it was the NDA’s allies that were scoring a perfect 10. The CPI-ML strongholds in Magadh and central Bihar were dented by an aggressive caste-based politics of the BJP, distributing tickets to backward caste candidates, from Rajwanshis, Kushwahas, Kanus, and Yadavs, and with the support of Chirag, Jitan Ram Manjhi and Upender Kushwaha. Although BJP leaders avoided campaigning with Nitish, they did nothing to damage his image and stature, let alone play backdoor politics to defeat JD-U candidates.

Critical to their courting of Nitish was the latter's carefully cultivated image of delivering on pro-women developmental schemes. Nitish has a history of bringing the girl child to school — starting with distributing cycles to schoolgirls, giving them uniforms, to appointing women rasoiya didis who cooked wholesome meals in schools.

His government has built up an incredible network of over one crore Jeevika didis — a state-wide confederation of women's self-help group of over 1.4 crore women. Besides, women were given 30% reservations in panchayat elections, and in appointments of police constables. Women police constables and women-on-cycles are a familiar presence all over the state. Nitish's policy of sharaab-bandi also found favour with women, even though there are criticisms of this policy having run its course and cheap quality alcohol is available as 'home delivery', it is alleged. The transfer of Rs 10,000 to women was a top-up on these pro-women developmental schemes.

As many as 2.47 crore women voters turned up to cast their votes —this was an unprecedented turnout and higher than the number of male voters. The women voter factor gave a "pan-Bihar" mandate to the NDA.

On the side of the Mahagathbandhan, Tejashwi's promise of one 'pakki naukri' (govt job) for each family in Bihar did not find favour, nor did any autonomous voting of the yuva-varg prop him up as a leader of the Gen-Z.