Whether Bihar’s young voters can overcome the state’s deep-rooted social, political, and economic divides to deliver a surprise outcome in the ensuing Assembly polls, or if it will be the same old story again? A report by Vibha Sharma
Bihar is a land of paradox. Historically, it was the cradle of learning—home to ancient Nalanda and Vikramshila universities—attracting scholars from across Asia. Today, it continues to produce some of India’s brightest minds—top IAS officers, bureaucrats, journalists, and professionals who excel nationally and internationally—despite the education system of the country’s “intellectual capital” being in shambles. Bihar remains among India’s poorest states, plagued by unemployment, migration, and weak governance.
For decades, the state’s decline has been shaped by political opportunism. Successive leaders—from Lalu Prasad Yadav’s populist patronage to Nitish Kumar’s moral posturing—thrived because national parties like Congress and BJP allowed them to. The Congress abandoned Bihar to caste-based and regional politics and BJP treated it as a coalition playground, prioritising electoral arithmetic over governance—a political culture of survival politics where systemic corruption flourished and development took a backseat.
Today, Bihar’s politics revolves around poverty, migration, moral governance, and electoral freebies—cash transfers to women and youth, pensions for the elderly, and free rations to secure votes besides measures like the liquor ban—which do little to foster real economic transformation. Despite decades-long rule of an apparently popular Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar, the state remains caught between symbolic reforms and persistent economic failure, with jobs, industry, and scarce opportunities.
The race to the 243-member Bihar Assembly is close with no alliance clearly dominating across all metrics. In one of the surveys ahead of the elections, backed by Congress and Left parties, RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav is leading as the preferred CM choice, while in another, the ruling JD(U)-BJP combine seems set to retain power with LJP’s Chirag Paswan making modest gains. In yet another survey, founder of newbie Jan Suraaj Party is said to be on a roll.
While politicians focus on managing poverty with freebies, cash doles and rations to win elections rather than eradicating it, the land of historical brilliance and immense human potential is struggling to provide basic livelihoods, forcing millions to migrate. Bihar’s paradox is clear—a state of exceptional talent trapped by structural neglect and political compromise.
The Irony
There are several examples of things that are wrong, consider this most evident: When Nitish Kumar announced total prohibition in April 2016, it was hailed as a bold social reform. The Chief Minister framed it as a moral and economic corrective—meant to curb domestic violence, restore household savings, and empower women. On paper, the ban is a perfect success story in gender justice.
Data gives this claim some weight. According to some studies, weekly alcohol use in Bihar fell to among the lowest in India and also prevented lakhs of domestic abuse cases. In countless villages, women testify that their husbands now come home sober, bringing groceries instead of quarrels. In this sense, the ban reconfigured power within families and gave women tangible relief.
But beneath the surface lie the deep cracks. The ban has cost Bihar dearly—financially and administratively—with the state forfeiting thousands of crores annually in excise revenue, money that could have funded roads, schools, or hospitals. Meanwhile, a parallel black market for liquor flourished, with smuggling networks from Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal keeping the state wet despite official dryness.
The irony is that while trying to prevent alcohol-related harm, Bihar spawned a thriving underground economy of bootleggers, police corruption, and fatal hooch tragedies. Dozens die every year from spurious liquor. Enforcement is heavy-handed and uneven—poor men from Dalit and backward communities are disproportionately jailed, while wealthier citizens procure alcohol discreetly.
Bihar’s prohibition experiment is well-intentioned, symbolically grand but operationally broken—and that may be the case with most populist schemes to woo voters.
Political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor has turned this into a campaign issue. Kishor calls the prohibition policy a “sham,” arguing it has neither reformed society nor strengthened the state and has promised to repeal the ban “within an hour of coming to power.”
Migration —The Escape Economy
This is just one aspect of the Bihar story. A poor education system, lack of opportunities, and migration make it a state whose most consistent export has been its people. According to recent estimates, around 74.5 lakh Biharis live outside the state—a staggering figure that reveals the limits of local opportunity.
Migration in Bihar is both a safety valve and a symptom. It is a safety valve because remittances sustain rural households, fund education, and drive local consumption and a symptom because it exposes structural failures that push people out—inadequate education system, unemployment, land fragmentation, low industrialisation, and frequent floods.
Migration data mirrors Bihar’s inequalities. It is highest in regions hit by ecological fragility and economic neglect. Educated youth migrate by choice while the poor and landless by compulsion. General and upper castes dominate skilled and formal-sector migration, while backward castes, Dalits, and Muslims form the bulk of seasonal, informal, and insecure migrants.
The economic cost of this exodus is immense. Bihar loses not just labour but voters—large-scale migration has distorted electoral rolls, with entire families missing during revisions. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise recently triggered controversy when thousands of names, particularly from Seemanchal’s Muslim-majority districts, were deleted. Allegations of disenfranchisement—whether by error or design—have turned migration into a democratic crisis.
Schemes launched during the Covid pandemic to reintegrate returning migrants were short-term patches, migrants came home but jobs did not. Once travel reopened, most left again. Migration in Bihar is no longer a temporary response—it is an embedded feature of its political economy, and every departing worker and every genuine voter missing is an indictment of the state’s inability to provide livelihood security.
Behind the migration tide lies Bihar’s youth bulge—its greatest potential and deepest liability. Over 60% of the population is under 35, but the job market is stagnant, and aspirations far outpace opportunities. Government recruitment drives are sporadic, often mired in paper leaks and procedural corruption. The education system, weakened by absentee teachers and political interference, fails to equip students for the private sector. The result is a generation disillusioned with both education and governance.
In urban centres like Patna, coaching institutes and exam centres are crowded with hopefuls preparing for government jobs that may never materialise. For many, migration to Delhi, Surat, or Gulf countries feels less like ambition and more like resignation. Logically, employment—or its absence—should be the most potent electoral issue alongside basic education. But will it?
The state’s welfare architecture is vast—free bicycles, pensions, student incentives, cash transfers, free rations and honoraria. But do these programmes make a long-term difference? The liquor ban itself is a case study. Police and excise officials reportedly extort both smugglers and citizens. Courts are clogged with prohibition-related cases, consuming administrative bandwidth that could have been spent on development.
The ruling government’s focus on welfare “freebies” reflects both electoral pragmatism and structural paralysis. In a state with little industry and weak private investment, the government’s role as the main distributor of benefits has become the central mode of political control. But welfare without reform breeds dependency, and does not build resilience.
The Caste Factor
The fact is caste is the invisible architecture of Bihar’s politics and everything revolves around it. Be it JD(U)-BJP, RJD-Congress, or new formations like Jan Suraaj, everyone calculates its arithmetic on caste equations. Women, empowered through prohibition and targeted welfare schemes, have emerged as a distinct voting bloc, however, gender empowerment in Bihar is narrow—it expands welfare access but not economic agency.
Overall, it is caste that drives electoral strategy, with representative leaders negotiating with bigger parties for gains that hardly reach their voters. Regional leaders thrived, often using public resources for patronage, nepotism, and populist schemes, leaving Bihar dependent on migration, remittances, and informal economies.
According to observers, Bihar’s chronic underdevelopment is no accident—it is the product of decades of political neglect, mismanagement, and opportunism. Despite being among India’s most populous states, it consistently ranks at the bottom of human development indices. Political elites prioritized survival over reform, building vote banks through caste and community appeasement rather than investing in industry, education, or healthcare, with freebies and symbolic schemes (like the liquor ban) substituting for real economic growth.
Nitish Kumar’s tenure has seen some infrastructure gains—electricity coverage has improved in urban and many rural areas, and rural roads expanded under central and state schemes—achievements that are real but insufficient to offset decades of neglect and entrenched poverty.
For Bihar to break free, politics must move beyond caste arithmetic, symbolism, and survival strategies.
The Current Situation
Hailed as “sushasan babu,” Nitish Kumar is a pale shadow of his former self who once challenged the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi because he saw himself as a competitor and a better candidate for the post of the Prime Minister. Twelve years down the line, his image is frayed due to his various U-turns and failing health.
The BJP top brass is well aware of the situation, a reason perhaps for playing a controversial yet significant card—the SIR/electoral roll revision. Many believe it may tilt the playing field in favour of the ruling alliance (NDA) by changing voter registration dynamics.
The impact of new entrants or a third front (Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj) is uncertain—the untested newbie may pull votes from both major blocs, particularly from segments dissatisfied with the status quo. Preliminary poll snapshots reflect current sentiment and volatile political environments which can shift closer to election day. Prashant Kishor has leapfrogged Nitish Kumar in the CM preference rankings.
Even if Kishor’s Jan Suraaj is merely a “third front”, “spoiler”, or “vote-splitting” factor, it is capable of influencing who eventually comes out on top. PK is emerging not necessarily as the top choice but as a strong second contender—signalling significant traction for a newcomer in a state long dominated by entrenched party identities.
The fact that he has overtaken Nitish suggests declining confidence in the incumbent, and that some of the anti-incumbency vote is gravitating toward him, not the RJD-Congress-Left parties’ mahagathbandhan. Some of the polls still show a big gap between him and Tejashwi Yadav, but even a modest base can swing outcomes by fragmenting vote shares in a three-way contest where the BJP-led NDA has the edge.
Who will win is anybody’s guess, but in real elections, factors like local candidate strength, alliance arrangements, party machinery, caste dynamics, and ground mobilization override.
Political Fatigue
Prashant Kishor openly accuses BJP and Congress of compromising the state by piggybacking on “regional corrupt parties.”
Bihar’s greatest challenge is not just poverty or migration—it is the deep political fatigue born of recycled promises. For decades, the state has oscillated between the same faces and formations, each claiming moral reform while preserving structural rot. Yet, under the surface, a restless young electorate—better connected, more aspirational, and less patient—is beginning to question inherited loyalties.
Observers say if Bihar does spring a surprise, it will not come from a new alliance or slogan—it will come from a generational demand to move beyond survival politics toward dignity, opportunity, and accountability. Bihar is not just a land of intellectual brilliance—it has also been an incubator of political activism in India.
The Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) Movement of 1974–75 stands out as the defining moment of Bihar’s revolutionary spirit. Sparked by widespread corruption, misgovernance, and inequality, the movement galvanized students, workers, and ordinary citizens across the state to demand “Total Revolution”—political, social, and economic reforms.
It is a close contest between the ruling NDA alliance (BJP, JD(U), LJP and others) and the opposition Mahagathbandhan (RJD, Congress, Left and other parties), with the newbie Jan Suraj Party positioning itself as the third alternative. Players like AIMIM and BSP are also in the game
The elections, to be held in two phases on November 6 and 11, carry several intriguing possibilities. Freebies for women and youth may influence voter choices, while the Jan Suraaj Party could attract disenchanted voters—especially the young and first-timers. Voter turnout, particularly among women and youth, along with the effectiveness of alliances, will be crucial. Whether Bihar can overcome its entrenched social, political, and economic divides to deliver an unexpected outcome—or if it will be the same old story again—is something only the voters will decide.
