The Bihar Mandate: A Mirror to a Changing Political Culture
The National Democratic Alliance’s sweeping victory, securing 202 of the 243 Assembly seats must have come as a pleasant surprise even for the ruling leadership in Delhi. For the opposition, however, it is a sobering jolt, exposing yet again their inability to decode the democratic winning mantra that continues to elude the Congress with each successive election. Such lopsided outcomes, though electorally legitimate, raise deeper questions about the health of Indian democracy. A politically divided national psyche becomes even more fractured when victory turns triumphalist and defeat becomes an occasion for conspiratorial lament. The winning side, especially in Bihar, has not always tempered its euphoria with humility, while the losing camp has too often sought refuge in imagined conspiracies rather than confronting hard political truths.
This moment in Bihar’s political history, however, cannot be read in isolation. Critics argue that it reflects a broader shift in the global political imagination. Despite unprecedented digital interconnections and the free flow of information, nations today appear more estranged from one another than at any time in recent decades. Identity may travel across borders, but trust does not. The nation-state remains the fundamental unit of political life. The early dreams of globalization regarding the promise of seamless cooperation, cosmopolitan solidarities, and borderless opportunity have steadily dimmed. Instead, political communities have grown inward-looking, guarded, and deeply anxious.
Modern states, including India, increasingly operate as powerful security structures fortified by surveillance capacities and organized military and paramilitary forces. This shift reshapes political participation itself. In such an environment, individuals discover that aligning themselves functionally with the system out of conviction, pragmatism, or compulsion becomes one of the few stable pathways to dignity and security. This internalisation of system-loyalty, coupled with a new narrative of patriotic duty, has become a significant force shaping electoral behaviour. Across India, ruling dispensations have successfully leveraged this mood, positioning themselves as protectors of national stability in a turbulent world.
To understand the magnitude of the Bihar mandate, one must revisit the state’s layered political memory. Public memory may fade with time, but the stains of humiliation linger sharply. The fifteen-year rule of Lalu Prasad Yadav left behind a powerful imprint—one that many believe symbolised the erosion of the rule of law. The politics of empowering the deprived had its own moral logic, yet the manner of its execution strained institutions, fractured social cohesion, and disrupted administrative continuity. Nitish Kumar’s governance model emerged as a corrective to this trajectory. His initiatives—reserving over forty percent of local-body seats for women, enforcing prohibition, restoring administrative order, and allowing institutions to function with renewed legitimacy. It has won him widespread recognition both within Bihar and across the country.
Bihar’s long history of outmigration remains crucial to understanding its political response. For decades, Biharis have travelled to Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir to work in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors. They have contributed immensely to the rural economy of Punjab, to the construction boom of the National Capital Region, and to the service labour that sustains urban life in many northern states. Yet the stereotype of the “Bihari labourer” named backward, uncouth, or unwanted persists in public imagination. This narrative of humiliation has roots in the collapse of Bihar’s developmental agenda after the mid-1970s, when political fragmentation within the Janata Dal crippled administrative functioning and stalled economic progress.
Over time, India began to conflate Bihar’s structural challenges with cultural deficiency. Lawlessness, backwardness, filth, and poverty were repeatedly portrayed as intrinsic to Bihari society rather than as the products of political and developmental neglect. This stereotype travelled with migrant workers, shaping public perception in host states. For many Biharis, this enduring prejudice remains a collective wound.
Seen in this light, the recent electoral verdict is not merely political; it is a silent form of moral revenge against decades of national stereotyping. It is an assertion of collective dignity by the very people who carried these burdens. They voted not simply for a party or an alliance, but for a political order they believe can restore the image of Bihar as a state capable of self-respect and forward movement.
Among the upper castes, this sentiment is particularly pronounced. Having lost much of their political influence during the turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, they now view the return of a stable governance model as an opportunity to reclaim political relevance—not in the old hierarchical sense but in the desire for institutional stability, predictability, and effective administration. Their support is less a vote for dominance than a vote for discipline in governance.
Beyond Bihar’s borders, another puzzle emerges: Why did Prashant Kishor’s reformist manifesto—clean, structured, and technocratically sound, fail so decisively? The failure cannot be attributed merely to campaign strategy. Instead, it reflects a deeper scepticism among the public toward large promises of systemic overhaul. Indians across classes have increasingly resigned themselves to the belief that corruption cannot be eradicated entirely. It is not cynicism alone, but experience that shapes this belief. Ordinary citizens know that even basic administrative tasks—getting a certificate, registering land, accessing welfare—often require intermediaries and informal payments. Corruption has ceased to appear exceptional; it has become procedural.
This resigned acceptance is dangerous, but it is real. Even the political elite, despite loud declarations of ethical governance, offer limited sensitivity to the corrosive impact of everyday corruption. Consider the plight of middle-class families in Delhi and other metropolitan cities who pay instalments for decades to cooperative housing societies, only to find their flats un-allotted due to internal corruption and bureaucratic manipulation. These stories are common, and they deepen public suspicion of lofty claims of “clean governance”.
In this context, political campaigns built around nostalgic socialist slogans lose credibility. Many candidates who deploy this vocabulary are themselves symbols of wealth, privilege, and entrenched familial networks. Their lifestyles reveal a stark disjunction between rhetoric and reality. Between polished neo-capitalists and symbolic socialists, the electorate perceives little difference. Socialist vocabulary becomes a decorative gesture rather than an ideological commitment. Voters, aware of this contradiction, gravitate instead toward governance models that promise administrative stability over ideological purity.
The Bihar mandate, therefore, must be understood as more than an electoral landslide. It is a mirror to shifting political cultures, wounded collective memories, and a society negotiating between aspiration and disillusionment. It reflects a global mood of anxiety in which states grow more powerful, identities grow more fragile, and individuals recalibrate their expectations of politics. It reveals an electorate that prefers governance over grand ideology, stability over agitation, and dignity over symbolic politics.
What emerges from Bihar is a complex yet coherent message: democracy thrives not merely on ballots but on trust, credibility, and the restoration of institutional order. The verdict is both an endorsement and a warning—an affirmation of governance grounded in stability, and a caution against triumphalism that blinds political actors to the deeper currents of public sentiment.
Bihar, often caricatured as India’s political outlier, may well be offering the country a profound insight into the evolving nature of democratic aspiration. It reminds us that in a world of fractured identities and global insecurities, dignity, stability, and institutional renewal may matter more than any ideology of the past.
Note: I am thankful to Professor J.K.Tiwary for his reflective inputs
Prof. Ashok Kaul, retired Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Banaras Hindu University
