Bihar has once again delivered a political drama worthy of its reputation—record turnout, sharp debates over the voter rolls, a decisive victory for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), and a fresh round of questions about whether the opposition has what it takes to displace Modi and the BJP.
The NDA—anchored by Nitish Kumar and his Janata Dal (United), together with the BJP and other allies—secured a landslide victory by winning 202 out of 243 seats in the state assembly. The opposition, for its part, saw little change in its vote share from 2020, but could only muster 35 seats.
To work through the elections—and their larger meaning for India’s political economy—Milan is joined on the show today by the Hindustan Times data and political economy editor Roshan Kishore. Over the past several months, Roshan and his team have consistently put out the most thoughtful data and analysis on the trends in Bihar.
Milan and Roshan discuss the resilience of the JD(U)–BJP alliance, the polarization in the electorate, and the dissonance within the opposition alliance’s campaign. Plus, the two discuss the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s controversial review of electoral rolls, the impact of upstart Prashant Kishor and his Jan Suraaj Party, and what the elections portend for India’s political economy beyond November.
Episode notes:
1. Roshan Kishore and Abhishek Jha, “Not conspiracy, political economy explains Bihar results,” Hindustan Times, November 18, 2025.
2. Nishant Ranjan and Roshan Kishore, “The resurrection of ‘coalition of extremes’ in Bihar,” Hindustan Times, November 15, 2025.
3. Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore, “How did Bihar go from a 2020 cliff-hanger to a 2025 landslide?” Hindustan Times, November 15, 2025.
4. Roshan Kishore, Abhishek Jha, and Nishant Ranjan, “Three key takeaways from Bihar results,” Hindustan Times, November 15, 2025.
5. Roshan Kishore, “Bihar election results: Twelve Ds that explain the Bihar results,” Hindustan Times, November 14, 2025.
6. “A Sixth of Humanity and the Dreams of a Nation (with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian),” Grand Tamasha, October 22, 2025.
7. Neelanjan Sircar, “The Welfarist Prime Minister: Explaining the National-State Election Gap,” Economic and Political Weekly 56, no. 10 (March 2021).
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Milan Vaishnav: Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and The Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. Bihar has once again delivered a political drama worthy of its reputation. Record turnout, sharp debates over the voter rolls, a decisive victory for the National Democratic Alliance, and a fresh round of questions about whether the opposition has what it takes to displace Modi in the BJP. The NDA, anchored by Nitish Kumar and his Janata Dal (United), together with the BJP and other allies, secured a landslide victory, winning 202 out of 243 seats in the Bihar State Assembly. The opposition, for its part, saw little change in its vote share, but could only muster 35 seats. To work through the elections and their larger meaning for India's political economy, I am joined on the show today by Hindustan Times data and political economy editor Roshan Kishore. Over the past several months, Roshan and his team have consistently put out the most thoughtful data and analysis on the trends in Bihar. I am pleased to welcome Roshan back to the show. Roshan, thanks so much for taking the time.
Roshan Kishore: Thank you, Milan, for being so generous and having me here again. It's a pleasure.
Milan Vaishnav: So I want to start this conversation by pointing our listeners and our viewers to a recent column in which you noted that the alliance of Nitish Kumar's JDU and Narendra Modi's BJP have never lost an election that they've contested together. Some of us may remember back in 2014 and in 2015, they fought separately, they reunited after that. To your mind, as we come to this momentous result in 2025, what explains the resilience of this JDU-BJP combine?
Roshan Kishore: Milan, there are two ways to answer this question. You know, first is that Nitish Kumar, even when he's contested once with the RJD after he sort of you know became a part of the NDA, even then he did not lose. So clearly there's something which you know in Nitish Kumar which I mean makes him the invincible component in any alliance in Bihar. But to come back to your original question, and I'll come back to the Nitish Kumar factor later. You know, the JDU-BJP alliance, and there were smaller parties also this time, such as the LJP and others, but primarily it embodies what you know late economist Shaibal Gupta, who was from Bihar, called a ‘coalition of extremes.’ You know, we have to go a little back in time in sort of Bihar's political history. And you know, pre-Lalu era, which is the pre 1990s Bihar, you know, had a lot of political turmoil, but primarily it was a politics which was dominated by upper caste. What Lalu did when he captured power in 1990 is he actually, you know, challenged that upper caste dominance, primarily with the Yadavs playing the vanguards. Now, Yadavs, minded Milan, they are the largest caste demographic group in the Hindus at least, and they're around 14% of the population. Lalu's support base had a had a much larger component. There were other OBCs and EBCs and Dalits as well, but primarily the larger spoils of power were sort of taken over by Yadavs. That is what led to the Nitish Kumar defection. And when he joined hands with the BJP and eventually when the alliance sort of fractified, what you had was a coalition of extremes on which the upper caste were on one hand, you know, who had been disenfranchised politically by the Lalu Yadavera, and the lower OBCs, the non-dominant OBCs and the Dalits were on the other hand, who, although they supported Lalu in his initial years, were never given the requisite share of power. This is an alliance against which Lalu Yadav's MY coalition, and now there are genuine doubts about how much of the M remains in that coalition, has always struck us.
Milan Vaishnav: And this is the Muslim Yadav combination.
Roshan Kishore: Yes, the Muslim Yadav combination. And basically, you know, the fact that this alliance keeps winning year after year after year is basically, you know, that, you know, it is, you know, in many ways it is actually, you know, sixty percent of the demographic against perhaps, you know, what is thirty percent of the demographic. So it is basically a coalition of upper castes, lower OBCs, EBCs defeating a coalition of Muslims and Yadavs. And you know, when you look at the demographic, it should not be so surprising.
Milan Vaishnav: I want to just bring your attention to another piece that you did with Abhishek Jha. I mentioned the data team at HT has been extraordinary in these elections. And one of the things that the two of you point out is that the opposition alliance's vote share is almost identical between 2020 and 2025, while the NDA, the BJP Alliance's vote share increased significantly from about thirty-seven and a half percent five years ago to about forty-six and a half percent in just over five years. Now, if the opposition alliances vote share did not change, where did the NDA Alliance get its additional support?
Roshan Kishore: So, like you said, you know, the NDA's vote share has increased by about 10 percentage points between the 2020 and the 2025 elections. You know, some of it is just parties which were earlier not a part of the fold coming into the NDA fold. You know, primarily the Lok Janshakti Party, which is Ram Vilas Paswan's party, now run by his son effectively. But you know, another 5 odd percent also I would say was a consolidation of fringe voters. You know, I would give you another statistic, Milan, which is basically if you look at it from say 2005 February, which is the first election when Lalu sort of failed to get a majority of his own, to these elections, the non-aligned vote in Bihar, which is the non-NDA, non-RJD vote, that vote share has collapsed from about 50%, 49.5% to be precise, to just about 15%. This tells you something remarkable about you know the manner in which Bihar politics has evolved. It primarily started as a contest among I would say competing caste elites, you know, where the Yadavs and the Muslims were on one side, and like I said, you know, these upper caste, like non-dominant OBCs and EBCs were on the other side. But what has happened and what has peaked in these elections is that you know this incumbent government of Nitish Kumar with the BJP in alliance, and this is something which we see across the country now, they actually made it a caste plus class contest. And primarily once again the route was cash transfers, where you actually transfer a lot of money to poor people, basically, and you know, a slew of other populist measures. And what happens is the smaller caste demographics, which do not have, I would say, the requisite share of economic elite to take part in the political electoral competition, they're solidly consolidated behind the NDA. So, what you had was there was nobody left on the fringe. And you know, Milan, you would know this better than I would. We are now living in a dominant party system in India, and basically, I mean, there's no space for fence sitters in politics. So, what you have seen in Bihar is also something you've seen in other elections, where increasingly you know the third non-aligned poll is getting completely squeezed, and in most cases than not, it is actually the NDA or the BJP which is actually managing to consolidate it rather than the opposition.
Milan Vaishnav: You referenced something just now, and I wanted to come to this later, but maybe this is a natural segue. You mentioned these populist cash transfer schemes, right? And this was a big signature policy that the NDA government rolled out. It was counteracted or tempted to be counteracted by the opposition touting their own scheme. But you look at elections across states. I mean, this is something that every party, every government is rolling out, particularly those focused on women voters. You know, do we have any sense of what sort of traction these sorts of schemes, you know, had in particular in the Bihar case? I mean, how much salience do they actually have on the ground?
Roshan Kishore: Well, unlike in the US, Milan, we don't actually have, you know, I would say data with integrity and transparency as far as you know polling is concerned in India. So, it's always difficult to quantify it. But by pure anecdotal experience, you know, this is something which has worked for incumbent governments across the political divide. You know, everybody's making a song and dance about how the BJP was wrong and there was sort of an ethical, sort of, you know, impropriety in doing cash transfer before the election. But this is exactly what say Hemant Soren did and you know the opposition alliance won.
Milan Vaishnav: And this was in Jharkhand earlier.
Roshan Kishore: Telangana to Yeah, everybody has been doing. And Maharashtra did it also. I mean Shivraj Singh Chouhan did it, you know, before the Madhya Pradesh elections. And you know, this is something which takes back, takes me back to the 2024 elections when you know the BJP actually failed to get a majority of its own. And there was a lot of commentary which actually saw this, you know, as a larger indictment of the BJP's larger political worldview. I would say Hindutva or this entire thing about how you know it was a vote by the subaltern against you know, I mean an imminent danger to the constitution or some such thing. But as you'd know, Milan, I've always held that the BJP erred in the 2024 budget, where they did not announce anything tangible in terms of an economic benefit to the electorate. And in my mind, the election defeat or you know, the failure to get a majority, I mean they're still in power, so they've not exactly lost, was basically a function of that. You know, if you take a step back and look at India's political economy, you know—not that things have changed significantly, but let's say post-pandemic, you know, there is more than a consensus that the economic recovery has been K-shaped. No, where the well-off in the economy have been driving the economic recovery, but the really poor have not, I mean, gained much from it. And their lives are, if not worse than before, perhaps as bad as it was before. And there, I think the electorate has sort of become very responsive to anything which gives them a tangible benefit. You know, […] at a larger level, it's it it's basically a cynicism that nothing good is going to happen at say the level of structural transformation or job generation or some such thing, and we might as well take the palliatives which are coming our way. So that way, yes, I think you know, I mean, everybody's an equal opportunity offender when it comes to say, you know, handing out doors before the elections. But yes, at a larger level, it's a deeper indictment of India's political economy. That basically, the only credible thing which an incumbent government, and it's always easy for incumbent government to do it because you know that is actually like a you know de facto transfer rather than just a de jure promise or some such thing. Basically, everything you know they do is one side, and what the electorate wants is whether women or men or whoever it is, they basically want something in their bank accounts before this is done. And you know, thanks to things such as the Jam Trinity and all those things, you know, these things have become extremely fast. These things, as you know, our friend Neelanjan [Sircar] has been arguing, they become extremely attributable. So, yes, I mean this is what you have in the name of electoral contests in this country.
Milan Vaishnav: But there's a little bit of hypocrisy, I think, some of the critics would point out, in that this prime minister or his party have spoken out about the ‘revdi’ or freebie culture. But what really distinguishes a freebie from a non-freebie, right? I mean, one could easily argue that this cash transfer to women was essentially a pre-election freebie, could they not?
Roshan Kishore: Well, the BJP, Prime Minister included, I think themselves they do not talk about this much. You know, I mean, the fascinating thing about the BJP is that apart from its core ideological agenda, which, and especially under you know, I mean the current leader, which is Narendra Modi, you know, apart from issues of core Hindutva, I think the BJP is willing to, you know, pretty much compromise on everything. I mean, as far as winning elections is concerned. You know, I mean they take a stock of what has happened. It's not that the BJP has not had reverses in India since 2014. They've had a number of reverses. I think the most critical and threatening of which was before the 2019 elections when they lost the Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan elections. And then again, you know, the PM, you know, in the entry budget, the government actually did a retrospective cash transfer for farmers. You know, you had something called the EWS reservation for upper caste, which was to sort of you know neutralize the upper caste angst which was there. You know, if you remember, there was a Supreme Court judgment which sort of diluted the prevention of SCST Atrocities Act, and the government sort of brought an ordinance to nullify the judgment. So, everything else I think apart from core Hindutva is negotiable for the BJP, and they're not, I would say, very ideologically invested in any of these things. You know, they make mistakes, they learn from their mistakes, and then they throw the kitchen sink at it.
Milan Vaishnav: That's a very useful I think corrective to some of the conventional wisdom. Roshan, let me just ask you about an interesting feature of these elections, which you and your colleagues have reported on, which is that the Bihar Assembly election saw the highest turnout in the history of the state. And you know, linking us back to the previous conversation about cash transfers for women, much has been made of the leap, particularly in women's turnout when compared to men. However, you and your team have written that one needs to kind of take these numbers with a bit of caution, in that they are merely statistical as opposed to political. What does that distinction mean to you?
Roshan Kishore: So I'll give you the immediate context and then I'll give you the larger context. Now, if you compare the Bihar's post-SIR electoral role with the January 2025 electoral role, which was the reference, so to say, for the SIR, there's been a deletion of somewhere between six to seven million voters. But if you were to compare it,
Milan Vaishnav: And just for our listeners who haven't paying attention, this is the election commission's special intensive revision they carried out months before the Bihar polls under the guise of quote unquote cleaning up the election rolls, which is an extremely controversial measure to say the least.
Roshan Kishore: But if you were to compare it to say, you know, the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the net deletion I think is about in the ballpark of around three million. The larger question, Milan, is, you know, and we will probably come to it later in the discussion. But basically, the question you should begin with is have India's electoral roles always been sort of say pristine? No, we don't know. So, you know, in our paper to look at this question and answer it in a historical perspective, you know, we what we did was we actually compared India's national level electoral roles with the closest adult population or the voting age population, because voting age changed in India in the 1980s, in all the closest censuses. And we found that there's always been a large diversion between the number of you know what the census would tell you with the number of you know adult voting population and the actual voting population of the electoral roles. And you know, this noise has over time actually reduced. So you know, if you look at it in a historical context, there's good reason to believe that you know discrepancy in the electoral rolls has been coming down rather than going up. So that's one. Now the thing is to come back to Bihar. So, let's say, you know, your I mean T minus one electoral role vis-a-vis SIR actually had a lot more people who should not have been there. And you know, there's no reason to accept, like I said, you know, historically we know that this is something which has happened. So basically, you know, the turnout, you know, the base on which you were calculating the turnout was artificially higher. And you know, when the first draft was released on August 2nd, we'd actually said, and Bihar, mind it, Milan, has been a state which has had you know perhaps the lowest turnout among India's largest state. So, what happened, I think was there was a lot of –now, I'm not for a moment saying that maybe not even one genuine voter was not deleted from the SIR, you know, when they should not have. But basically, what really happened possibly was that a lot of people who were probably registered in more than one place, who had migrated, who had simply passed away and had not been deleted from the electoral rolls, they were deleted. Whereas the number of people who actually turned out and voted in the election between 2024 Lok Sabha and the Bihar Assembly actually went up. So, it's basically just a statistical thing because you had a lot of noise in the pre-SIR electoral roll. That noise sort of comes down. And you know, historically, I think till the time the trajectory sort of comes back to you know what like we used to refer to say the pre-COVID trajectory for GDP of countries, etc. So, you're going to perhaps see something of that sort. And you know, my guess is Milan, you know, because the SIR is now being conducted in a lot of other states also, when it comes to the historically high turnout states, such as say you know, West Bengal or Kerala or other places, I mean the turnout delta would not be as high as you know what it has been in the case of Bihar. So, you know the woman turnout was greater simply because more women were deleted than more men were.
Milan Vaishnav: Let me kind of step backwards for a second, right? Which is the opposition banked very heavily on an election narrative that focused on the role of the election commission of India, which is supposed to be this kind of arbiter of a level playing field. And this special intensive review was a very detailed audit of Bihar's voter rolls intended to correct deletions, add missing voters, improve accuracy, deal with deaths, migration, and so on and so forth. Now, to this day, we're recording the Tuesday after the results were announced, the opposition continues to accuse the election commission of using this process to mask large-scale deletions from the voter lists. I want to ask you a question which is which is difficult to answer, but I know it's one that you've thought about. What evidence do we have of any political bias in how the SIR was actually conducted in terms of whose names, whose supporters' names, were deleted from the list?
Roshan Kishore: So you know, one can only deploy proxies to answer this question, and we actually tried to do that when the first draft was released. We looked at constituencies, assembly constituencies where, say, the opposition had won in the 2020 elections and where you know, the NDA had won in the 2020 elections. We found no statistical correlation whatsoever in the extent of deletions. We also looked at constituencies where either a Muslim candidate had won or at least finished second in the elections, which would suggest that these are primarily Muslim-dominated constituencies in the state. Once again, there was no statistical correlation. And the second one is something I think in which other publications have actually worked with LLM models such as the one developed in Harvard, and they've actually sort of scraped the electoral roll. And I think their results are not very different from ours. I mean, once again, Milan, it's very difficult to say what exactly is happening because we do not have access to say booth-wise polling data or some such things. And you know, this is where I think ironical as it sounds, the BJP has an advantage because it today has, I would say, the most robust sort of you know, grassroots level network of political workers in the country. You know, it is probably the only party capable of deploying, say, booth level agents, etc., in most Indian states, apart from maybe states like West Bengal or Kerala, where such parties such as the Trinamool or the CPM or the Congress actually have that kind of an organization to match. No, statistically, you know, quantitatively, these are very difficult things to prove. Anecdotally or you know, by deploying statistical proxies, I think as of now there's no evidence that, you know, I mean, selective targeting or deletion of voters happened. But I think a party which actually has a more robust organization at the grassroots level has the potential to sort of exploit you know any such exercise to its advantage. But that I guess would hold for even a normal election, I mean that alone SIR.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, because SIR is going to be the special intensive review process whereby electoral roles in other states, including some poll bound states in spring 2026 are going to be reviewed, I guess, let me just ask you one follow up question, which is if you leave aside questions of political bias and partisan intent, to what extent do you think the SIR was a problem in its own right, procedurally or administratively?
Roshan Kishore: Well, there are two dilemmas we are dealing with here, Milan. You know, first is I would say the statistician's dilemma. Because in a country where you promise universal suffrage and, you know, you're basically doing an exercise like this, you know, any such exercise, and mind you, India is a country of around one billion voters today, it is a country of 1.4 billion people, you know, and the field level workers who actually conduct exercises such as the SIR, they're immensely overworked. You know, they are your proverbial schoolteacher or the ICDS worker or some such thing. You know, they're working under tremendous stress, they probably do not have the resources. So, any such exercise is bound to have, you know, the type one and the type two error, which is wrong exclusion and wrong inclusion. Now, as a democracy, you know, in a country where you know that poor people are least likely to have documents, you know, and those kind of things, what do you prioritize? You know, any democracy with its heart in the right place should prioritize wrong inclusion over wrong exclusion. So that's there, you know. And I think you know, some of the Supreme Court interventions during the court hearings which were happening when Bihar SIR was taking place, I think I've at least sort of ensured that, you know, that the errors tended towards wrong inclusion rather wrong exclusion. We'll have to see how it goes from now on. The larger constitutional dilemma in the case of India, Milan, is that you know the crux of the debate is when you are revising the electoral roll, do you put the onus of proving citizenship on a voter? You know, because if you're actually putting the documentary burden of proving citizenship on a voter, I think that documentary burden can be prohibitively difficult for a poor person, you know, because you he would not have those kind of educational documents and such things. Now, this I think is an extremely constitutionally salient question, you know, because there have been debates on whether Aadhar can be taken as a proof of citizenship. You know, I mean, how do you prove if your parents—and we actually did a story in Bihar, you know: what share of the population could probably be off the grid? You know, and we set the threshold that if you never finish your secondary school examination in India because you actually get a certificate at the end of the year, then you're probably more likely to be off the grid. And this is a very large proportion. I mean, that is a constitutional dilemma which I think is still out in the open, which probably, you know, between the Supreme Court and the civil society and the government and the election commission of India, all of these people will have to come to an agreement. But unfortunately, Milan, in India, and I would say more and more people are realizing it in the US too, you know, what is constitutionally salient is not always politically relevant. So the two can often differ. And I'm afraid what we'll see even in the SIR debate is precisely this: I'm the dominant political voice, we'd probably, you know, sort of bypass the constitutionally salient.
Milan Vaishnav: It's a great of phrasing it, Roshan. Let me now go to a completely different area, which is to ask you about this upstart in Bihar politics. And I'm speaking here of Prashant Kishor and his Jan Suraaj Party and the role they played in these elections. Now, Prashant Kishor, many of our listeners will know, he famously advised Modi and the BJP in their 2014 national campaign. He later struck out on his own, setting up a political advisory firm, IPAC, that has since worked with parties really across the political spectrum. This time in Bihar, and in fact, for the past several years, he has been preparing to take the electoral plunge himself and directly get involved in mainstream politics. What impact did Prashant Kishor have on the outcome of this election?
Roshan Kishore: So in pure, purely quantitative terms, I would say, I mean, he didn't have any impact, you know, because like we said, you know, the non-aligned vote share, which is the non-NDA and non-RJD vote share actually collapsed. If you look at ENOP, you know, which is the effective number of participants, you know, in an election, I mean ENOP in these elections is the lowest Bihar has ever had. So that way, you know, clearly the Jan Suraaj Party or Prashant Kishor did not have an impact. But where I think it did have an impact, and you know, I'm this is once again difficult to quantify, is you know, that Prashant Kishor actually had a lot of airtime, not just on TV, but even I would say among the electorate before campaigning actually began in earnest. And this is because you know the other like the mainstream parties were still preparing for elections, or they were not like because you know Prashant Kishor's party was a startup, it actually you know did a lot of legwork. And the rhetoric he sort of built was, you know, that he actually managed to, I would say, discredit the opposition more than the incumbent government. You know, because while he was criticizing, you know, the NDA government and Nitish Kumar and some of his key ministers in the state, etc. Not so much Narendra Modi or Amit Shah or the BJP at the central level. He actually criticized the RJD and Tejashriprasadhyadav and Laluyadam more. So in you know, had PK not been in these elections, I would say, you know, maybe the RJD alliance would have had a more—I mean not that it would have mattered, but probably ultimately—but they would have had a more robust claim at you know, claiming themselves to be the alternative to the NDA government. So, he actually I would say, you know, in a qualitative thing, and you know, I mean it's a leap of faith, somebody can argue against my argument, is they actually damaged the opposition subjective appeal in the in these elections, if I could say that.
Milan Vaishnav: Thinking about the kind of broader sweep of Bihar politics and really kind of Hindi heartland politics, in a recent column, and we'll link to this for our listeners, you argued that this result in Bihar should really disabuse people of the idea that Mundal, that sort of backward caste politics, can comprehensively defeat Kamandal or kind of Hindutva politics in Bihar. And you write that Kamandal wins in Bihar because it has muted the Mundal binary by allying with Nitish Kumar. And so, for people who are not in the weeds on this, who aren't following so closely, for the non-experts, explain to us what this means? So how did the BJP and its allies, you know, mute this Mandal binary that you're speaking of?
Roshan Kishore: So, you know, it's useful to probably begin with a little bit of a context. You know, I mean, post-independence, you know, Congress was the party which led the national movement. Congress presented a broadly secular liberal framework in front of the country, you know, we had a constitution and all that. And the Congress enjoyed political dominance for a long time until when it lost power in 1977. You know, and even after that, it actually, you know, Indira Gandhi came back to power, then Rajiv Gandhi came back to power in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination. And 1989 is when the Congress really sort of loses power, and you have a you know a government, you know, which is led by what is you know the ideological predecessor of today's Mandal parties, the Janata Dal, and it was supported by the BJP as well, you know, because it was a national government, the BJP was supporting it. And you know, in in that government, you actually you know…the Rath Yatra happens and the BJP withdraws support from it and all those things happen. And then you have, you know, the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, when the Congress was actually in power. But the demolition happened in Uttar Pradesh, and you know, all BJP governments, there were I think there were BJP governments in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh were summarily dismissed, citing law and order situation. And the elections which happened in Uttar Pradesh in the aftermath of the 1992 Babri Mosque demolition, you know, an alliance of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party actually managed to defeat the BJP. And it is from there that the Mandal versus Kamandal sort of binary gains traction, you know, against popular acceptance in Indian political parlance. And since then, especially in Bihar and UP, there's always been this contest. You know, that if you if you can actually manage to rally the lower castes, you know, which is the OBCs and the Dalits, then you can actually keep the BJP in check. Now, the problem with this kind of an argument, Milan, is that it's historically dated now. I'm not saying it was not right when it was propped up, but basically what has happened is the BJP today, unlike say the I mean the RSS or the Jan Sangh, which was primarily a party of Brahmins and traders, the typical Banya Brahmin as we call it in India Party, it has today expanded its social footprint much beyond the typical Brahmin Banya base. It has actually been, I would say, more generous in sharing the spoils of power with India's Hindu subalterns. You know, I mean the president of the country today is a scheduled tribe woman. The president who was there before her was actually a scheduled caste. You know, if you look at the share of lower OBCs, OBCs, etc., OBC chief ministers, etc. And we have built in-house databases in our newsroom to show all of this. The BJP actually accommodates a lot of power, shares a lot of power with the lower caste. And the larger ideological question to ask is you know, the BJP doesn't really have a fundamental ideological problem in India with anybody, you know, apart from non-Hindus, more so Muslims than Christians. So, the question is, you know, trying to say pit, the social divide within the Hindus against the BJP today is not going to be enough. And Bihar is the classic case of that. Bihar is actually the classic case of that because unlike the Samajwadi Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, Nitish Kumar actually broke the Janata Dal and joined hands with the BJP. You know, it was that ideological split in the socialist ranks which brought the Vajpayee government to power for the first time. And what has happened in election after election after election, which is the first question we began with, is that you have the upper caste and the Banyas, which are the historical support base of the BJP, and a section of the backward classes and the lower OBCs, and now also the Dalits, who are actually voting, you know, a party which claims to be, you know, I'm the heir apparent of the Mandal legacy in Bihar. So basically, you have to answer a larger question. Large parts of the social subaltern among the Hindus in India do not have a problem with the communal politics of the BJP because there's more to BJP's politics than just communalism, then you have to revisit this entire binary. And you know I mean there's more than enough evidence today to show that it's not working. And which is also a larger indictment of Rahul Gandhi's recent attraction no for sort of what I can call ‘mandalization’ of the Congress, maybe.
Milan Vaishnav: So I want to get into this actually because it speaks to the relationship between the principal opposition parties, the RJD of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his and his heirs and Rahul Gandhi in the Congress. When you write about the opposition, you have written the following, and I just want to quote from what you said, “Anybody who followed the campaign in Bihar would have noticed the dissonance in the campaign rhetoric of the RJD in the Congress's top leadership.” Unpack that dissonance for us and what do you see as its root causes and is it related to this question of kind of backward caste empowerment?
Roshan Kishore: Well, what exactly, you know, I mean went on between I would say the RJD's top leadership and the Congress is in the realm of hearsay. So, I would not get into it there. But basically I think, you know, before the campaigning actually started, I think there was more than enough evidence to see that, you know, I mean the Congress was not exactly comfortable with say Tejashwi Yadav being declared the chief minister face of the campaign. I think they have a realization that his party carries a lot of baggage, which probably is you know difficult to deal with if you're fighting an election. So that was there. I think this is also something which you know, this is also a problem which is not exclusively limited to I would say between Rahul Gandhi and a regional party's leadership. I mean, this is also a problem which has existed between Rahul Gandhi's and his own party state leaderships in various states in various other elections. You know, once Rahul Gandhi gets fixated on an idea and his idea, you know, in these elections was A SIR and B, you know, sort of lodging an attack against Narendra Modi and his larger politics, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, he has very little patience or I would say mind space for actual issues that might matter. You know, I mean what is actually the organic narrative in a place like Bihar? So, if you're actually going to say, you know, an interior district in Bihar and actually telling people that, you know, I mean you're talking to people about say what is going on between you know Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, the electorate is not interested. You know, Bihar's one of the poorest states in the country, you know, they are more important problems. I'm not saying this is not important. But they're more important problems to think about. So clearly at the top leadership of the Congress, I think there's a dissonance where they think that you know—I mean the party high command—what it thinks is the issue, is the issue. And you know, this is something, you know, from the 2019 elections when he did the entire campaign on Raphael and you know ultimately ended up with no traction at all sort of proves that. The problem with Tejashwi is that you know this is also a regional party and you know the manner in which he conducted himself in this entire election, you know, there's a lot of feud between the family also some of which is coming out. But I think primarily you know he approached the elections as some sort of a divine birthright to come to power in the state. And this sort of made it an extremely apolitical power grabbing kind of a campaign apart from the banal promises which you said you know we'll sort of you know triple the cash transfer promise and those kind of things. And what you had as a result was you know a completely depolitical and sort of inorganic campaign. So, I think that is the problem. You know I mean a Mandal party like Tejashwi is basically just like you know sort of yearning for status quo ante and Rahul Gandhi would like want the electorate to be more vanguardist than it can ever can be. He basically wants them to skip all of their livelihood questions and come to the larger ideological struggle against the BJP. You know none of which actually works.
Milan Vaishnav: Nitish Kumar is expected to take the oath as Bihar Chief Minister one more time. He's been around now in power for on and off for twenty years, basically. You've written that in these elections the BJP now enjoys greater say, greater hegemony in Bihar's politics than it ever has at the state level. In your mind, as someone who is from Bihar, who's watched its politics very closely, who's looked at the data, how significant is this shift where the BJP now kind of, if you want to put it this way, firmly sits in in this kind of driver's seat?
Roshan Kishore: So Nitish's first break with the BJP Milan came when Narendra Modi was actually declared the Prime Minister candidate of the BJP before the 2014 elections. And he actually broke ranks saying this is completely in conflict with his larger politics. He tried the elections on his own, did very badly, won only two seats, then went back to Lalu, you know, they swept the 2015 elections. He's done that once more in 2022 and 2023. So 2020, you know, the BJP actually actively sabotaged Nitish Kumar, you know, [with] Chirag Paswan's LJP. And he actually, you know, even though he was made the chief minister, he just had 40 odd MLAs, you know, compared to 75, 73-something for the BJP. This time there's more of a parity, but he's had to cede more alliance space to the BJP. And for the first time, you know, both of them actually contested the same number of seats. But what is more important is in Nitish Kumar, you actually had a person, you know, even I would say, you know, […] even after he sort of went back to the BJP, you know, in 2017, that he would actually push back against the more shrill Hindutva rhetoric of the BJP. You know, in this election, Nitish Kumar, you know, I mean, he's keeping indifferent health, is to say it politely. I mean, he pretty much read out from a script during the election campaign, even that matters as far as the election results tell us. But you did not see him pushing back against the shrill Hindutva narrative of the BJP, you know, from the Prime Minister, the home minister, the entire top leadership of the BJP, there was a very shrill campaign on issues such as infiltrators and those kinds of things. So there, I think you know the BJP realizes that social engineering is important and all that, but now it'll have a more an open field, you know, within its own alliance to push its core agenda. And what you have in Bihar for the first time, I think you would have as a result of this, is that you know the BJP never had the hegemonic status in the alliance in Bihar. You know, for the first time, I think even though Nitish Kumar might be chief minister, maybe even somebody from the JDU will continue to be the chief minister after him. But there's more saffron than socialists in the alliance today, is how I would like to put it. And you know, for the BJP, I think it's a huge, huge ideological victory. You know, Bihar was one state they've not been able to win. I mean, so that way, I mean, it's the barring Bengal, the eastern frontier completely conquered for the BJP. That's a very big deal.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean I think, you know, Nitish Kumar has developed this kind of enigma about him, and I think there have been many people, you see this in the op-ed pages across the country, who have been asking, you know, why, given that Bihar remains the poorest state in the Union, his government was nonetheless given another chance, right? And something that you said in a recent column caught my eye at where you said, Look, the state's developmental gains under Nitish are very real. They are tangible, they are visceral, you can see them, you can feel them, you can touch them, but they are somehow quote unquote detached from the state's demography. What do you mean by that?
Roshan Kishore: Bihar before Lalu, and this is something I wrote in in the same column you're referring to, you know, what Lalu did to Bihar was a historical service, you know, even though he's a pariah of sorts in the state and his political party is fighting an existential battle. He actually broke the toxic upper caste feudal dominance in the state. Problem is, you know, I mean that sort of you know became a force which consumed the state rather than develop it. And you know, I mean Lalu came to power in Bihar just when India was starting its economic reforms. And rather than take sort of advantage of those kind of economic reforms and all, what Bihar had was actually complete stagnation in the Lalu period, you know, which is about fifteen years. And you know, you had a complete you know lost decade and a half in the state. By that time, you know, economic you know growth in in large parts of the country had started happening. And you know, I mean you had actually a drain of capital and drain of labor both from Bihar, you know, both of the white collar and the blue-collar variety. And today I think Bihar's economy is primarily sustained by remittances, you know, whether it's white-collar workers who are primarily upper caste, or whether it is blue-collar workers who are primarily you know lower OBCs, Dalits, I mean some of them are even upper caste. So basically, you know, they earn money in various other parts of the country, they send it home, and that is what sustains the consumption. This is something which sort of you know, when a state sort of misses out on investment, you know, and when the larger you know even the labor sentiment is to go out and seek a living. It's very difficult to break that vicious cycle. I don't think I mean the governments have not tried, but basically this is a problem which, you know, I think is the most acute in Bihar, but it is also a problem which you can find in large parts of I would say, you know, I mean Uttar Pradesh barring the Western part of the state, no or other such things. So, this is something which I don't think would be easy to break for a government. And this has become a very stable arrangement. What you see in the state is a lack of conflict, you know, because I mean agriculture is no longer the most important breadwinner in the state and those kind of things. I mean, once you factor in the remittances and all those things. But to be able to usher in a meaningful you know capitalist transformation in the state, I think, frankly speaking, is unfair to any government, I mean, let alone Nitesh Kumar’s. So I mean people have bought peace with this thing, and I think this is what it is right now. I mean it's unfortunate, but I would say, you know, compared to the past, things are still better off.
Milan Vaishnav: Let me now kind of bring this conversation to an end by asking you kind of two bigger picture questions, which are not really about Bihar per se, but really more the national picture. You look at Indian economic data very closely, you know, we follow growth, inflation, FDI, capital expenditure, and so on. Do you see any obvious implications of the Bihar outcome for the central government's economic strategy going forward?
Roshan Kishore: Well, you know, you've had some things, you know, such as say the rationalization of the GST rates, you know, which happened a couple of months ago. And you know, the primary revenue loss burden of that entire exercise is going to fall on the states, you know, because states get fifty percent of the GST collections and then they get the centers devolutions here as well. So, state finances are already very precarious. Add to that what is happening. You know, Bihar's fiscal GDP in FY25 is actually six percent of the GDP, you know, which is way beyond what India's FRBM norms permit. I mean Bihar is still a very poor state, Milan, but look at something like Maharashtra. I mean, it is one of the richest states in the country and its public finances are in a complete mess thanks to the cash transfer scheme which was doled out. Now the center is in a process of say fiscal consolidation in the country. It has been making a lot of noise, and you know, I mean it's not just noise, they've done it also to sort of push capital trial expenditure in the country and those kind of things. The kind of fiscal largest you're seeing in states such as Bihar, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, every other state, is a) like in the case of Bihar, putting a fiscal burden. Now, now remember, I mean, states are the bigger spender in this country than the center is. So overall, you know, the fiscal thing, you know, which is something Devesh [Kapur] and Arvind [Subramanian] in their book talk about a lot, you know, it is definitely going to have a fiscal impact as far as the national finances are concerned. But more importantly, I think, and this I think will take you know more research than a journalist or a newsroom can do. I think what we really need to worry about is a lot of this spending comes out of taking out money from different kinds of heads. So, we've had historically a focus on the Revex versus Capex debate in India, how much of your revenue spending is happening and how much of your capital spending is happening. I think it is time we started focusing on the quality of revenue spending in India because a lot of this money which is being doled out for cash transfers, etc., is being taken out of extremely essential revenue spending heads, you know, which probably I think spends towards the future, such as health, education and all those things. So, in net terms, it is basically I would say just starving growth, well-being in the future to sort of win elections today. And that for a country like India, which still has a demographic dividend, I think it's a very damning thing to do, frankly speaking. I mean, think of it this way. I mean, UP will go to polls a couple of years from now. I mean, can you imagine the and there's no way they can go to UP elections without doing a cash transfer because it has become the norm. Because if the BJP government doesn't promise this, the SP will promise it. I mean, imagine the fiscal strain it will entail. You know, Bihar, you actually did a 10,000-rupee transfer. So this is a thing which will not only proliferate, it will also increase in terms of the fiscal burden.
Milan Vaishnav: Right. I mean, we should mention Uttar Pradesh is a state with, you know, two hundred and thirty, two hundred and forty million people, so about twice as large as Bihar, if not more. And there's also an interesting reversal of fortune, Roshan, because, you know, there was a time not too long ago when it looked like state finances were doing better than central finances in terms of reducing the deficits. And now that's completely flipped, right? The union government has actually stuck to a reasonably aggressive fiscal consolidation glide path, while state budgets have kind of run amok.
Roshan Kishore: Like I said, you know, ultimately what matters is the combined deficit of the state and the center. And like I said, I think the qualitative deterioration in state spending matters much more because a lot of the most essential spending actually comes from the states. So, this is in a way completely neutralizing the gains of the fiscal consolidation which is happening at the center. And for me, what matters more is, you know, the quality of the spending rather than the magnitude of the spending. Because if you actually say, you know, starving your schools and engineering colleges and research institutes or agricultural extension services just towards cash transfers, I mean that is actually, you know, completely defeating in a way.
Milan Vaishnav: So we have another set of state elections coming up in the spring of 2026, including in some, you know, quite important states like Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu. I'm wondering if the Bihar verdict gives us anything or tells us anything about the opposition INDIA alliance’s, their kind of national coherence, right? Or maybe the lack of national coherence. What takeaways do you have in your mind, or even questions you have in your mind based on this performance about the extent to which the opposition can put up a fight, number one, and number two, put up a coordinated, coherent fight together across parties?
Roshan Kishore: So, you know, the so-called INDIA Alliance has always been like more notional than I would say completely regimented. Because in Kerala, you would actually have the CPM and the Congress fighting against each other. You know, for namesake, they are both parts of the INDIA Alliance. In Bengal, I do not see the Trinamool Congress sort of even accommodating the Congress within its alliance because there, it will directly challenge the BJP. In Assam, the Congress doesn't, as of now, I don't think it has an ally. So, I mean it's primarily the Congress versus the BJP with some smaller allies on its own. And in Tamil Nadu, you would actually have an INDIA versus an INDIA fight because there you would see the DMK and the Congress and the left parties and other regional parties fighting with the ADMK and the BJP. Now, Milan, you know, Bengal, you know, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, they're culturally very different states from you know what Bihar is. And I think the demographic dynamic and the extent of polarization, all these things differ very significantly. So, that way I don't think it would matter much, especially down south, even BJP's Hindutva appeal doesn't work like as well as it would say in Uttar Pradesh. Assam is a very different communal dynamic because of a very different set of factors. Two things or three things one can take from the Bihar elections. One is, you know, both the opposition and the incumbent government will come under bigger pressure to announce a bigger dole, some such thing before the elections, which again will eat into the fiscal headroom the country has, the quality of spending the country has to offer. And B, I think, you know, I mean, the Congress's own factional battles in Kerala will increase. You know, you have somebody like Shashi Tharoor who's been sort of making you know all kinds of sounds about the Congress leadership. You know, even without Tharoor, you know, the Kerala Party, the Congress is actually an extremely faction-ridden party. It would become difficult for the high command to sort of put their house in order. Even I would say in Tamil Nadu, probably the DMK would not cede as much space to the Congress as it would have, you know, had the Congress done well or had the RJD done well, etc. So, you'd probably see the stronger regional parties sort of asserting themselves more against the Congress. It'll clearly weaken a pan-INDIA sort of a narrative, you know, against the BJP. So I mean, the elections would largely remain regional in nature rather than become a prelude to say a Uttar Pradesh election or some such thing. And you know, the culmination of all these things, you know, the BJP might not win Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I mean, who knows? Maybe they'll retain Tamil…Assam and West Bengal are going to be a very difficult contest for the BJP because of Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool Congress continue to be strong. You know, the state has a significant presence of the Muslim voter, which makes it difficult for the BJP to win it. But I think you know the BJP is much better off winning the Bihar elections than it would have been, say, even if the elections were close. More importantly, I know I think what it will do is it will put BJP in an extremely comfortable situation ahead of the Uttar Pradesh elections. Because Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are neighboring states, they are Hindi-speaking states. A large part of both states actually have the same cultural affinities, same social fault lines, etc. So that is where I think the elections would matter the most, you know, and that is where I think Akhilesh Yadav/ Samajwadi Party will come under increasing pressure to deal with the Congress. Because the Alliance actually did very well in the Lok Sabha elections and he allied with the Congress. But given the fact that Congress's organization at the state level in Uttar Pradesh is as ramshackle as it is in Bihar, I would say, you know, it is going to be very difficult for Akhilesh Yadav. And once again, you know, any decision not to ally with the Congress is also going to make him look sectarian, will probably create confusion in the ranks of the opposition. So I mean the person who would be getting, I think the most sleepless nights after the Bihar results is Akhilesh Yadav. And you know the person who would be walking away smiling is probably you know the UP leadership of the BJP. And UP is, of course, you know, it's the most crucial state in the country.
Milan Vaishnav: My guest on the show this week is Roshan Kishore. He's the data and political economy editor at The Hindustan Times. He and his colleagues have been doing excellent work bringing data to bear to try and understand the trends in this most recent Bihar election. Roshan, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to your further data work on these elections that we spoke about coming up next spring. Thanks for taking the time.
Roshan Kishore: Thanks a lot, Milan.
