Caste is one of India’s original fault lines.
Seven decades after independence, the accident of birth continues to be the grim reality of millions of Indian lives, determining whether they get to sit on benches in classrooms or on the floor, if job interviews shrivel away in front of their last names, whether red ticks in front of their names in college registers condemns them to hostility from peers and professors, even whether they receive a decent, dignified burial.
Caste remains an alive, material concern for millions. It is no surprise, then, that caste is a main fulcrum in elections in any corner of India. But in Bihar, it gains additional salience. This is a state where over the last two decades, almost half of all constituencies have seen winners from the same caste, but not party – showing caste allegiances trump party preferences. Caste also clearly delineates the three broad political periods in the state – the Congress era where upper-castes held almost half of all seats, the Lalu era where the upper-caste share fell to a quarter and the backward share (Yadavs dominant among them) swelled to nearly a half, and finally, the Nitish Kumar era where the backward share dips a bit and extremely backward classes get a bite of the pie, though far lower than their population share.
Clearly, caste is an important, if not the most important, factor in deciding tickets and campaign thrust.
Arithmetically, the NDA had a larger catchment to work with. The JD(U) focussed on the 110-odd castes that make up EBCs (extreme backward classes) – many of whom are beneficiaries of Kumar’s 2006 decision to subcategorise reservation – and the BJP on the numerically smaller but prosperous upper-castes. Both tried to make a balance on other backward classes and only the JD(U) gave a smattering of tickets to Muslims. The Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and the Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) balanced between their potent Dalit vote bases and general caste candidates. After initial squabbles, the campaign was largely disciplined, focussing on local strengths, strongmen and caste dynamics.
In contrast, the Opposition Grand Alliance’s strategy pivoted on chemistry. The RJD gave a lion’s share of tickets to backward class candidates (three-quarters of that went to Yadavs). The Congress attempted to strike a balance between general castes, scheduled castes and Muslims. During the campaign, both parties explicitly tried to woo the EBCs – a first in 20 years – and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi even made EBC-specific promises. But the RJD gave only 13 tickets to the community out of the 143 it contested and the Congress 4 out of 61. Instead, the parties believed that projecting Vikassheel Insaan Party chief Mukesh Sahni – a former Bollywood set designer who has never won an election – as the surprise pick for deputy chief minister would do the trick, never mind the fact that EBCs are not a monolith, that building a vote bank takes years, if not decades, of work, and that the Mallahs – the supposed vote bank of the VIP – account for a mere 2% of the electorate.
The results showed a complete polarisation on caste lines, where almost every community except Yadavs and a section of Muslims abandoned the Grand Alliance. The Opposition won just four of the 38 SC-reserved seats in the state, down from 17 in 2020. For the first time in almost 40 years, Yadavs are not likely to be the single-largest sub-caste in the Bihar assembly.
It showed three things. One, unlike Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, Tejashwi Yadav has failed to expand his party’s base beyond the dominant Yadavs. Akhilesh lost three consecutive elections, had to seriously slash the number of Yadav candidates he fielded in 2024, and focus on fielding smaller backward and Dalit groups to offset the groundswell of resentment these marginal groups hold for the grassroots dominance of Yadavs. Still under the enormous shadow of his father Lalu Prasad, Tejashwi tried a much smaller scale experiment and it flopped. Two, Kumar’s tremendous goodwill among smaller groups that he hand-stitched into an alliance in the 2000s remains intact and the coalition of extremes (a reference to the BJP’s upper-caste base and JD(U)’s EBC bank) is held together by his face and stature. And three, a campaign aimed to attract marginalised castes has to focus on material issues because caste is about material concerns. This is what happened in 2024, where the Constitution reflected the very real concerns of the hinterland around jobs, education and intergenerational mobility. This is what didn’t happen in 2025.
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