Nitish-niti: What this moment means for the Bihar CM, his party

Yet, those close to him cite the free electricity announcement to say that Nitish is very much in control. A source close to the CM House explains, “The scheme was, in fact, the BJP’s idea, which his bureaucrats too backed. The CM agreed, but gave his own value-addition to the scheme — that consumers can also opt to install solar panels on their rooftops. For extremely poor families, the government will bear the entire cost, and for the rest, the government will provide appropriate support. He insisted on the solar panel idea so that the burden of the free scheme on the state exchequer would be eased over time.”

Over the past two decades, Nitish has led the JD(U) in four Lok Sabha elections and as many in the state. Irrespective of which way the results went, there has been one constant: Nitish as Chief Minister. He has walked between alliances with the ease of a man crossing a familiar path, each time underlining his worth to his allies and rivals.

But this time could be different. At 74, Nitish is visibly slowing down. The man, known to be alert and cautious and with an enviable grasp on facts and figures, often trails off mid-sentence. His interactions with journalists at his Vidhan Sabha office, a regular feature during Assembly sessions, have been curtailed since 2019, and he has shunned media interviews.

Two decades is a long time by any measure, but most certainly for politics. As Nitish Kumar prepares to take the field for another campaign, around him, much has changed.

A generational shift

When Nitish began his first big term in 2005, he was up against Lalu Prasad and his quintessential family politics that had come to define Bihar. Law-and-order and patronage in governance were the biggest talking points. So Nitish, who had positioned himself as an antidote, put his head down and worked on getting the basics right: roads, schools and hospitals, law and order. The state budget rose from Rs 25,000 crore under the RJD rule to over Rs 1 lakh crore in a matter of few years and now stands at Rs 3.17 lakh crore. The road network in the state went up from 14,468 km in 2005 to 26,000 km in 2025.

But now, as Bihar votes on November 6 and 11, he will have to convince an entire generation of young voters, who have never seen or would have no memory of the Lalu-Rabri regime, that he continues to be their best bet. He will have to work hard to dial down the hope that his opponent Tejashwi Yadav’s employment promises may have stirred in this segment, explain to them how he once redefined the state’s politics, how he moved away from the RJD’s politics that revolved around identity and the lalten (lantern, the RJD’s symbol) to a strong welfare model that focused on education for girls, women’s empowerment and grassroots governance.

This generation of young voters, those in the 20-29 age group, has gone up from 15.5% of the population in 2006 to 18.9% in 2026 (based on Census projection data).

Meanwhile, there has been a generational shift in Nitish’s rival camp too, with his old foe’s son Tejashwi Yadav projecting himself and the RJD-led Opposition bloc as a youth-led alternative. The Leader of the Opposition has promised that if the Mahagathbandhan came to power, it would ensure a government job for a member of every family in the state.

As Nitish Kumar prepares to take the field for another campaign, around him, much has changed.

JD (U) chief spokesperson Neeraj Kumar says the party, too, has been reaching out to the youth. “We opened an engineering college in each of the 38 districts. We set up a Youth Commission to identify the problems of the youth and suggest measures to resolve those. We are also giving a monthly allowance of Rs 1,000 to those between 18 and 25 years for two years, besides running a credit card scheme for students of professional courses by giving them loans of up to Rs 4 lakh on a 4% interest rate,” he says.

Ashwani Kumar, leading social scientist and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, says whether this generational shift works for or against Nitish remains to be seen. “Indeed, Bihar has changed beyond recognition. Yet, Nitish Kumar’s political dilemma in 2025 remains as much generational as ideological. The development-centric Vikas model that transformed Bihar in 2005 now demands an upgrade — a shift from vernacular modernity to an aspirational, cosmopolitan Vikas Plus.

He will have to meet the aspirations of a state with one of India’s largest millennial and Gen Z populations. Nitish, the most unusual socialist and Mandal-era wizard, is making a careful effort to emotionally reconnect with this restless generation.”

RJD national spokesperson Subodh Kumar Mehta says it was Lalu’s “social investments, which led to a greater participation of the weaker sections in the decision-making processes, that paved the way for Nitish Kumar”.

“People expected Nitish to carry forward the idea of social empowerment and economic development. Nitish peaked in 2010 but post 2010, his image as a pan-India leader got dented on various fronts,” he says.

Fading of old caste mobilisations

When Nitish came in, he was a leader without a caste bloc while Lalu’s politics coalesced around his unbeatable Muslim-Yadav social base. Nitish sensed an opportunity. With some deft calculations, he rearranged the existing pieces of the caste puzzle to carve out a new base for himself — the Extremely Backward Classes as a subset of non-Yadav OBCs, Mahadalits and women.

Through a mix of political messaging and targeted welfare schemes such as 50% reservation in panchayats, the free bicycle scheme and prohibition, Nitish assiduously cultivated the women vote — an effort that paid off as women came out in huge numbers to vote. From 2010 onwards, in a reversal of voting trends until then, female voter turnout in Bihar has consistently outstripped the male turnout. According to Election Commission data, in 2015, for example, 60.5% of women voted compared to 53.6% of men.

“Nitish Kumar’s strength is his caste-neutral constituency of women, consolidated through 50% quota in panchayats, the formation of 11 lakh self-help groups with 1.4 crore Jeevika workers, and the Rs-10,000 assistance to 1.21 crore women entrepreneurs. Plus, girls from Class 1 to postgraduate levels get free education in the state; we give Class 9 girls — now also to boys — free bicycles. Tejashwi envies this constituency, cultivated very meticulously by Nitish,” says another JD (U) leader.

While the JD(U) may be confident about the women vote, it’s the EBC plank that has chipped away since the 2010 Assembly elections, when the NDA ended up with 206 of 243 seats – the first vindication of Nitish’s social engineering project.

Since then, several top EBC and Mahadalit leaders have left his ranks – from top EBC leader and former MP Mangani Lal Mandal, who is now RJD state president, to prominent Dalit leaders Uday Narayan Choudhary.

While the JD(U) has worked to retain the EBCs and Mahadalits, who together form around 20% of the population, with land and vocational training schemes, the Opposition camp, too, has been wooing them. In the 2020 polls, when the JD(U) won only 43 out of the 115 seats it contested, it lost from over three dozen seats that had a substantial EBC and SC population.

A JD(U) leader explains: “Till the 2010 Assembly elections, JD(U) was the main stakeholder of EBC votes. But with the rise of Narendra Modi since the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP has also been getting a substantial chunk of EBC votes. Nitish’s core constituency of OBC Luv-Kush (Kurmi-Koeri) also saw cracks in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls when the Mahagathbandhan cut away Koeri votes by fielding seven candidates from the social group.”

Besides, his old team of political advisors – former bureaucrat N K Singh, former MP Shivanand Tiwari (now in the RJD), and veteran socialists such as K C Tyagi and the late Sharad Yadav — has made way for a different set of people. Many old-timers in the party point to the appointment of Sanjay Kumar Jha, a former BJP man who is now the JD(U)’s national working president, as evidence of how far the party has left its socialist background behind.

Kartikeya Batra, Assistant Professor (Economics) at Azim Premji University who is currently researching Bihar election trends, says, “It is a fair point that EBCs and Mahadalits may not have received fair representation in jobs, politics and other positions of power (during Nitish’s terms). For instance, as per one analysis, in Bihar’s current Assembly, a little over 10% MLAs belong to the (non-Muslim) EBC category, which is much lower than their population share. However, does that mean that JD(U)’s pro-EBC and pro-Mahadalit politics has failed? I would say that ensuring empowerment among marginalised communities is an incremental process. The first step was to ensure basic public goods such as law and order, education and healthcare. Maybe not fully, but that has happened over the last two decades.”

On whether the current set of policy priorities have reached a point of saturation, Batra says: “The next obvious aspiration among these social groups will be to occupy positions of power. This does give other parties an opening, but cannot negate what CM Nitish Kumar has done for them in the past.”

The indispensable Mr Kumar

Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) was the number one party in 2010 (115 seats), number two in 2015 (71 seats, when he was part of the Mahagathbandhan) and number three party in 2020. Despite this apparent slide, Nitish went on to become CM each time. His numbers did not matter, what mattered was which side he chose.

The BJP tried its best to decode this “Nitish factor”, but failed. In 2015, with Nitish out of the NDA, the BJP in Bihar had hoped to ride on the Modi wave that brought it to power in the 2014 general elections. But despite a high-pitched campaign by PM Modi, the Mahagathbandhan, of which Nitish was a part then, won 178 of 243 seats and rode to power. Nitish had proved that he held the key to the power cabinet.

Nitish walked in and out of the NDA some more, before finally coming back in January 2024. “After Nitish made sure that the BJP had learnt its lesson — that they had no life without him — we returned to the NDA fold on our terms, getting the best ministries,” says a JD (U) source.

But with the BJP on a much surer footing since then, Nitish has been looking increasingly vulnerable within the alliance. In the 2020 elections, the JD(U) contested on 115 seats, but won only 43, while the BJP had a much better strike rate (it won 91 of the 102 seats it contested).

There are already signs of a shift in the alliance landscape. For the first time since the two parties came together as the NDA in 1996, the BJP bargained hard and settled for an equal number of seats as the JD(U) for this election — 101 seats each.

But his camp says Nitish isn’t one to give up so easily. While the JD(U) agreed to the seat-sharing, Nitish, sources say, was unhappy that the party was not allotted some of the seats it had won or where it was the runner-up in 2020. He is said to have “sent a strong message” to the BJP to redo the list and asked for ally Chirag Paswan of the LJP to be “reined in”. Nitish prevailed, once again, and the NDA put out a reworked seat list.

He was also the first to hit the ground for the upcoming election, kicking off his campaign with a rally on October 16 from Sarairanjan (Samastipur) constituency, where JD(U)’s Vijay Kumar Choudhary is seeking re-election.

Reading out from a speech written out for him, the CM rarely missed a beat as he spoke about his government’s achievements and countered his rivals — from Tejashwi’s “job to each family” promise to Prashant Kishor’s attack on unemployment.

Yet, here too, there were signs of a shift – at the rally were giant posters of PM Modi, a far cry from 2010, when Modi was not allowed to campaign.

What next for Nitish?

While the BJP declared early on that the 2025 polls would be fought under Nitish, the party hasn’t committed to backing him for the post in the event of an NDA win. But the JD(U) knows well that its numbers, not Nitish’s health, will decide the eventual CM.

If the JD(U) gets around 60 seats, which is crucial to the NDA getting a majority, Nitish will continue to remain indispensable for the alliance. He could choose to stay on as CM till his health permits. Plus, he is a key ally at the Centre with 12 MPs.

Those close to him have for long been working on a Plan B for the JD(U) by projecting Nitish Kumar’s son Nishant Kumar as a potential heir. If Nitish has been holding back, it’s only because he is all too conscious of his stand against dynasty politics. Among the many calculations is this: that if Nitish has to resign as CM for health reasons, the BJP can have its CM and the JD(U) can have two Deputy CMs, including Nishant. Sources in the party say there is also an outside chance of Nishant becoming CM if the JD(U) outshines the BJP by getting 75-plus seats. They say that as he waits for any such sudden elevation, Nishant has been using the time to read up on socialist literature. “He is our wildcard entry,” says a JD(U) source.

But if Nitish and his party lose this election, it could be the end of the road of a great innings.

At least among his constituents, few see that as a possibility. In the midst of the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision exercise, a shopkeeper in a Seemanchal village summed up the importance of being Nitish Kumar. “In Mahabharata, Bhishma Pitamah was blessed with ichha mrityu (death at one’s will); in Bihar, Nitish has the blessing of iccha shashan (ruling Bihar as long as he wants)”. Will the 2025 election confirm this?