To say nothing of political adversaries, not the most ardent backers of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar could have anticipated the scale of the NDA’s triumph — a greater than three-fourths majority win in the Assembly election. Since the spectacular defeat of the Emergency administration in the Lok Sabha polls of 1977, it is hard to recall an election in the country that threw up such a no-contest outcome, especially when the main Opposition RJD appeared to be on a reasonable wicket. The Janata Dal (United), the chief minister’s party, fielded 142 candidates — of whom 112 coasted home, taking the JD(U) close to the halfway mark on its own steam. Perhaps the nearest parallel comes from the 1995 Assembly election in Bihar when Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD contested 225 seats (out of a total 325, when Jharkhand had not yet been formed) and won 167. Grand spectacles such as these can project a leader for years to come, although Mr Yadav did not prove himself capable of fulfilling that aspiration to the extent he might have liked, being bogged down by political challenge from opponents and allies, and dogged by ineptitude in administration and a poverty of ideas.
A noteworthy feature when Mr Yadav had won big was that there was still left in the Assembly a viable ideological and political Opposition. The striking magnitude of the NDA victory powered by Mr Kumar’s leadership — a Houdini dream come true — has seen to the folding up of any form of Opposition in the Assembly. This may not be an unmixed blessing, as examples from our recent parliamentary history show. An unbridled rise in popular expectations tends to carry a political cost for rulers. Looking at the present result, it is not inconceivable that the idiom of politics purveyed by Mr Yadav for two decades has had its day. Trying to rebuild itself from scratch, the Congress has also fallen flat on its face, slipping below its paltry 2005 numbers, but the ideas that animate the party don’t leave it utterly without a chance in the future if it can get its organisational act together. After all, in Bihar today, the hunger appears to be for development and rapid modernisation.
It is more than clear that the NDA swept every inch of the electoral ground. When the figures come in, victory margins are bound to be revealed to be big. For Mr Kumar, the victory is all the more eloquent as his own and allied caste groups are only a tiny fraction of the electorate, unlike, say, the Yadav vote that the RJD chieftain commanded so imperiously once and began a poll race with a distinct lead. The voting pattern is also likely to show that the so-called Muslim vote did not turn away from the NDA since the alliance is led by someone they are comfortable with by now.
In all, the celebration of the chief minister’s impressive gains has somewhat obscured the fact that the BJP, so far the JD(U)’s junior partner in Bihar, has been thrown up in this election as an almost-equal. This can introduce a new dynamic within the winning alliance. No less significant, the BJP’s extraordinary gains are also likely to carry a meaning for politics outside of the narrow confines of Bihar, and give the party confidence in dealing with, say, the disorder within its ranks in Karnataka, and provide additional boost to its challenge to the UPA at the Centre. Not for a moment should we forget that the extraordinary work put in by the Election Commission of India ensured that the electoral turnout was the highest in recent times, thanks to the effective squashing by the commission of both money and muscle power. It is a remarkably clean election that produced a most remarkable result.