Nitish Kumar, who spearheaded the development of Bihar, one of India's poorest states, is set to be re-elected as its chief minister on Wednesday, in a blow to the ruling Congress party mired in a corruption scandal.
The re-election of Nitish Kumar, a member of the Janata Dal United party that is part of the national opposition coalition, as leader of Bihar comes as the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh struggles with graft accusations over the sale of telecoms licences, an issue the opposition has used to keep parliament shut for two weeks.
While Bihar is not a traditional stronghold for Singh's ruling Congress, the party was hopeful of improving its performance there, fielding its young leader and potential prime ministerial candidate Rahul Gandhi to campaign.
Bihar accounts for 40 of the 545 seats in the national parliament - the fifth largest parliamentary bloc in India. It can play a crucial role in federal coalition politics.
Kumar's coalition was almost decisively ahead in 192 of the total 243 assembly constituencies, television stations showed. If he is declared the winner, he will start a second, five-year term.
Bihar was long a byword for lawlessness, caste politics and snail-paced development until Kumar, who first took office in 2005, turned the economy around, rapidly building roads, curbing crime and boosting education and health care over the next five years.
Bihar's economy grew an average 11.35 per cent each year between 2004 and 2009, compared with 3.5 per cent in the prior five years and above the national growth average.
"The re-election of our coalition is a reaffirmation of the people's faith in the development agenda of Nitish Kumar," said Ravi Shankar Prasad, a leader of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which Kumar's party is allied to.
While the next general election is in 2014, the Bihar vote could, in part, be seen as a rejection of policies of Congress, which has struggled to tame high inflation and has been hampered in its ability to govern by a series of crises, mostly over corruption, since its re-election last year.
In Bihar, Congress struggled to better its 2005 tally of winning nine seats. The BJP was on its way to improving its 2005 performance which could boost the confidence of the party going into half a dozen more state elections over the coming year.