Whatever the results, the narrative for Bihar’s state elections is set. The choice is for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Janata Dal United (JD (U)), to lose. If the NDA works well, it will be because of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. If he does badly, it will be because of Prime Minister Nitish Kumar.
Nitish Kumar’s sudden drop in popularity is confirmed by data. The Center for Developing Societies (CSDS) -Lokniti found that satisfaction with Nitish’s performance as CM fell from 80% in the 2015 post-Bihar survey to 52% in the pre-election survey in Bihar. Standard political pundits attribute this to “anti-incumbency”, but that just means that his popularity has dropped, not an explanation why. After all, Nitish doesn’t seem to have faced the same antitrust in 2005 or 2010. So why now?
Nitish Kumar has earned a reputation as a welfarist. In fact, according to the Reserve Bank of India, Bihar’s social spending (a sum of social sector, development and capital outlay) was more than 50% of its state gross domestic product (GSDP) in fiscal year 2019. -2020, greater than any other. another great state of India. Since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, we have seen BJP-aligned top welfare ministers such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh lose. And the BJP or its coalition has experienced double-digit drops in the percentage of votes in state elections compared to national elections.
In a recent article written with my colleague at the Center for Policy Research (CPR) Yamini Aiyar, we have argued that this has to do with the political centralization of benefits and welfare schemes that are explicitly linked to the character of Narendra Modi.
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In summary, from the 2000s onwards, fiscal decentralization together with the main welfare ministers created a winning electoral combination for state leaders. In certain states, voters attributed newly discovered welfare benefits to their top ministers and continued to vote for them to return to power. But the centralization around Modi has changed the game. Voters attribute their welfare benefits to the Center and Narendra Modi, leaving top welfare ministers, particularly those aligned with the BJP, without their main political appeal.
Nitish Kumar’s declining electoral appeal has been evident since Modi entered the scene, even if we look beyond Nitish’s disastrous decision to contest the election in 2014 only. The graph above shows the disputed vote share (the share average votes per contested assembly constituency) for JD (U) in the 2010, 2015 state elections, and 2019 national elections. Shaded boxes indicate the JD (U) coalition partners. In particular, the JD (U) underperforms in contested vote share compared to its main coalition partner in every election after 2014 (the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in 2015 and BJP in 2019) but not so. in 2010.
The reasons for political attractiveness are difficult to discern from survey data, but the CSDS-Lokniti pre-survey survey in Bihar offers some clues as to the relative political attractiveness of Nitish Kumar’s work and Narendra Modi’s work. .
When respondents were asked what job they would base their vote on, 16% of voters said the Nitish government, while 27% of voters said the Modi government (with 29% saying the MLA) . When only looking at NDA supporters, 33% said they would base their vote on work done by the Nitish government, with 42% basing their vote on the Modi government (and only 8% on work of the MLA). In short, in the electorate as a whole, and even among supporters of the NDA, the main political appeal resides in Narendra Modi, even with the scale of welfare and development expenditures of the Nitish Kumar government.
As we look at the final results of the Bihar elections, Nitish Kumar says that this will be his last election. Win or lose, the reality is that it is finished. In a state where politics has always been based on complicated caste calculations, Nitish does not have a formidable caste base, and his central political appeal has been lost to Narendra Modi. And his brazen political opportunism has certainly done him no favors.
The sudden disappearance of Nitish’s political appeal should be a lesson to top ministers across India.
(The author is an assistant professor at Ashoka University and visiting senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research)
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