Sarita Devi could well be Bihar. A one-woman personification could not be more apt. She’s yet to get her pucca makaan. In the matchbox-sized piece of the earth that’s in her name, the floor is still cool mud. The roofing is pre-modern too, except for patches of tarpaulin and polythene. But her optimism pierces that ceiling. Her family is among the last 10 or 12 in this Dalit tola waiting for a concrete roof over their heads. She’s confident it’s on the way—whoever wins this Friday.
Around her is a colony that hugs a highway rushing back to Patna. The highways of Bihar today all seem scripted by Pirandello—a play in search of characters. Wide strips of shining new tar, all very 21st century, but mostly empty. Not counting the occasional big SUV, they look like tarmacs poised for takeoff. Only waiting for a plane.
If a local Rip Van Winkle were to wake up in the Bihar countryside, he wouldn’t be lost. Nothing much has changed in 20 years. The breeze of the highways has not swept in much, but has left behind slipstreams of ambition. There’s not much to slake that thirst. Only horizontal mobility—rickety shared vans going to town, trains ribboning out filled with gig workers.
In Patna, Rip Van Winkle may have woken up with a new face—well, a facelift of sorts, patchy yet tangible. India’s growth story bursts through the shabbiness of Bihar’s capital city. New five-star hotels, new malls, a BMW showroom, signs of new money colliding on the streets with familiar forms of life. Cheek by jowl with fancy buildings are wet markets, tin-roofed shanties, acres of teeming humanity. All contemplating flight, but pulled down by gravity.
Sarita’s hamlet, not too far from Patna, is a microcosm of that. For drinking water, there’s still only a hand pump. But most of the old mud-and-brick hutments, with moss creeping out of cracks, have given way to compact, brightly painted homes. Fluorescent green, pink, blue, yellow—with a touch of pride in the form of chandramala motifs along the terraces. Sarita’s own attire, a synthetic sari of orange and blue with a glinting silver border, mirrors the change. It’s the kind of sari a young Dhirubhai might have once pedalled across small-town Gujarat to sell, long before he turned a textile dream into an industrial empire.
Bihar, the ‘B’ of the degrading collective noun ‘Bimaru’, gives off the sense of being ready for a similar transformation. Sarita, and millions like her across the state, are not sitting by passively. Women, famously, have walked out on their old role in politics. They are no longer silent spectators, they have a voice. Nitish Kumar was among the first to hear it. He knew this was one constituency that does not migrate, that stays back to vote. By now, it’s a decisive bloc of over 3.5 crore voters.
In the first phase of voting, that voice was a crescendo. The bumper 69 percent turnout was essentially a female chorus. Women outvoted men in nearly all of those 18 districts. The female turnout percentages notched unbelievable figures—77.42 in Samastipur, 77.04 in Madhepura, 76.57 in Muzaffarpur, 76 in Gopalganj. The men were 17-15-10 per cent behind.
For all the change brought by new actors, the political landscape of Bihar is almost entirely masculine. From the avuncular Nitish and the bristling Tejashwi Yadav, both very homespun, to the two prodigals who have returned with the stamp of outside prosperity, Chirag Paswan and Prashant Kishor. The men are the ones kicking up all the dust, shooting off their mouths, often their guns. The women are deciding between them. Today, they are putting in their casting vote. By evening, after Seemanchal votes, Bihar may well have moved into post-caste politics. Not wholly or in full measure, but substantially. The female vote, as proved in Muslim voting patterns after the triple talaq ban, can be community-agnostic. It can emancipate itself from natal loyalties.
Another bloc has that impulse. Young voters between 18 and 29, at about two crore, form a major axis of this election. Bihar’s Gen Z has no lived memory of Lalu’s ‘jungle raj’, of the agitations, the flashpoints of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. They have grown up instead with the smartphone, the coaching centre, the dream of a government job. For them, caste identity matters, but not as much as opportunity. They are impatient with old formulas. Their gaze is outward, towards Bengaluru, Delhi, Dubai, anywhere that offers a chance.
Between the competing suitors, the safe and conservative reading is that Nitish has the first claim on the women’s vote. Past loyalties have durability, but slogans are not entirely teflon-coated against the everyday data of lived experience. Leave aside jobs. Even prohibition has turned out to be a bit of an Achilles’ heel. Sarita and her sisterhood chorus that illegal liquor stretches their household budgets even more!
The folly may be in treating voters as separate blocs, moved by different imperatives. In reality, most needs overlap. Only physical distance separates the women from their migrant husbands, toiling away at skyscrapers in the big city. They are joined by fate. Sarita cannot be unmoved by the bleak future of her son either. The youth are idling at home, waiting for jobs that rarely come, government or private. Education is an expensive and uncertain investment. “Our sons study, but where will they go?” they ask.
There are many who promise to break the stasis. Tejashwi’s basic promise is around jobs. Dole for dole, he has promised `30,000 in one shot to women to outmatch Nitish’s ‘Dus hazaari’ scheme. In his attempt to move beyond caste, he has also given tickets to 23 women. There’s also the personable Rahul Gandhi behind him—even if pollsters don’t count it, that factor did help Akhilesh Yadav break the ‘MY’ trap in 2024. No reason why it can’t work in Bihar. PK too is built in that new mould. His vocabulary is all about real needs. The BJP, with its airports and power plants, its narrative of national aspiration, kindles those dreams too.
Between Sarita’s colourful colony and her restless, jobless son, Bihar’s political story is being written. The women who stayed and the youth who long to leave may together decide who stays in power—and who must go. Either way, Bihar cannot wait.
Santwana Bhattacharya | Editor