Bihar has never been short of noise. Certainly not when it mattered. Its politics has marched through history with a daring swagger — JP’s call that shook New Delhi, Mandal’s churn that redrafted power, the long years of Lalu raj that jolted the old order. Even the subtler Nitish era made bold strokes on the canvas, turning India’s polity yet again with the caste census narrative and grand alliance politics.
Yet this election arrives on soft feet. On November 5, the campaign for the first stretch of 121 constituencies is winding down, and the battle for the remaining 122 — those border districts where sentiment often travels across rivers and frontiers — will begin soon. And through it all, there hangs a curious quiet.
Whether in Nitish Kumar’s native Bakhtiyarpur, or hamlets like Gauspur and Chitapur fringing Patna, whether in Dalit ‘tolas’ where caste is still geo-tagged or along the mobile 100-km sweep to Gaya on NH-22, out in villages like Barachati and Tekari near where a legend named Dashrath Manjhi once moved mountains, the stillness is audible.
Even in places like Mokama where bullets flew the other day, or Barh, which saw fisticuffs after this writer left, the action is all on one slim band where politics does its business. The people seem unmoved. Almost cold.
This is not indifference. It is an extended pause — a thinking state, perhaps it’s the hush of crores of people thinking harder.
The old Bihar election grammar is still here: the woven caste alliances, the search for the right symbol atop the right community, the deft stitching of booth workers and social equations. But listen closely, and the dialogues are shifting pitch.
It is no longer enough to promise representation; people want opportunity. Bihar’s young — impatient, painfully aware of the ticket-to-life stamped “migration” that’s been their lot for years, and now uniformly literate about the ways of the world beyond their panchayat WhatsApp group — are asking sharper questions.
Identity of the other sort has not dissolved; only its fabric has thinned in the face of this new common identity, an identity of experience. Numbers are never incidental here. OBCs and EBCs together form roughly two-thirds of Bihar — a demographic truth that still underwrites strategy.
Yadavs remain the single biggest OBC bloc, Kurmis and Kushwahas count in pockets where one village’s mood can bend a seat, Dalits and Mahadalits together hold a weight politicians can never ignore, and the elite castes — though numerically modest — continue to influence candidate choice and the political discourse, particularly in the plains.
Bihar has chosen reflection over rhetoric for now
Tejashwi Yadav stands at the pivot of this transition—bearing a surname thick with history, and yet determined to build a politics whose vocabulary begins not with past entitlement but future dignity.
His rallies have energy, his phrasing has a way of finding the young and speaking to them. In the village alleys, you hear a new sentence: “Chance toh milna chahiye.” A chance must be given.
Across the aisle, Nitish—visibly ageing, visibly weary—remains, remarkably, a comfort choice. This is something adjacent to loyalty; more like habit, the trust evoked by an old armchair.
For a state whose told stories have travelled the arc from chaos to order and back through impossible political contortions, a known form of stability still commands an instinctive nod.
His alliance with the BJP brings an electoral machine that can calculate with the cold precision of algorithms. But the BJP’s quiet ambition glimmers beneath its dutiful partnership: a desire, someday, to govern Bihar not by the consent of allies but on its own steam.
The Congress lingers at the edge—a memory, a partner, a seeker of relevance in a landscape it once defined and now must negotiate seat by seat.
Thus Bihar stands at a crossroads marked not by fury but by thought. The shouting has dimmed. The electorate may not be bored or disinterested, it is discerning. A state long animated by political passion has chosen—at least for this moment—reflection over rhetoric. In a pause.
Still waters do run deep. Bihar may simply be listening to itself before it speaks again.