Many commentators claim the key to Mr Kumar’s victory lies in his decisive break with identity politics, speeding up GDP growth to 11 percent, and making the bureaucracy work. Some have called him “Bihar’s Narendra Modi”, who has created a new political mould in which caste, religion and other identities don’t matter; what matters is “development” (read, GDP growth). They say the electorate punished the practitioners of the “negativist” politics of “social justice” and reservations.

This is wishful Right-liberal thinking. In fact, Mr Kumar, a former Socialist committed to affirmative action, didn’t reject identity politics, but built a new social coalition based on subaltern identities. In place of the JD(U)’s earlier base among OBCs like Kurmis, Yadavs and Kushwahas, with a smattering of Muslims, he crafted a coalition of EBCs (extremely backward classes) comprising 109 particularly underprivileged, occupation-based layers, Mahadalits (the worst-off Dalits), and Pasmanda (backward) Muslims.

Mr Kumar stitched them together through reservations and affirmative action. As a result, the JD(U)’s share of these groups’ votes rose by a huge 14 to 16 percentage-points. Although this coalition is so far limited to Bihar, it is potentially capable of wider replication and opens up new political possibilities.

However, it would be wrong to attribute the JD(U)-BJP’s stellar performance to the new social coalition alone. Nor are such coalitions easy to construct. Other factors played a role, including Mr Kumar’s effort to improve law and order; revive Bihar’s collapsed social and physical infrastructure; use public investment for growth; and empower women. The improvement in the social and economic climate and personal security, and creation of new jobs, inculcated pride and hope amongst Biharis, probably for the first time since the 1950s.

One of the first things the Chief Minister did is to secure the convictions of 54,000 known criminals through a productive dialogue between the administration and the judiciary. This restored the authority of the state which was widely seen as nonexistent. He also made Bihar’s cities safer. Women who dared not step out after dark could now move about safely. Street crime decreased.

Mr Kumar took numerous measures to empower women, including raising their representation in gram panchayats to 50 percent, overnight creating 4,300 women mukhias (village heads). The government launched a major adult literacy programme for mothers. It donated almost 5 lakh bicycles to girls who enter the eighth standard. It announced a Rs 10,000 prize for girls who score 60 percent in the board examinations. This raised girls’ high school enrolment almost threefold.

These measures made Mr Kumar the favoured choice of half the electorate. No wonder women’s turnout inn the election was an impressive 54.7 percent, 5 percentage-points higher than men’s, and 10 percentage-points higher than in 2005.

Mr Kumar pumped Rs 40,000 crores into the physical infrastructure—almost threefold more than the previous regime. He concentrated on reviving the state school system by improving teacher attendance. Some 100,000 new teachers were recruited on probation, which would encourage better performance. Equally important were special scholarships for the EBCs, Mahadalits and Muslims.

Mr Kumar also tried to revive Bihar’s rotten public health infrastructure—less successfully. The average number of daily visits to primary health centres (PHCs) rose from 39 in 2005 to 4,800. Institutional deliveries almost tripled to 14.5 lakhs. Maternal mortality decreased from 376 to 312, although this is still unacceptably high. All these rates must be seen in perspective—as building on an abysmally low base. But the direction is indisputably positive.

This is also true of GDP growth. The bulk of this is in roads (2,400 km) and bridges (2,300), and doesn’t translate into a proportionate rise in incomes for the poor. Bihar still has a long way to go in providing electricity to the people. Its power-generation capacity is a mere 1,850 MW, one-half that of the tiny territory of Delhi and less than one-tenth that of Maharashtra, whose population is only slightly higher than Bihar’s.

The JD(U)-BJP highlighted these achievements in its election campaign, but without extravagant slogans like “Shining India” or “Swarnim (golden) Gujarat”. Its opponents had no real alternatives to offer. The RJD-LJP made unconvincing claims about its past governance record, on which it said Mr Kumar was building. And the Congress got it all wrong when it emphasised Central assistance to Bihar, underestimating the “Bihar pride” factor.

Mr Rahul Gandhi personally campaigned in Bihar and to an extent revived the Youth Congress. But of the 22 constituencies where he campaigned, his party won only one seat. The state Congress chief lost his own seat.

The election, first expected to be a three-way contest, quickly became a plebiscite on Mr Kumar when Mr Prasad announced he’d be his coalition’s Chief Ministerial candidate. This gave the JD(U)-BJP a huge advantage. With just a 3-percentage-point increase in its vote-share from 2005 (to 39 percent), it won 85 percent of seats, higher than the Congress’s success rate in the 1984 Lok Sabha election, when it won 76 percent of all seats. The BJP was luckier still. Its success rate was 91 percent, higher than the JD(U)’s 82 percent.

The RJD’s vote-share fell from 23.5 percent in 2005 to 18.8, but its seat tally plummeted sharply, from 54 to 22. This is partially because the RJD-LJP weren’t able to ally with the Congress or the CPI and CPM, as in 2005. Then, the RJD-led combine bagged 30 percent of the vote, only 5 percentage-points less than the JD(U), but won 82 seats to the JD(U)-BJP’s 143. But a far weightier factor was the erosion of the RJD’s Muslim support. Evidently, there was some RJD fatigue among Muslims who constitute 16.5 percent of the total population.

The BJP-JD(U) did exceptionally well in the 54 constituencies where Muslims form 20 percent or more of the population. The BJP won 30 of these—almost a third of its total tally. The JD(U) won another 12 seats. The BJP won all 4 constituencies where Muslims account for 45 percent or more of the population, including Amour, where they account for 74 percent.

This could only have happened because the JD(U) transferred sizeable Muslim votes to the BJP. Clearly, Bihar’s Muslims voted “tactically” for the BJP because that would bring Mr Kumar to power. Mr Kumar’s secular credentials are strong. There was no overt communal violence under his rule. He secured convictions in the Bhagalpur anti-Muslim riots of 1989. More, he fenced some 9,000 cemeteries, thus reducing the potential for tension between graveyards and residential areas and giving security to Muslims.

Not least, he kept the BJP’s most rabid communalists, Narendra Modi and Varun Gandhi, out of the campaign by taking a hard stand on the issue after boycotting a dinner for Mr Modi this past June. This, and the scholarships offered to Muslims, helped the JD(U)-BJP win substantial Muslim support.

It’s unfortunate that the JD(U) fell short of an absolute majority on its own by only 7 seats. This closes—at least for the moment—the “Naveen Patnaik option” of dropping the communal BJP from the ruling alliance. But Mr Kumar remains in control in Bihar, totally overshadowing the BJP.

If, however, he has national ambitions, he’ll have to consider ways of getting rid of the BJP albatross. He can make a good beginning by pursuing serious, bold land reform and other social sector agendas in Bihar and turning it into a model of inclusive pro-poor governance. He’s hesitant to do so for fear of an upper-caste backlash and is only considering the registration of tenant-cultivators.

The elections expose the bankruptcy of the RJD platform of relying primarily on the Yadavs and an assortment of upper-caste elements by playing on their fear of land reform. Yet, although his party was mauled and his wife lost both constituencies she contested from, Mr Lalu Prasad shouldn’t be written off. The Congress has to “start from scratch”, as Ms Sonia Gandhi conceded. But this must go beyond building up the party organisationally to constructing a winning social coalition, based on the poor and the core minorities.

The BJP must know that it did well only because it piggybacked on another party, the JD(U). There are limits to how far, where, and for how long, this strategy can work. It earlier failed in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Maharashtra. The BJP remains tainted by communal extremism and sectarianism. Success in Bihar won’t easily translate into major national-level gains.(IPA Service)