Instead of casteism, it was sub-casteism which was at play in Bihar, though party leaders like Tejashwi Yadav kept promising the electorate 10 lakh jobs if they came to power. 

The winner takes all is an English idiom, the etymological origin of which is unknown to me. What it means is that a winner, for instance, in an election, gets all the spoils. What do spoils mean? Spoils mean things that have been stolen by thieves, or taken in a war or battle. In short, the idiom has a negative connotation.

In the case of the Bihar elections, there is no doubt that the winner is the BJP, which is entitled “to take all”. That raises another question, did the BJP really win the election? Or, did it snatch victory from the jaws of defeat using means other than fair and justifiable?
Come to think of it, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won the election by a razor-thin margin. If it had not won four or five of the 125 seats it managed to win, it would not have been difficult for the RJD-led Mahagathbandhan or Grand Alliance to form a government with the support of smaller parties like the AMIM and the BSP. That raises suspicion.

True, it was a nail-biting experience for those who watched the results on television channels across the country on 10th November. Many of them like me went to sleep before the final results came. As a result, many newspapers could not carry the full results as they had an earlier deadline for printing.

Never before, since the advent of the electronic voting machines in the country, has the counting been so slow as this time. Many even compared the delay to the delay in the counting of ballots in the recent presidential election in the United States. The delay allowed President Donald Trump to make claims, too fantastic to be real.

While the Covid protocol is said to be the villain of the piece, the Mahagathbandhan attributes it to a deliberate attempt on the part of the administration to manipulate the results. In order to provide social distancing to the voters, the Election Commission had increased the number of polling booths, i.e., EVMs by about 50 per cent.

That means, if there were 100,000 EVMs in the 2019 elections, there were 150,000 EVMs in the recent elections. The beauty of the EVM is that at the touch of a button it gives the results of the votes registered in the machine. 

That is precisely why in the previous general elections, the results were announced by the afternoon. That the counting took so much time this time was certainly a matter of concern. 

Incidentally, it is not for no reason that Western countries, including the US, which are far more advanced than India in the use of technology, especially computing technology, still rely on the paper ballot, instead of the EVM. They know only too well that no machine, created by a human being, is free from manipulation. Small wonder that hackers are able to attack computing systems like those maintained by the armed forces and Intelligence agencies. 

Australian editor, publisher and activist Julian Paul Assange, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, showed how easy it was for him to bring to the public domain classified files that brought to light how US President Richard Nixon made disparaging references to Indira Gandhi before and during the 1971 war with Pakistan. 

Leaders of the Grand Alliance say that some of  their candidates, who were declared winners, were later told that they had actually lost. For instance, Hilsa was snatched from the RJD by a margin of just 12 votes. 

Another seat — Barbigha — was won, again, by the JDU, by a margin of 113 votes. Needless to say, in a cliffhanger situation, even a couple of seats could make a huge difference.

One is reminded of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections when the then Union Home Minister, P Chidambaram, was trailing all through while trying to retain the Sivaganga seat. His loss would have been a great setback for the UPA, which eventually won that election. Surprise of surprise, two recounts were ordered and Chidambaram was declared elected! The result showed the clout of Chidambaram, rather than the strength of the voting process.

Curiously, the other day, when a Congress leader questioned the manner in which counting was allegedly manipulated in Bihar, Chidambaram’s son came out strongly in defence of the EVMs, as if he knew the ins and outs of the machines. Also, the margin of victory in some constituencies was less than the number of postal ballots counted there.

By the way, the trends of the counting, at least in the initial period, conformed to the exit poll results which predicted an easy victory for the Grand Alliance. Almost all the exit poll results favoured the alliance. The NDA presented a high-voltage campaign, while the RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav went around holding a little over 200 rallies which attracted large crowds. In comparison, Rahul Gandhi’s was a lacklustre affair!

A journalist who covered the elections told me how an organisation of women affiliated to the ruling party like the Kudumbasri in Kerala were allowed to help the elderly and the physically challenged to exercise their franchise. He says all their votes went in favour of the NDA.

Be that as it may, there is little doubt that the real winner is the BJP. Though it could not emerge as the single largest party, it succeeded in its strategy of cutting the Janata Dal United of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar down to size. 

It is not because of the large-heartedness of the party that it offered the chief ministership to Kumar, though the BJP has 30 more MLAs than the JDU, which won only 43 seats. 

Rather, it is the fear that Kumar might go the Shiv Sena way and form a government with the support of the RJD that forced it to be so magnanimous. Of course, there is also the realisation in the BJP that with his wings clipped, Nitish Kumar would not be able to call the shots in the government the way he did in the past. He would remain at best a lame-duck chief minister.

As of now, there is no certainty that Kumar would be allowed to complete his full term. The JDU leader is a veteran of electoral battles and he knows how the BJP manipulated the defeat of a large number of his candidates. Given the treatment meted out to him, he would be fully justified if he decides to leave the BJP and form an alliance with the RJD-led group to provide a stable government in Bihar. 

Otherwise, he would end up as just a figurehead, with the real power remaining in the hands of his second-in-command who would be from the BJP.

When the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) led by the late Rambilas Paswan’s son Chirag Paswan fielded 137 candidates and campaigned exclusively against Nitish Kumar’s leadership, it was with the blessings of the BJP. 

In fact, the young Paswan even admitted that Amit Shah was told about his electoral gamble. While the strategy worked to some extent, the LJP could win only one seat. At least in one constituency — Bhagalpur — infamous for the blinding of “criminals” in the eighties, the LJP’s presence helped the Congress to win that seat!

The Congress which succeeded in bluffing RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav to get 70 seats presented the worst performance, winning only 19 seats against 27 it won earlier. If the Grand Alliance’s defeat can be attributed to a single factor, it is the underperformance of the Congress. 

Had the Congress contested a lesser number of seats and used all its resources there, it could have made a difference to Tejashwi Yadav’s fortunes! But, then, wishes are seldom horses! None of the Congress leaders, who have ambitions of taking over the leadership of the party, was seen campaigning in Bihar.

No other party had the success rate of the CPI (ML). It won 12 out of the 19 seats it contested as part of the Mahagathabandhan. What’s more, while all the parties, including the RJD and the BJP, lost some of the seats they won in 2015, the CPI (ML)’s representation went up from 3 to 12. The CPI and the CPM also benefited from the alliance getting two seats each.

Incidentally, Bihar, especially central Bihar, was a stronghold of the Communist Party. Most of the party cadres stayed with the parent CPI when following a split, the Marxists formed the CPM. For instance, the MP from Patna was always a CPI person, till its monopoly was broken in the nineties. 

While the CPI remained confined to some pockets like Begusarai and under the leadership of Upper castes, the CPI (ML) began organising agricultural labourers, most of whom belonged to the Scheduled Castes in Patna, Jehanabad, and Gaya areas. This resulted in clashes and massacres when the land owners countered them with their own militias called Bhoomi Sena.

The party came overground in 1992 and since then it has been consolidating its position among the marginalised sections of the people. The alliance with the RJD helped the Left parties, especially the CPI (ML), to make a good harvest of seats. Interestingly, it was a CPI (ML) candidate —Mr Mehboob Alam — who won the Balrampur seat with the highest margin of 53,597 votes. 

In fact, if the CPI (ML) were allowed to contest for more seats, Tejashwi Yadav, at 31, would have become the youngest chief minister in India. He has been defeated but he emerged as a leader in his own right, who did not even invoke the name of his father Lalu Yadav or mother Rabri Devi to seek votes. 

He even explained the MY phenomenon in Bihar not in terms of Muslims and Yadavs but in terms of Mazdoor (labour) and Youth. He never adopted the hit-below-the-belt strategy that even a person like Narendra Modi chose during his campaign by constantly referring to the Jungle Raj. He turned out to be the most decent and honest politician.

It had its advantages. While the BJP and the JDU together lost their vote share by about 10.5 per cent compared to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the RJD and the Congress gained a vote share by about 9.5 per cent. Alas, in the first-the-past-the-post electoral system we follow, vote share and seat share seldom match.

One person the BJP and the JDU should be thankful to for their success is All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) leader Asaduddin Owaisi. The party lost its sitting Muslim-majority seat, Kishanganj, but it won five seats in the Seemanchal area where the Muslims have a large presence. 

The party contested two dozen seats, as a constituent of the third alliance led by Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Samata Party. It also included Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. From one seat to five seats is certainly a big jump for  the AIMIM. Owaisi is known for his rhetorical, if not mesmeric, speeches and he could certainly influence the Muslim voters, who, in the ordinary circumstances, would have voted en masse for the RJD and the Congress.

Karpoori Thakur and Lalu Prasad Yadav were the ones who wrested power, almost for ever, from the upper castes in Bihar. Until their arrival on the Bihar scene, the chief ministership of Bihar was the preserve of the likes of Srikrishna Sinha, Satyendra Narain Sinha, Bindeshwari Dubey and Jagannath Mishra. 

They did so by invoking the unity of the Backward Castes. The arrival of Nitish Kumar, who belonged to the Kurmi caste, saw the Kurmis leaving the company of the Yadavs. And to consolidate his own position, Kumar, aided and abetted by the ever-divisive BJP, has been further dividing the backward and more backward groups so much so that even a smaller group like the fish workers had a party of its own — Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) — contesting in alliance with the BJP. The VIP had a fish party with the RJD before joining the BJP-JDU bandwagon!

Instead of casteism, it was sub-casteism which was at play in Bihar, though party leaders like Tejashwi Yadav kept promising the electorate 10 lakh jobs if they came to power. 

The BJP is less than honest when it claims that the vote in Bihar was for development. Far from that, the results were a pointer to the political polarisation in which the divider-in-chief won at the cost of his own local commander.

(ajphilip@gmail.com)