NEW DELHI // Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his party face a difficult challenge in state legislature elections in Bihar starting next month.
The election commission announced on Wednesday that the polling in India’s third most populous state will be held in five phases between October 12 and November 5, with results to be announced on November 8.
The election is seen as a battle between Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and an alliance of opposition parties — the Janata Dal (United), or JD (U), which has ruled the state for a decade; the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the party previously in power in Bihar, and the Congress.
Though Bihar’s election dates have just been announced, political parties have been in campaign mode for months, criss-crossing one of India’s least-developed states to win over the electorate.
Mr Modi kick-started the BJP’s campaign in July with a “rally for change” in the town of Muzaffarpur, taking digs at Nitish Kumar of the JD (U) who heads the state government.
“During the last election, Nitish Kumar had said that if he was unable to provide electricity to all of Bihar, he would not come to ask for votes again in 2015,” Mr Modi said. “But have you got the electricity? It has not come. But he has come to ask for votes. He betrayed your trust. I am here to promise you to provide 24-hour electricity.”
Mr Modi has been to Bihar three times since then. During a visit on August 18, he announced a federal aid package of 1.25 trillion rupees (Dh69 billion) for the state.
Mr Kumar responded by tweeting: “While I will wait to hear details of the so called package announced by [Mr Modi], I emphasise, special assistance is OUR RIGHT & not a favour.”
Mr Kumar is campaigning on his record and has put aside old rivalries in a bid to keep the BJP out of power.
His JD (U) party launched a door-to-door campaign on July 2 to connect with the state’s 30 million voters and he has joined hands with the RJD leader Laloo Prasad Yadav, formerly a fierce rival. He also hired away Prashant Kishor, Mr Modi’s campaign strategist in the general election last year.
Several metrics bear out Mr Kumar’s claim that Bihar has progressed under him, even if it still has India’s lowest per capita income.
Between the financial years 2005-06 and 2014-15 — which neatly bookend Mr Kumar’s tenure — Bihar has grown at a compounded annual rate of 10.6 per cent, higher than the national average of 7.4 per cent, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a Mumbai-based think tank.
Between 2005-06 and 2012-13 fiscal years, industrial jobs in Bihar increased by 8.1 per cent — far higher than the 0.9 per cent growth seen in the state between 1998-99 and 2005-06, according to CMIE.
Jean Dreze, a New Delhi-based economist who has studied Bihar’s public distribution system for delivery of subsidised food and fuel to the poor, found that inefficiencies and “leakages”, or embezzlement, of these commodities have reduced drastically.
These leakages were in the astronomical range of 75-90 per cent through most of the 2000s, Mr Dreze wrote in an article for The Hindu newspaper in May. “The latest estimates, however, show a dramatic decline — from 75 per cent in 2009-10 to 24 per cent in 2011-2” when estimates were last available, Mr Dreze wrote.
Figures released by the planning commission — a now-defunct federal body — showed that Bihar had pulled 18 million people above the poverty line between 2009-10 and 2011-12, which it defined as 816 rupees per capita per month in rural areas and 1,000 rupees in urban areas.
Still, Mr Kumar and his alliance have a challenge ahead. The BJP and its partners won 14 out of 24 seats in elections to the upper house of Bihar’s legislature in July, while Mr Kumar’s alliance won nine. In the parliamentary elections last year, the BJP won 22 out of the 40 seats in Bihar; the JD (U), RJD and Congress together won eight.
The BJP will be tested as well. It has never formed the government in Bihar, and Mr Modi’s lustre has dulled somewhat since his election last year.
“Modi’s popularity has undoubtedly gone down across the country,” Amulya Ganguli, a New Delhi-based political analyst, told The National. “And if he loses, it will be a very big setback. The BJP lost in the Delhi [legislature] elections so heavily in January. It cannot now afford to lose another election.”
But Mr Ganguli also believes that Mr Kumar’s political alliance might prove brittle.
“All along there have been differences between Nitish and Laloo Prasad Yadav,” he said. “Because of that, the BJP has reasons to smile.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
