A shoe hurled in Delhi heard in Bihar

The BJP wouldn’t have bargained for a caste backlash in the midst of tricky seat-sharing negotiations for the Bihar elections, but it may find it hard to live down the shoe-throwing incident of 6 October. It was no minor affront, after all — the shoe was hurled at the Chief Justice of India, while he sat in his designated chair in Court #1 of the Supreme Court of India.

Justice B.R. Gavai happens to be a Dalit and the perpetrator an upper-caste, self-styled defender of ‘sanatan dharma’, whose outrageous assault has received great support from Hindutva trolls online.

The caste underpinnings of the attack are all too obvious, and predictably the incident has triggered more outrage and protests. It brings to mind a sequence from a decade ago. It was 2015, weeks before the Bihar Assembly polls. Speaking to the RSS mouthpiece Panchajanya, Mohan Bhagwat had said it was time India reviewed its reservations policy.

The RJD–JD(U) alliance seized the moment and went after the BJP–RSS for ‘threatening the rights of SC/ST/OBCs’. The results were decisive: the RJD bagged 80 seats and the JD(U) 71, for a comfortable majority in the 243-seat state Assembly. The BJP, still high on its 2014 Lok Sabha triumph, came crashing down to a measly 53 seats, its campaign apparently derailed by a misstep from its ideological mentor.

For weeks in the run-up to the recent shoe-throwing incident, BJP supporters had launched a coordinated online campaign targeting the CJI, framing him as ‘anti-Hindu’ and calling for his impeachment. They pushed hashtags like #ImpeachCJI and #GavaiMustResign on X, after he dismissed a petition urging the court to direct the Central government to restore a damaged Vishnu idol in Khajuraho.

Justice Gavai had questioned the petitioner’s locus and cuttingly described the PIL as ‘publicity interest litigation’. Emphasising that matters of faith and heritage were outside judicial purview, he reportedly said: “If you claim to be a staunch devotee of Lord Vishnu, go ask the deity to intervene through prayer and meditation.”

Prominent BJP-aligned influencers accused Justice Gavai of mocking Hindu sentiments, and of a bias due to his Dalit-Buddhist background and Ambedkarite leanings. Their inflammatory posts, tagging government handles like @PMOIndia for action, had garnered a lot of engagement.

The tipping point came during Gavai’s Mauritius trip, when delivering the inaugural Sir Maurice Rault Memorial Lecture 2025 on 3 October, he said: “The Indian legal system is governed by the rule of law, not by the rule of the bulldozer.” Even this was seen as ‘anti-Hindu’, presumably because a certain Hindutva icon is the poster-boy of bulldozer justice.

Notably, none of this elicited condemnation from the BJP eminences, exactly the kind of acquiescing wink that encourages impunity.

After the shoe-throwing outburst, the CJI tried to tamp down the backlash. Rakesh Kishore, the 71-year-old vigilante advocate who couldn’t apparently bear Gavai’s conduct — in his own words “सनातन का अपमान नहीं सहेंगे (won’t tolerate insults to sanatan dharma)" — was detained and reportedly questioned by the police, but the Supreme Court’s Registrar-General, acting on instructions from the CJI, told the police to not press charges.

Bihar, gearing up for elections on 6 and 11 November, has seen the incident politicised sharply along caste lines. Dalits, who account for roughly a fifth of Bihar’s population, form a key voting bloc in the state, and the attack seems to have stirred Dalit sentiment against the BJP and the ruling NDA. The Opposition parties are looking determined to make a point of the ‘systemic upper-caste arrogance of the BJP’ even as it pays lip-service to the empowerment of SC/ST/OBCs.

The NDA leaders, sensing trouble ahead, have issued token condemnations of the assault, while downplaying the caste dimension to avoid alienating upper-caste voters. Two Union ministers from Bihar, Chirag Paswan and Jitan Ram Manjhi — both self-styled champions of Dalit interests — were conspicuously silent, not even offering token criticism. “As part of the NDA, Manjhi and Paswan have accepted the hegemony of the RSS and Sanatan Dharma, that’s why they are silent,” said Bihar Congress co-incharge Shahnawaz Alam.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar of the JD(U) issued a brief statement on 7 October, delicately calling the attack ‘unacceptable’. In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, BSP chief Mayawati offered a mild rebuke, calling the lawyer’s act ‘discourteous’.

In sharp contrast to these muted condemnations that betray the NDA’s discomfiture, Bihar Congress chief Rajesh Ram, also a Dalit, broke down at a press conference. If even the CJI isn’t safe, what kind of protection can ordinary Dalits hope for, he asked. “The pain [will be] felt by all Dalits,” he said, calling the assault an insult to the Constitution’s social justice ethos.

Sources in Patna indicate that protests are being planned across Bihar. The Congress has mobilised its Delhi unit and its formidable lawyers’ cell to explore legal options. Party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul

Gandhi issued a joint statement, condemning the atrocities against Dalits, also referencing the most recent lynching of a Dalit youth in UP’s Rae Bareli and describing the assaults as ‘crimes against the Constitution’ and a ‘question of collective morality’.

Commentators say the M–Y (Muslim–Yadav) axis forged by Lalu Prasad Yadav back in the day is likely to be upstaged in Bihar by the new M–Y in town — the ‘Mahila-Youth’ combine.

The NDA’s wooing of women voters with direct cash transfers ahead of the election will, they feel, be a gamechanger (going by the outcome in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra earlier). A cash transfer of Rs 10,000, with apparently no strings attached, can even swing loyalties, they argue. And so, if the 2020 trend of more women than men showing up to vote sustains in 2025, the NDA may have an edge, these observers say.

However, the perception that Nitish Kumar, who has indeed cultivated women as a constituency, has their support by default is not supported by the statistical evidence. While the overall voting percentage of women (59.7 per cent) was indeed higher than men (54.5 per cent) in 2020, the NDA received just 1 per cent more of women’s votes than the Mahagathbandhan (as the INDIA bloc was then known).

A post-poll study by CSDS-Lokniti revealed a tight contest for women’s votes in Bihar: 38 per cent supported the NDA and 37 per cent the Mahagathbandhan — while 25 per cent opted for ‘other parties’. Among Dalit women, ‘other parties’ got 43 per cent. This was despite the fact that the NDA had loosened its purse strings in 2020 as well, recalls author and journalist Nalin Verma, who has tracked Bihar politics closely and co-authored a biography with Lalu Prasad Yadav. To assume, then, that the latest payout will automatically translate into overwhelming support from women voters is a fallacy, Verma argues.

Rajesh Kumar, a social activist from Bhagalpur, concurs with Verma, with a caveat. Women will doubtless appreciate the Rs 10,000 windfall, he says, but they are not blind to the state’s unemployment crisis, and it’s hard to ignore that most rural households in Bihar are so poor that they incur debts to meet daily expenses. Unemployment was a big issue in the 2020 elections as well, and it was Tejashwi Yadav’s promise to fill government vacancies that turned the tide in his favour, this activist recalls.

Bottomline: handouts may not cut it for Nitish after so many years in the saddle.