Is this another stolen mandate?

The headline of the story we ran in this paper in the edition dated 19 October read: ‘Is INDIA ready for the NDA–ECI alliance?’ Well, the Opposition in Bihar may have been fearing the worst, but they weren’t letting on—not till the last ball had been bowled, to borrow vocabulary from another sport—that they knew the match was likely fixed.

Addressing the media in Delhi on 5 November, after the ‘H-files’ exposé about the alleged rigging of the 2024 assembly elections in Haryana, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi said: “It is pretty clear to us that now this [institutionalised rigging by the ECI] is a system. [It] has now been industrialised, and it can be used in any state, and it is going to be used in Bihar. I’m confident that after the Bihar election, we’ll get the same record, and we’ll show you that the same thing has happened in Bihar.”

The ‘H-files’ exposé was not even a standalone—it came on the heels of similarly damning disclosures about Mahadevpura in Karnataka (Lok Sabha 2024) and Aland, also in Karnataka (assembly polls, 2023). Investigations about the ECI’s special intensive revision (SIR) exercise, by a motley bunch of non-corporate media outlets, intrepid YouTubers and independent experts have also raised deeply unsettling questions about the sanctity of the voter rolls and the conduct of elections.

Talking to National Herald about the SIR, CPI-ML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya had said (NH, 3 August) that it was more apt to think of the SIR as ‘Special Intensive Reconstruction’. Prescient words! But before we recall other incriminating details of this exercise, to understand why Bhattacharya thought the supposed ‘revision’ was in fact a ‘reconstruction’, or indeed why we think this is not a genuine mandate for the NDA, let’s dispense with what the poll numbers seem to foretell.

At the time of writing, the BJP was leading in 92 of the 101 seats it had contested—a strike rate of 91 per cent, if these leads convert into wins. Nitish Kumar’s JD-U was ahead in 83 seats; Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), which fought 29 seats, was ahead in 19.

Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha, contesting six seats, was ahead in five, while Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Morcha was leading in four of the six seats it had contested. Even Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM was ahead in five seats.

The NDA overall was leading in a staggering 203 of 243 seats, after 11 hours of counting, and the opposition Mahagathbandhan reduced to just about 40 seats—with the RJD accounting for 26 of those.

Mahagathbandhan folks, how do you even begin to judge what you did right or wrong, when there is no way to judge who really voted for you—the ECI’s numbers are not going to spill those secrets. We’ll get to the fictions in the official election data when they become available.

Looking at these incredible numbers, political scientist Suhas Palshikar wryly said: “With parties looking poised to win 80–90 per cent of contested seats, should election analysis focus instead on why they lost the remaining 10–20 per cent?”

What these numbers also mean is that the BJP is within striking distance of a majority even without Nitish’s JD-U, which renders his party vulnerable to an ‘Operation Lotus’ manoeuvre in the post-poll scenario. The break-up of NDA leads/ likely wins also means that despite his party’s own very high strike rate, Nitish may not be crowned chief minister this time, or lose the chair soon—and, given the landslide, won’t have the bargaining chips to threaten another switch. Which is exactly what the BJP was hoping for when it ran the risk of not naming him the CM-designate this time round. So, do watch out, Mr Nitish Kumar—the knives will be out for you.

To return to how this unbelievable landslide was engineered—yes, engineered, for nothing in the immediate or recent past of this state, nothing in the NDA’s governance record, nothing about the state’s pathetic state lends credence to this mandate.

National Herald has published a whole series of articles exposing the shadiness of the entire SIR exercise in Bihar—from the impossible demands for documents to be submitted with enumeration applications to putting it on the BLAs (booth level agents) of parties to flag anomalies, to giving discretionary powers to booth level officers (BLOs) to determine status of complaints, to the stonewalling of the Opposition when it demanded explanations after damning exposés, to the opaque and bewildering changes in the number of eligible voters at different stages of this ‘purification’ drive.

Let’s try and wrap our heads, one more time, around some highly improbable numbers put out by the Election Commission of India since the evening of 23 June, when it announced that an SIR would start in Bihar the next day!

• There were 7.89 crore voters in Bihar in January 2025, after summary revisions (the last such exercise before the SIR). On the eve of the SIR, which got underway on 24 June, with just a few hours’ notice, this was the number of voters in Bihar

• The draft rolls announced on 1 August had 7.24 crore names, i.e., 65 lakh names had been deleted

• The final list announced on 30 September had 7.42 crore names—now featuring 21 lakh unaccounted-for additions in the space of one month; no mention of any additions before this, only deletions, because people were either dead or had permanently migrated or were duplicates

• Talking of ‘duplicates’, one of the stated reasons for deletion of names from the earlier rolls, the ECI did not even run the de-duplication software (this was discovered through another exposé) before it announced the final rolls; incidentally, the ECI has this software since 2018.

• Now, from 7.42 crore voters in the final list, the number of eligible voters went up by more than 3 lakh to 7.45 crore (7,45,26,858 to be precise), as per an ECI press release on 11 November; this announcement came after elections had concluded.

• Even if you ignore the 21 lakh voters supposedly added to the draft rolls, where did the ECI find 3 lakh more voters after it had published the final rolls?

Conspiracy theories, you think? So, if this incredible mandate is not about the shenanigans of the ECI, at the behest of the ruling BJP—which, we should remember, appoints the Election Commissioners by a majority of 2:1, under the new dispensation— is it perhaps about the performance of the outgoing NDA government, about Nitish Kumar’s governance record in the nearly 20 years he has been at the helm? Or the all powerful alchemy of caste?

This kind of resounding return mandate suggests that people couldn’t ask for better. Yet, everyone knows that Bihar is a byword for backwardness—and that despite two decades of claimed ‘sushasan’ (good governance). It has the highest poverty rate; an unemployment rate that is more than double the national average; and terrible health and nutrition indicators. So, this mandate really doesn’t wash. Even the women of the state many pundits think are gung-ho about Nitish, even the beneficiaries of the cash transfers have another story to tell (read: ‘Why are these women fleeing in Bihar?’) It’s not a pretty picture, you’ll probably agree.