Politics in Bihar is set to revolve around the Mandal-Hindutva axis once more with the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) joining hands again to form an alliance. In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), after 2014, has trounced the main Mandal party, the Samajwadi Party (SP), in every single election. However, the BJP now faces a more difficult task in Bihar as Mandal politics in the State has evolved in a manner that makes it more resistant to the BJP’s advances.
A rewind to the past. By the mid-1990s, Mandal politics in Bihar had fractured and become two competing political formations — Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Janata Dal (later the RJD) and Nitish Kumar’s (and George Fernandes’) Samata party (later the JD(U)). The roots of both parties were each in a dominant backward caste: the Yadavs and the Kurmis, respectively. The political competition between both parties forced each one to evolve differing strategies of mobilisation, preventing the kind of political stagnation that beset Mandal politics in Uttar Pradesh. A JD(U)-RJD combine, therefore, would not have the same glaring weaknesses to the BJP’s backward caste strategy that proved decisive in Uttar Pradesh.
