(Part 2)
The Real Game in Bihar
This is a comparison of election campaigns of Congress and NDA in Bihar assembly elections 2025.
The money (Rs 10000/-) the NDA distributed is not framed as charity but as working capital or seed money to start a business. A modest initial deposit is meant to get a micro-venture off the ground. Once the recipient shows activity in the bank account, a larger infusion becomes available. Those who continue to demonstrate growth can access even bigger support. The design is simple: prove that you are building something, and the state will back you further. It is an economic staircase, not a handout.
Congress Model
Congress, by contrast, offers an entirely different political product: identity surveys, suspicions about election theft, and a steady diet of grievance politics. Instead of a route toward financial expansion, the promise is an audit of community labels or yet another post-mortem of electoral injustice. Little in this approach generates income, opportunity, or upward movement. It is commentary in place of capital.
This stark difference shaped voter perception. One side delivered a mechanism to climb; the other delivered explanations for why the world is unfair. People saw a path that rewarded effort and a rival pitch that asked them to trust the party’s narrative. When given a choice between building something tangible and listening to another analysis of caste or electoral malpractice, voters naturally gravitated toward the former.
The strength of the economic pathway is not in its size but in its sequence. A small push creates momentum. Once there is momentum, scaling becomes imaginable. Ordinary people are transformed into small proprietors, not clients of a patronage machine. They feel like participants in an economic chain rather than subjects of a sociological study.
The caste census, on the other hand, leads nowhere productive. Counting communities neither creates work nor reduces competition. It simply generates new arguments about entitlement and fresh resentments between groups. It offers numbers for political speeches but nothing that changes the daily economic reality of a household.
Congress’s habitual cry of “vote theft” deepens the disconnect. Every loss becomes a rigging allegation. Haryana, Maharashtra, Bihar, all turning defeat into conspiracy. The implicit message to voters is patronizing. You didn’t actually pick the winner; you were deceived. This does not win respect. It signals contempt for the voter’s judgement. But Congress did not care.
NDA Model
Meanwhile, the NDA’s model functions like a miniature entrepreneurship program: small step, verified effort, larger step. It weeds out casual claimants and rewards those who show discipline. It does not require them to internalize a narrative of oppression or wait for systemic reforms. It simply allows them to grow.
What Congress misreads is the psychological shift. People no longer want to be analyzed or categorized. They want to advance. Being reduced to a caste label feels like being frozen in place. Being told that their vote was stolen feels like being called naïve. Being offered a structured path to expand their income, however modest, feels like respect.
Even the requirement to show financial activity, proof that one is actually doing something, creates a sense of dignity. It rewards initiative and builds a habit of accountability far more effectively than endless talk of identity or injustice.
For someone starting from the bottom, the idea that the state will back you again if you show progress is far more powerful than yet another debate about reservations or representational politics. Ambition needs a ladder, not a lecture.
This is why voters turned away from Congress’s package of census politics, conspiracy claims, and sociological rhetoric. None of it puts a single rupee into a business or a home. None of it offers a route upward. In contrast, even a small push with a clear route for scaling is enough to transform aspirations into plans.
Final Analysis
While Congress and sections of the media continue to perform moral and intellectual theatre about identity, the audience has quietly walked out. People are busy building what they started with the initial push. They are occupied with expanding their ventures, not consuming political commentary.
In the end, the country responded not to speeches about who they are but to opportunities that help them become something more. The economic staircase spoke louder than ideological sermons.
The ladder won because it moved people. The lecture lost because it moved nothing.