(Part 5)
Bihar Election Analysis
The most striking feature of the Bihar result is the shift in voter behaviour. Communities that traditionally defended large reservation quotas, whether fifty percent or eighty percent or category-specific, ended up crediting the electoral shift to the direct cash transfer. The surprise is not that Dalit and OBC families still support reservation as a principle. The surprise is that, when confronted with an immediate and reliable material benefit, they prioritised what reached their account over what was promised for the future. The logic was simple. Instead of fighting over a limited quota pool, they preferred a benefit that went to everyone and arrived without delay. What changed the atmosphere was not the size of the transfer but the manner in which it was delivered.
The psychological design of the transfer was decisive. The money was already credited long before the election. There was no demand for political repayment. Voters did not feel trapped or obligated. It created goodwill because it was complete, not pending. Most political parties ask for votes in exchange for future benefits. Here, the benefit came first and the vote came later. Voters immediately recognised the difference. They interpreted the early delivery as an act of trust rather than a transaction. The sentiment was clear. If the government had wanted to manipulate them, it could have announced the scheme near the election. Since it did not, the gesture felt genuine.
This collided directly with Congress’s credibility problem. In Himachal Pradesh, the party made several welfare promises and struggled to deliver. In Karnataka, it announced a suite of guarantees that faced funding issues and delays. These experiences travelled across states through word of mouth, social media and relatives working interstate. Voters in Bihar did not need analysts to tell them whether Congress’s promises were realistic. They had fresh evidence that the party struggles to execute what it promises. Even a higher cash promise would have been dismissed with the question of whether it would actually come. With recent memory full of broken commitments, people preferred money they had already received.
They concluded that this is not a political party in crisis. This is a political party in active decomposition.
Absurd Promise
The collapse of credibility was only the first layer. The second was the absurdity of some of the campaign promises. The most glaring example was the pledge to provide one government job to every family in Bihar. The state has around two and a half crore households. Voters quickly realised that this number exceeds the total number of government employees in the entire country. They concluded that the promise was not ambitious but ridiculous. It felt less like a plan and more like an insult to their intelligence. When people said that they were not fools, they meant that they could calculate simple figures and recognise when a promise was impossible even in theory.
The third layer was the steady decay inside the party. Ticket-selling, which had damaged the organisation in Haryana, appeared again in Bihar. When nominations go to the highest bidder, weaker candidates enter the field, local workers lose morale and voters see the decay for themselves. This problem is not episodic. It is structural. A party that chooses candidates through auctions cannot build credibility, cannot maintain organisation and cannot recover trust. It behaves less like a political institution and more like a marketplace.
The contrast with the NDA’s model widened the gap. The NDA combines ideology, a cadre network, disciplined booth management, direct-benefit delivery and a record of execution. Congress today operates without a clear ideological core, without a loyal cadre and with an internal system shaped by transactions rather than convictions. One side behaves like a party with a plan. The other behaves like a shop that sells tickets.
We are not Idiots
The phrase “we are not idiots” capture the Bihar mood. The electorate no longer accepts lofty promises without verifying the record of delivery. In the past, large promises could produce hope. Today, hope must be backed by credibility. The voters saw a government that credited money directly into their accounts without fanfare, without conditions and without tying the benefit to voting behaviour. They saw an opposition that made sweeping promises to give jobs, without explaining how they could be fulfilled. The first approach respected their intelligence. The second insulted it.
The Bihar result should not be seen as an isolated event but as a demonstration of a new voter logic. Material delivery that arrives early and reliably creates trust. Grand announcements without proof of capacity generate suspicion. A party that respects the intelligence of the electorate wins their confidence. A party that treats them as gullible loses it. In this election, the people judged both sides with clarity.
People of Bihar rewarded the one that delivered and rejected the one that asked them to believe the unbelievable.