The people of Bihar have delivered a mandate whose weight goes well beyond the arithmetic of seats. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has won 202 of the 243 seats in the Legislative Assembly, while the Bharatiya Janata Party alone has secured 89 seats, its best-ever performance in the state. The Mahagathbandhan has fallen to just 35 seats after having dominated Bihar’s politics for decades in various combinations. A turnout of 67.13 per cent out of more than 7.4 crore registered voters makes this one of the most intensely contested elections in the state’s recent history.

For years, much of the commentary on Bihar treated the state as if it were frozen in time. Elections were read as exercises in caste arithmetic, with social demography assumed to translate mechanically into politica

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