The 2025 Bihar assembly election explained

Bihar’s eighteenth assembly election was held, on 6 and 11 November, under extraordinary circumstances. It was preceded by the Election Commission of India conducting a Special Intensive Revision of the state’s voter rolls—an exercise that the ECI is poised to conduct nationwide in the near future. As my colleague Sagar reported in the August issue of The Caravan, there are serious questions about the necessity, design and execution of the SIR process, which could not only disenfranchise people who do not have the required documents but also cast doubt on their citizenship status. Petitioners challenging the SIR in the Supreme Court estimated that around 1.75 million Muslims were excluded from the electoral rolls, making up over a quarter of all deletions in a state where they constitute a sixth of the population. The ECI disputed the methodology used to arrive at this estimate but refused to reveal the caste and religious breakup of those who were excluded, and the legal status of the SIR remains pending in the Supreme Court even as votes are cast and counted.

The SIR controversy erupted amid allegations by the leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, over irregularities in the electoral rolls used during the 2024 general election, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi held on to power despite his Bharatiya Janata Party losing its parliamentary majority, and in subsequent assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana, both of which the BJP unexpectedly won. Having been one of the few widely trusted democratic institutions in the past three decades, the ECI has increasingly come under intense scrutiny for allegedly playing a partisan role, with the Congress leader Jairam Ramesh calling it the “B-team of the BJP.”

Although the opposition did not end up boycotting the Bihar election over the SIR, the issue of election integrity looms large. The draft electoral rolls, published on 1 August, excluded 6.56 million voters. While preparing the final electoral rolls, the ECI added 2.15 million names despite receiving only 1.69 million requests challenging exclusions in the draft rolls or seeking enrolment as a new voter. It also deleted a hundred and fifty thousand more names than it received exclusion applications. The Congress alleged, and Scroll confirmed, that the ECI has disproportionately appointed bureaucrats and police officials from BJP-ruled states to act as its observers. Moreover, Jairam pointed out, “in some assembly constituencies, the number of voters’ names being deleted exceeds the victory margin from the previous elections.”

Those margins are extremely thin. In the last assembly election, in 2020, the National Democratic Alliance won 125 seats—three more than required for a majority. Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party fought that election separately, splitting the NDA vote. Hypothetically, even if the LJP’s 2020 vote is added to that of the NDA, a uniform swing of five percentage points to the opposition Mahagathbandhan would see the ruling alliance lose 42 of those seats. The LJP has since split, but both factions remain within the NDA, which would gain 60 seats with a swing of just one point in its favour.