NEW DELHI — A resounding landslide by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in regional elections in the eastern state of Bihar has demonstrated the reach and resilience of the BJP, analysts said, and the fractured state of the Indian opposition.
The BJP-led alliance captured 202 out of 243 seats in Bihar’s legislative assembly, a stunning showing in a state where it has historically struggled to make major gains. The opposition Congress party and its allies saw their share of seats tumble from 110 to 35.
The election came at a fraught moment for Modi, 75, whose once warm relationship with President Donald Trump has frayed — first over the resolution of India’s most recent military conflict with Pakistan, and then over the country’s purchases of Russian oil. In the face of 50 percent U.S. tariffs on Indian goods, and stalled trade talks with Washington, opposition leaders sought to portray the prime minister as diminished at home and increasingly isolated abroad.
But those national pressures seemed to barely register in Bihar, where the campaign revolved around welfare promises and long-standing local loyalties. And the verdict delivered by nearly 50 million voters this month across Bihar, India’s poorest and third-most-populous state, affirmed the durability of Modi’s political movement.
“The result has strengthened the BJP government at the center,” said Asim Ali, a New Delhi-based political analyst. “They are safe again.”
Central to the party’s victory was the immensely popular Nitish Kumar of Janata Dal (United), whom the BJP partnered with in a coalition government after the last round of regional elections in 2020. Many Biharis see Kumar, the state’s longest-serving chief minister, as responsible for steering them out of the crushing poverty and caste-driven violence that marked the late 1990s and 2000s.
He had appeared to lose momentum during his most recent term, however, amid persistently high levels of unemployment in Bihar, especially among young people, who have left the state in large numbers to work low-wage jobs in other parts of India. At 74, Kumar has also battled health issues, and his opponents seized on apparent memory lapses and slip-ups during campaign events, drawing comparisons in local media to Joe Biden’s aborted bid for reelection in 2024.
But efforts to paint Kumar as infirm and no longer up to the job backfired, analysts said. “It generated a kind of sympathy wave,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This kind of feeling of ‘we have to protect our leader’ as opposed to rally against him.”
The election also spotlighted India’s weakened and fragmented opposition, which failed to distinguish itself from the BJP-led alliance, analysts said, and never settled on a message that would resonate with voters.
“There is no dearth of pressing issues in Bihar — from landlessness and unemployment to police violence and bureaucratic apathy,” Ali said. “Yet there was no strategic attempt to mobilize these grievances into a cohesive progressive platform.”
Women, who make up nearly half of Bihar’s electorate, played a decisive role at the polls, registering a record 71.6 percent turnout, compared with 59.7 in 2020. In September, the state government deposited about $850 million into the bank accounts of 7.5 million women as part of an initiative to seed money for small local enterprises. Though the opposition tried to discredit the program as a “bribe,” Congress’s own political manifesto proposed similar cash-transfer schemes for women.
Pairing targeted cash programs with policies long associated with Kumar — from bicycle subsidies for girls to measures aimed at improving safety and public order — gave the BJP a leg up among politically independent and highly engaged female voters, according to analysts.
“What the BJP in particular has been so savvy about is essentially understanding that something is changing in the political landscape, that women are this kind of underappreciated, underexploited political bloc,” Vaishnav said.
The election took place amid growing public unease over the health of the country’s institutions, including the Indian Election Commission, which ordered an overhaul of Bihar’s voter rolls earlier this year. The commission defended the chaotic process as essential for verifying the citizenship of voters, but critics warned that it risked disenfranchising millions of poor residents, who often lack formal documentation and have traditionally backed opposition parties. The updated voter list, released Sept. 30, had 6.5 million fewer names.
The Congress party tried to rally Biharis around the issue, launching a statewide march in August to champion voter rights. Weeks before polls opened, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi highlighted alleged irregularities in voter lists, warning of a system tilted in the BJP’s favor. But the attempt to make election integrity an animating issue in Bihar ultimately fell flat, analysts said.
“The opposition could not decisively point out how the election was compromised,” Vaishnav said.
The BJP’s commanding performance was the latest example of the party recovering its footing after an unexpected setback in national elections last year, when it lost its parliamentary majority and was forced to lean more heavily on coalition parties to govern, including Bihar’s JD(U). Over the past year, the party had already scored decisive victories in three state contests and, with its sweeping win in Bihar, showed again its ability to absorb international turbulence and adapt to local conditions.
“Bihar has very particular developmental problems,” Vaishnav said. “So national issues, whether it’s India-Pakistan or Trump’s tariffs, don’t really have an impact.”
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