There are many reactions regarding the new mandate of Bihar but the biggest question is why most of the good candidates are not successful in electoral politics without being associated with any big party.
In the Bihar Assembly elections, the National Democratic Alliance i.e. NDA has once again formed the government with an overwhelming majority. The winning parties are calling the result as expected, while election analysts are calling it unexpected. The losing parties are questioning the entire election process and pondering over the results. Often the leaders of defeated parties are not able to accept the mandate easily. The beauty of Indian democracy is that elections have been fair here, even though from time to time the Election Commission has been accused of adopting a biased attitude towards the ruling coalition. The losing parties have been accusing the ruling parties for a long time of EVMs being hacked and of favoring the voters by distributing pre-poll handouts. Same thing is happening this time also. Earlier it was said that the names of voters were deleted on a large scale to benefit the ruling party through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) campaign conducted by the Election Commission. Then allegations were made that the Nitish Kumar government ‘bribed’ the women beneficiaries by depositing an amount of Rs 10,000 in their accounts to vote in its favor.
By the way, the custom of distributing ravaris before elections is old in the country. No single party or alliance has done this. From the oldest party to the new ruling parties, such allegations have been made. It is a common belief that election rallies work to woo voters towards a particular party or alliance. There has been a long standing discussion on whether this is really possible in Indian democracy or not. One side believes that voters are definitely influenced by populist promises, while the other side believes that saying so is like questioning the socio-political maturity of the Indian voter.
There will be a long debate on what role the government’s steps to woo the common people played in the Bihar election results, but it would not be logical to say that this was the only reason for such election results. In a large state like Bihar, election results are affected by many factors, in which the performance of the ruling party, the image of the opposition and its acceptance among the public, national and local issues and people’s perception towards the candidates play a major role. Barring exceptions like the Lok Sabha elections of 1977 and 1984, there is more than one reason for winning an election. The same happened in the recent elections in Bihar also.
This time, an interesting aspect of Bihar elections was that the voters gave more importance to a particular party or alliance than the image and talent of the candidates. Therefore, candidates contesting on the tickets of main parties won easily compared to those candidates who stood independently or on the election symbol of a new party, even if they were better in terms of ability. At least this seems to be the fate of the candidates of Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraj Party in this election. Kishore’s party had fielded most of the people in the electoral fray who had a clean image and had earned fame and social prestige in their respective fields. They included everyone from popular teachers to hard-working retired IAS/IPS officers, but the bail of almost all of them was forfeited. Same situation happened with those eligible candidates who were trying their luck as independents. On the contrary, those candidates who had the election symbol of a particular party got Vijayashree without any difficulty, even if criminal cases were registered against them.
However, this is not the first time this has happened in this election. In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, a renowned police officer from Bihar contested as an independent, who had retired from the post of DGP a few months ago. While working in the police service, he became famous due to his action to crack down on a powerful MP of the ruling party. But, the public rejected him in the election field as an independent. An independent candidate, who was arrested by the CBI for leaking the exam question paper, got more votes than him. The same fate befell the educated candidates in the 2015 Bihar Assembly who had left their jobs to contest the elections as independent candidates with a passion to change Bihar. So, is the personal talent, honesty and clean image of the candidates irrelevant to the common voter in the present electoral system? In a democracy, the voter’s decision is paramount but there is a need to discuss why most of the good candidates are not successful in electoral politics without being associated with any big party.