Bihar will vote in two phases to elect a new assembly on November 6 and November 11. We will know the mandate of the 74 million strong electorate on November 14. Predicting electoral outcomes in India is something best avoided. Psephologists have had to regularly eat crow in the recent past. What is more useful is to flag the fault lines which shape an electoral contest. There are five of them which can be underlined for the forthcoming Bihar contest.

The first is to avoid the cocktail of stereotyping and confirmation biases that marks analyses by armchair commentators who fail to differentiate between top-down and organic narratives in an election. The run-up to Bihar elections has been dominated by the cacophony around the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise that has been conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI). Its tangible impact has been the deletion of 4.8 million or 6% of the state’s voters between June 24 and September 30. While a lot of SIR’s critics — there are valid reasons to critique the way in which the exercise was done and also the way ECI has conducted itself during the process — have linked this exercise to the targeted deletion of anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) voter groups (this did not happen according to data analysed by HT) and some sort of a concerted effort to undermine the universal franchise (and, therefore, the cornerstone of democracy itself), there is nothing on........

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