Opinion | Nitish Kumar’s Exit Marks The End Of The Mandal Era In Bihar

If the past two decades stabilised Bihar’s political grammar and extended the Mandal framework to its logical limits, the next phase must move beyond Mandal towards markets

In democratic politics, legacies rarely end. They simply change form. Nitish Kumar is now poised to move from the turbulence of state governance to the reflective chamber of the Rajya Sabha. In the idiom of varnashrama dharma, it is a passage from grihastha to vanaprastha. After two decades of tending the household of Bihar, the householder steps back while experience replaces power and counsel replaces command.

Assessing Nitish Kumar’s legacy requires acknowledging a structural but uncomfortable truth about leadership. Transformative governance rarely extends meaningfully beyond a decade. The first term repairs institutional disorder and the second institutionalises a vision. Nitish Kumar governed Bihar’s political space for nearly twenty years after assuming office in 2005. In that sense, the electoral verdicts that sustained him in later years were not routine mandates but something closer to a historic acknowledgement of a political era that reshaped Bihar’s social foundations.

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His most consequential contribution was deepening the social coalition born from the Mandal Commission implementation. Early Mandal politics consolidated around dominant OBC communities. Nitish Kumar extended that framework downward to include the Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs), groups long marginal even within the broader OBC fold. Bihar’s 2022 caste survey places EBCs at roughly 36 per cent of the state’s population, making them its single largest social bloc. By embedding their representation within governance and welfare structures, Nitish Kumar broadened — and in many ways exhausted — the Mandal framework, pushing its logic to its fullest democratic extension.

Alongside this caste reconfiguration, he introduced a second and nationally significant innovation — the consolidation of women as an autonomous political constituency. Bihar implemented 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayati raj institutions in 2006, supported by a broader ecosystem of policies: expansion of self-help groups linking millions of rural women to microcredit; welfare programmes promoting girls’ education and mobility such as the bicycle scheme; and 35 per cent reservation for women in government jobs. Together, these measures institutionalised women’s participation in governance and employment.

The electoral consequences were striking. Women in Bihar now vote in greater numbers than men — about 71 per cent turnout compared to roughly 63 per cent for men in recent elections. They have emerged as a decisive bloc that cuts across caste alignments. This may be Nitish Kumar’s most innovative national contribution. What began as a Bihar experiment gradually influenced wider political strategies. Shivraj Singh Chouhan built a powerful women-centred welfare architecture in Madhya Pradesh. At the national level, Narendra Modi later incorporated a similar emphasis through programmes centred on women’s welfare, financial inclusion and household security.

Nitish Kumar’s governance model, however, remained deliberately understated. When he assumed office, Bihar’s institutions were widely perceived as fragile, marked by weak infrastructure, poor law enforcement and low administrative capacity. His first decade focused on restoring basic governance. Rural roads improved. School enrolment increased. Law and order strengthened. Development occurred through incremental institutional repair.

This gradualist model stabilised the state but revealed its limits. Bihar did not undergo the structural transformation many expected in post-1991 liberalising India. The state’s per capita income today remains among the lowest in the country — roughly one-third of the national average — while manufacturing contributes barely nine per cent of Bihar’s Gross State Domestic Product. Urbanisation remains limited. Migration continues to function as the primary livelihood strategy for millions of households.

Several structural challenges also persist. Annual flooding in North Bihar, particularly along the Kosi River, continues to disrupt livelihoods much as it did in the era of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Seemanchal region remains marked by developmental lag and demographic anxieties. Bihar’s broader modernisation — urbanisation, entrepreneurship and industrial employment — remains incomplete.

There is also a paradox in Nitish Kumar’s gender politics. While his policies successfully mobilised women voters and expanded their role in grassroots governance, they did not produce a comparable generation of women leaders at the state level. Bihar produced women voters in unprecedented numbers, but not women politicians in proportionate strength.

Legacies in politics are ultimately judged by the terrain leaders leave behind. Nitish Kumar inherited a Bihar marked by institutional erosion and fractured social coalitions. He leaves behind a state with more stable governance and a broadened political base. If the past two decades stabilised Bihar’s political grammar and extended the Mandal framework to its logical limits, the next phase must move beyond Mandal towards markets. As Nitish Kumar enters the reflective chamber of the Rajya Sabha, the responsibility of shaping that post-Mandal future will pass to a new generation of political householders.

Shubhrastha is co-author of ‘The Last Battle of Saraighat: The Story of the BJP’s Rise in the North-east’. She teaches psephology and communication at the School of Global Leadership. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.

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