For both the National Democratic Alliance and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the two principal contenders for power in Bihar, the outcome of the Assembly. Elections represents a, setback, in different ways. It is more pronounced in the case of the NDA ... The RJD, which won 124 seats and secured 28.2 per cent of the popular vote, emerged as the single largest party in the Assembly; the Bharatiya Janata Party finished way behind, with 66 seats and 14.5 per cent of the vote.
The RJD too suffered a big erosion in its legislative strength, and to that extent experienced a setback. Even so, the RJD's defeat is being read as a victory. This is because pre-clection opinion polls in the media, which were largely insensitive to ground-level polarisations in Bihar, had painted a bleak picture of the RJD's prospects, and in the end the RJD won many more seats than had been forecast.
Laloo Prasad Yadav presided over a historic shift in the social balance of political power in 1990; that shift was reaffirmed by the results of the 1991 Lok Sabha elections" and the 1995 Assembly elections. However, the results of. the parliamentary elections of 1998 and 1999, and the Assembly elections of February 2000, have shown up Laloo Prasad's inabflity to consolidate the social shift into an enduring political entity, as the Left Front has done in West Bengal. The loss of 43 seats as compared to the 1995 Assembly elections must be read as a verdict against the RID's poor record of governance ... The NDA, however, claims that this was no coincidence: it alleges that pressure on administrative officials ... proved decisive when the race was close:
The Congress(I) went it alone this time, perhaps hoping for a revival of the sort it experienced in Uttar Pradesh. But that was not to be, it won only 24 seats and secured 11.1 per cent of the popular vote ...
Taken together, the CPI, the CPI(M), the Communist Party of: India (Marxist-Leninist) and the Marxist Coordination Committee, won 40 seats in 1995; this time their collective tally fell to 13. Both the CPI and the CPJ(M) faced an overall decline. After a long time, the CPI contested without a mainstream party as its ally and fared badly: it won only five seats, down 21 seats since 1995, and lost its position as the dominant Left party in the State. The CPI(M-L), which contested fewer seats than the CPI, won six seats, one more than the CPI. The CPI(M), which was in alliance with the RJD, won two seats, down four since 1995, but its vote share remained much the same. A.K. Roy's Marxist Coordination Committee, which won two seats in 1995, was blanked out this time.
A comparison of the performances of the constituents of the NDA shows that the BJP performed much better than its allies in all three regions ...
Although the "RJD's seats' tally has seen ups and downs in the past few elections, the party's vote share has remained fairly steady - an indication that it has a committed support base. But does this mean that the same group of people voted for the party over the years? The CSDS-NDTV survey's analysis of the social profile of the RJD vote showed that it had not changed in the last few elections.
There is a sharp contrast between the profiles of those who have always voted the RJD and those who have never voted for the party. While more than 50 per cent of the RJD vote comes from Yadavs and Muslims, only 6 per cent of those who have never yoted f or the RJD belong to these two social groups. Among the other backward classes (OBCs), the RJD has at best mixed support. On the one hand, nearly 21 per cent of the RJD vote comes from OBCs; on the other, of those who have never voted for the RJD, 26 per cent belong to the OBCs. There is practically no change in the composition of the RJD vote ... There is firm opposition to the RJD from among the upper castes, who account for half of those who have never voted for the RJD in the last 10 years. Among Dalits and Adivasis too, there are some sections that have never voted for the party.
The vote in Bihar this time was sharply polarised on caste lines. Yadavs and Muslims offered solid support to the RJD, but the proportion of Muslims who voted for the party was lower than expected. The upper castes decisively tilted in favour of the NDA, although the polarisation here was much less pronounced. Dalits and the lower OBCs were clearly split. However, such levels of polarisation are not uncommon in Bihar.
No caste or community except Yadavs can be said to constitute a "vote bank", for there is a fair degree of cross- voting in each section. Yadavs tend to favour the RJD to a higher extent than any other caste favours any. Other party ... The RJD managed to secure a fair share of the votes of Dalits. A gravitation of the votes of Muslims towards the NDA is discernible, but the RJD nevertheless enjoys some support. among the minority community. There are sections among Rajputs who yoted for the RJD. Besides the votes of Adivasis, the Congress(I) secured a: fair share of the votes of Brahmins ... (Source: The Frontline, 31 March, 2000)
