After Nitish Kumar | Who will script Bihar's next chapter?

Will Bihar see a leader who simply manages an inherited coalition, or one who can, in their own way, rethink development, social justice, and communal harmony for a new era?

Nitish Kumar’s resignation from the legislative council signals that it is only a matter of time before he steps down as the chief minister. His March 30 resignation and move to the Rajya Sabha mark a deeper turning point. Who will inherit his complex legacy of social justice, human development, and political manoeuvre? And what future will such a succession script have for Bihar?

Kumar’s political project involved a careful recasting of Mandal politics. Rather than centring on the relatively better-off backward castes, he invested in Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs), Mahadalits, and Pasmanda Muslims, even creating new categories to extend the moral and material reach of social justice. This offered an alternative to the RJD’s MY (Muslim-Yadav) axis, and gave voice to castes long excluded from power.

Prohibition, introduced in 2016, must be read within this caste and gender-aware framework. It cost the exchequer a crucial stream of excise revenue in a fiscally constrained state, but responded directly to grassroots mobilisation by rural women who linked alcohol consumption to domestic violence, indebtedness, and social insecurity.

Yet prohibition also produced contradictions: illicit markets, selective enforcement, and the criminalisation of poor communities involved in brewing or bootlegging. These tensions capture a core feature of Kumar’s legacy — a willingness to pursue ethically motivated, socially anchored policies within the limits of weak state capacity and stagnant employment.

Women’s wave

Bihar under Kumar pioneered schemes such as free bicycles and uniforms for schoolgirls, expanded scholarships, and targeted programmes for Mahadalits and EBCs. These were not just welfare handouts, but attempts to expand capabilities — whether enabling a girl to attend school safely or ensuring a poor family could access basic services without humiliation.

Similarly, Bihar became the first state to reserve 50% of seats for women in panchayats and urban local bodies, later extending 35% reservation to state government jobs. Gender representation became a structural principle of governance, rather than a token gesture. Over time, this institutional groundwork intersected with high male out-migration and the rise of women’s self-help groups, producing a ‘women’s wave’ that decisively shaped electoral outcomes in favour of Nitish Kumar-led coalitions.

Growth without structural transformation

Economically, Bihar saw high headline growth rates and a dramatic expansion of its Budget, yet it remains at the bottom of India’s human development rankings, with low per capita incomes and persistent deficits in health and education. By late 2025, Bihar’s per capita income stood at around ₹70,000 — less than half the national average — and the state continues to rank last in HDI among major states.

Agriculture and allied activities still support most of the population. Roughly 60% depend directly on farming, while nearly 90% of rural residents rely on it as their primary livelihood. Limited industrialisation, low private investment, and chronic joblessness have ensured that migration to metropolitan labour markets remains a defining feature of Bihari life. Kumar’s capability-enhancing policies thus sit atop an economic structure that has not undergone the transformation seen in some other high-growth states.

This is the paradox that his successor will inherit: a state where expectations have been raised by visible improvements in roads, schooling, and welfare delivery, but where structural economic constraints still push millions to seek livelihoods outside its borders.

Caste arithmetic and leader politics

With Kumar’s exit, the state leadership now passes to the BJP, forcing the NDA to confront a difficult question: who can be projected as the new face of Bihar, capable of both holding the ruling coalition together, and speaking across caste divides?

The caste survey underscores the complexity of this task. OBCs and EBCs together constitute about 63% of Bihar’s population, with EBCs at ~36% and OBCs at ~27%. The Scheduled Castes account for 19.65% and Scheduled Tribes 1.68%, while the ‘general’ (upper-caste) category stands at 15.52%. Within the OBC bloc, Yadavs are the largest single group at 14.27%, but the survey also confirms the weight of non-Yadav OBCs such as Kushwahas (4.27%) and Kurmis (2.87%).

Among the non-Yadav OBCs, only the Kushwhaha (Koeri) community crosses the 4% mark, giving it outsized importance in any social coalition that seeks to counterbalance the RJD’s Yadav-centred base. Under successive NDA formations, both Kurmis and Kushwahas have been given significant representation in government. For the BJP, which traditionally commands strong support among upper castes, the challenge is to fit its chief ministerial face into this matrix: to reassure forward-caste voters while not alienating the OBCs/EBCs and Dalit segments that Kumar painstakingly drew into the NDA’s fold.

Beyond numbers, there is an ideological and generational shift at play. Kumar belongs to a cohort shaped by the JP movement and socialist politics of the 1970s, where ideological training, student activism, and social movements provided the grammar of politics. A BJP-appointed successor is likely to be more the product of a nationalised party apparatus than of that earlier ecosystem of intellectual and grassroots mobilisation. This may bring more centralised co-ordination and clearer ideological lines, but it could also narrow the space for the kind of experimental, movement-informed politics that marked key aspects of Kumar’s tenure.

In this sense, the question ‘who will be the next CM?’ quickly morphs into ‘what kind of politics will define Bihar’s next phase?’. Will the state see a leader who simply manages an inherited coalition, or one who can, in their own way, rethink development, social justice, and communal harmony for a new era?

At the heart of this transition lies a fundamental truth about Indian politics, and perhaps more acutely about Bihar: it is not party-centric as much as it is leader-centric. The personality of the leader, their ability to inspire trust, to communicate intent, to embody governance, often outweighs ideological rigidity or party structures. In this context, the legacy of Nitish Kumar looms large. It is against this backdrop that Bihar’s human development story unfolds.

Sanjay Kumar is founder, Deshkal Society, and co-editor, Interrogating Developments: Insights from the Margins. Shruti is an Assistant Professor of English at MRIIRS. X: @Deshkal_Society, @nishishruti

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.