Bihar polls will test Brand Modi

Roughly 32,000 new voters enrolled in each constituency for this year's Assembly election in Bihar may play a decisive role in determining the ultimate poll result. The presence of these new voters becomes important in the light of the fact that during the last two assembly elections in the state, the victory margins of many of the winning candidates ranged between 12,000 and 13,000 votes.

But there are plenty of ifs and buts before the State goes to polls. The electoral behaviour of the Hindi-speaking States in the Indo-Gangetic plain is always influenced by caste factors and here, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav, one of the principal players of caste-based politics in India, have stolen a march by stitching up an alliance and announcing their respective share of seats.

There is reason for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to feel a bit rattled as it cannot field an equally powerful counter-combination of castes and, therefore, has fallen back on its slogan of "development" as can be understood from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement of a grant of Rs.1.25 lakh crore for Bihar.

But this slogan of "development", together with a sense of "national perspective", as described by the BJP, had enabled the constituents of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) it leads to capture 31 seats out of 40 in Bihar during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The NDA's combined vote-share was 38.8 percent while the BJP's individual share in this stood at 29.86 percent.

However, the vote share of the opposition parties consisting of the Janata Dal-United (JD-U), the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) combined was much more than that of the NDA. This is the source of worry for the BJP. The BJP's traditional vote-base consists of the Brahmins and the baniyas. Party veteran L.K. Advani first tried to broadbase it by his concept of a broader Hindutva.

The BJP could successfully romp home in the last Lok Sabha elections in spite of its divorce from Nitish Kumar, who represented the other backward class (OBC) interests. This was because a significant number of OBC votes and even a slight amount of Muslim votes had swung towards the BJP. But this is unlikely to happen now.

By AMITAVA MUKHERJEE