Early on Wednesday, the NDA emerged with an absolute majority in the Bihar Assembly, with the Mahagatbandhan trailing with 110 seats. In a closely contested election that saw counting continue stretching over 19 hours and wrapping up only in the early hours on Wednesday, the RJD emerged as the single largest party in the 243-member Bihar legislative assembly.
The BJP too gave a stellar performance, outshining the allied JD(U) to bag 72 seats. The first mass election in the country amidst conditions created by COVID-19, the results have also paved the way for the return of Chief Minister Kumar for the fourth successive term in office. The JD(U) incidentally bagged bagged 42 seats. Four seats went into the accounts of the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) and 4 to Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular).
While the NDA has won Bihar, the largest vote share and seats lie with the RJD. But while the BJP has improved greatly on their 2015 Assembly poll seat count, the RJD fell slightly short of their earlier numbers. In the 2020 polls, the vote share of the RJD was recorded at 23.03%, the highest for any single party in the elections. This was followed by the BJP with 19.5% and the JDU and Congress got vote shares of 15.4% and 9.5% respectively.
In the 2015 Assembly polls, RJD with 80 seats had emerged as the single largest party in the elections, followed by JD-U (71). BJP was reduced to 53 seats and got the largest vote share (24.42%).
While recent polls have underlined that the state election is not always a metric for how a national level poll will go, it is nonetheless interesting to note how the NDA had fared over the course of the last few elections. While the overall vote share of the NDA had stood at 53.25% during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it won 39 of the 40 seats the alliance contested.
Breaking down the numbers further we see that the BJP at 23.58% had had the hightest vote share amid the major parties in the state. Fellow NDA ally JD(U) too scored highly, garnering 21.81% of the vote share.
At the time, the LJP had contested as a member of the NDA and had garnered 7.86% of the votes and six seats. This time however the LJP managed to net only a single seat in the Bihar Assembly polls, despite contesting nearly 150 seats.
The publishers permit sharing of the paper's PDF on WhatsApp and other social media platforms.)