7.12.15

BJP Analysis: 10 Reasons Why It Lost in Bihar

Manish Kumar / ndtv
Post-election analysis shows, say BJP leaders that the Grand Alliance of Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav and the Congress mapped social and caste factors more effectively in their selection of candidates for the 243 assembly seats in Bihar. The BJP tied up with regional players with backward caste support like Jitan Ram Manjhi to supplement its traditional upper caste vote-base, but polled 10 lakh fewer votes than last time.

While the Grand Alliance, as expected, consolidated the Yadav, Muslim and Kurmi votes with the coming together of Lalu and Nitish, the BJP was surprised that its regional partners Hindustani Awam Morcha, Lok Janshakti Party and Rashtriya Lok Samta Party could not manage to hold their respective traditional vote bases among the backward castes, who had voted for the NDA en mass only last year in the national election. more

Failing to read Bihar

Jyoti Punwani / Hoot
Despite a feast of rich reportage and comment in the English press, what remained in mind was that Lalu was bad, Nitish was good but doomed, and the BJP had the perfect combination of caste and vikas. Some doubts began to be raised in this narrative after voting began, but not enough. The results were therefore a complete surprise to readers. more

26.11.15

Bihar spooks brewers with alcohol ban talk

Bihar sent shares in breweries and liquor firms down as much as 10 percent on Thursday after the country's third-most populous state said it was considering a ban on alcohol, prompting concerns that others could follow.

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Alcohol has been traditionally frowned upon in India for religious and cultural reasons, but a growing middle class has made the country a booming market for drinks makers, and only a handful of districts and states have an outright ban, including Gujarat, Modi's home state. The southern state of Kerala is introducing limits on alcohol sales.

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"More than the obvious financial impact, this is a directional negative if rest of the state governments emulate Bihar and Kerala, in our view," analysts at brokerage house Motilal Oswal said. more

Nitish will have problems enforcing the ban

Pyaralal Raghavan / ToI
Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has made a bold move by announcing a ban on liquor in the state from April next year to fulfil the promise made to the electorate before the elections. This is a major reversal of the liquor policy that his government had implemented in the earlier years which saw a substantial expansion of liquor shops.

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The major challenge before the Bihar chief minister is not the loss of revenue from the liquor ban but the problems associated with enforcing the ban. Given the popularity that liquor has gained in recent years it would be difficult to wean away the habitual drinkers without accompanying efforts to spread the message of temperance through social and religious organisations. This is all the more so because the law and order machinery in Bihar is far too inadequate to police the state and restrain any growth in production and sale of illicit liquor which is bound to happen as soon as the ban sets in.

Most recent numbers on the availability of police personal in the states for 2012 show that there were only 67 policemen for every lakh people in Bihar which is clearly insufficient given that other states like Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand had a much higher ratio of 162, 174 and 178 respectively. The ratio of policemen to population even in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal were at a higher 89 and 98 respectively.

So the big question now is how the Bihar chief minister can implement the liquor ban given the insufficient law and order machinery and the rickety bureaucracy in the state even if he manages to find tap new resources to make for the loss of excise duty revenues from liquor which is only a minor part of his total revenues. more

14.11.15

Egg on NDTV's face

Nalin Mehta / ET
For calling the election wrong, NDTV, a pioneer in India's psephological and election result coverage, the channel has already apologised. It is a cruel reminder of how fickle a mistress live TV can be even though NDTV was right that pollsters all over the world sometimes get it wrong. 

As they did in Britain where the British Polling Council ordered an independent enquiry into how no poll could predict David Cameron's victory earlier this year. Or how no Israeli poll predicted Benjamin Netanyahu's latest poll victory. Or how the Greeks and Turks recently got their election 'results' wrong as well. 

But NDTV's big blooper was not that their exit poll was wrong. It was that it called the counting trend wrong. The channel blames "incorrect" data. The News Broadcast Standards Authority has reportedly Nielsen, the agency that supplies a common feed to all subscriber news channels, for an explanation. The fact is that whatever the data may have been, calling the election so early in the morning, when only postal ballots are counted first, is inexplicable. more

Bihar: what happened and why

Surjit S Bhalla / IE
The next time BJP officials say they lost big just because of electoral arithmetic, tell them that argument has as much credibility as the discredited notion of the BJP losing because of caste-based voting. The BJP lost big because of their divisive campaign, whose purpose was to instil fear among those not preordained to vote for them. It was a lousy political campaign and the BJP, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah ignore this reality at their present (and future) peril. more

The anguish and anxiety of the Upper Caste

Ajaz Ashraf / scroll
The one untold story of the Bihar election is that the anguish arising from nostalgia for the past and the anxieties about the future drive the Upper Caste to rally behind the Bharatiya Janata Party. Lacking the numbers to counter the assertion of Other Backward Classes and still perceived as exploiters to have lower castes band with them, the Upper Caste is unmindful of electoral strategies such as religious polarisation, hate rhetoric and fictionalisation of history to stoke caste pride (claiming that emperor Ashoka was a Kushwaha is an example) for creating a governing majority for themselves. more