The November 2025 elections to the Bihar Assembly were the only state elections scheduled for 2025. The elections happened in the shadow of two unprecedented pre-poll interventions by the Indian state. The electoral rolls of Bihar were completely rewritten through a surgical exercise called Special Intensive Revision or SIR. Close to seven million names were deleted at one go and more than two million voters were inducted, effecting major alterations in the electoral roll across the state. And then ten days before the elections were finally announced, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar jointly launched an unprecedented money transfer scheme to deposit Rs. 10,000 in the accounts of some 15 million women. The money transfer in instalments continued through the poll period and 180,000 beneficiary women volunteers were deployed on poll duty.

The outcome of an election held under such extraordinary circumstances has turned out to be equally extraordinary. A government in power for twenty long years has retained office with close to eighty-five percent majority. A chief minister whose health conditions have of late been a matter of growing public concern and whose popularity rating stood at a distant number two or even number three in the opinion poll tracker for the entire year, has now been sworn in for the tenth time. With the BJP taking away the home ministry portfolio from the Chief Minister to assign it to Samrat Choudhary, one of the two deputy chief ministers, both belonging to the BJP, it is however abundantly clear that more than ever before the government in Bihar will now work under the BJP's control.

In its bid to retain power the BJP has of course made a whole host of promises to the people of Bihar. From one crore jobs and employment opportunities and one crore lakhpati didis (women with an annual income of more than Rs. 100,000) to one factory in every district and ten industrial parks and 100 MSME parks across the state, the NDA manifesto is replete with ambitious promises for all sections of the people. Amit Shah also promised to make Bihar flood-free and give two lakh rupees to each woman who got 10,000 rupees under the Mahila Rozgar Yojana. While these promises are likely to be forgotten quickly as jumlas, the signal given by awarding the Pirpainti power project to the Adani group through a lucrative deal that has been dubbed a Rs. 62,000 crore scam by a former energy minister of the Modi regime and the BJP's declared desperation to implement the Bulldozer Raj model of UP in Bihar should perhaps be taken far more seriously. 

For the Modi government and the RSS, currently celebrating its centenary, the Bihar victory of course marks a moment meant to be seized and used to advance the Sangh brigade's fascist agenda across the country and especially in the states that are going to the polls next - Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The SIR is already underway in twelve states with its characteristic haste and arbitrariness. Disturbing reports of deaths of BLOs under the pressure of SIR targets are being received from several states from West Bengal to Rajasthan and from Gujarat to Kerala. Far from holding the ECI accountable for its dubious role in subverting India's electoral system, a public statement has been issued in the name of 272 retired bureaucrats, judges and military officials, all aligned with the BJP, condemning Rahul Gandhi for questioning the ECI.

While celebrating the Bihar landslide, Narendra Modi made it clear that his expedition is now all set to enter West Bengal exactly as the river Ganga, his favourite metaphor for his political trajectory since his 2014 arrival in Varanasi, flows from Bihar into West Bengal. Unmitigated centralisation of power around one party and unregulated concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands are the twin props that define the Modi era. The Supreme Court order that had stopped Governors from making a mockery of federal distribution of powers by fixing a time frame for clearing bills passed by state governments has now been overturned. Trade union rights protected by existing labour laws are now being summarily replaced by four new codes of slavery that give a free hand to the corporate policy of hire and fire. 

And to clear the entire tribal belt of Central India for unregulated corporate plunder, adivasi fighters are being systematically exterminated to crush the adivasi claim for constitutional rights. Even as BJP leaders got a video message from Madvi Pojje, mother of young adivasi Maoist leader Madvi Hidma asking her son to come home, Hidma and his comrades were killed in a fake encounter on 18 November. Ironically, the killing happened hours after the 150th birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, in a district named after Alluri Sitarama Raju, another iconic anti-colonial hero who was executed by the British colonial rulers hundred years ago on 7 May 1924. 

Emboldened by two successive electoral landslides, Maharashtra in November 2024 and Bihar in November 2025, the Modi government and the RSS will now be in a hurry to seal their century-long wait to redefine and redesign India according to their ideology. This November 26 when we observe the 76th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of India and the fifth anniversary of the historic farmers' movement and the worker-peasant mass strike that forced the Modi government to repeal the farm laws of corporate takeover a year later, we must accept the challenge posed by the heightened fascist aggression with all our might.