Bihar 2025: a landslide for the NDA after a contested roll revision

Bihar voted in two phases in November 2025 for all 243 seats in its Legislative Assembly, and counting took place on 14 November 2025. The election was the first Assembly election in the country to be held after a Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, which had been ordered in Bihar in June 2025 and had become a major political controversy. The opposition argued that the revision risked excluding eligible voters, while the Election Commission maintained that it was necessary to clean rolls of dead, shifted, and duplicate entries.

The result was a landslide for the ruling National Democratic Alliance, which won 202 seats in the 243-member House, well above the majority mark of 122. The Bharatiya Janata Party emerged as the single largest party with 89 seats, followed by the Janata Dal (United) with 85 seats and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) with 19 seats. The opposition Mahagathbandhan won 35 seats in total, with the Rashtriya Janata Dal winning 25 and the Congress six.

The scale of the victory surprised many observers, not only because of its size, but because the Janata Dal (United), which had won only 43 seats in 2020, nearly doubled its tally to 85, while the Rashtriya Janata Dal fell from 75 seats in 2020 to 25. The new entrant Jan Suraaj, led by Prashant Kishor, failed to win a seat. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, whose party had been written off by some commentators before polling, remained at the centre of Bihar politics after the result.

Turnout was also notable. Bihar recorded an overall turnout of 66.91 per cent, reported as the highest in 74 years, with women outvoting men in both phases. That figure complicates any simple story about the election: a high turnout, a contested roll revision, and a landslide for the incumbent alliance all occurred in the same election, and different observers drew different conclusions from that combination.

The opposition, including Congress leader Udit Raj, attributed its defeat in part to the Special Intensive Revision and to the Election Commission, while the ruling alliance presented the result as an endorsement of its governance and welfare delivery. For civil studies readers, Bihar 2025 is a case in which the same result can support competing explanations, and in which the evidence for each explanation must be examined separately from the result itself.