(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated October 20, 2025)

The timing was telling. For Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar, it was a final flourish of governance before the Model Code of Conduct came into effect. At 10 am on October 6, barely six hours before the Election Commission of India announced the polling schedule for Bihar, Nitish transferred Rs 10,000 each into the accounts of 2.1 million women, taking the total number of beneficiaries of the Mahila Rojgar Yojana to 12.1 million. An hour later, he inaugurated the first phase of the Patna Metro and also took a ride on it, putting Bihar’s capital on the map of Indian cities with metro connectivity. The messaging was unambiguous: he was not just Bihar’s past but its future too.

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A day earlier, Tejashwi Yadav, Nitish’s one-time deputy and now chief rival, was busy wooing Dalits in Patna, promising to hike women’s compensation to Rs 2,500 a month and widen the net of reservations. On October 7, he upped the ante on social media platform X, posting a clip of Nitish greeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi with folded hands, and pointedly asking: “Do these odd gestures make the chief minister seem mentally fit to you?”, alluding to the rumours swirling around Nitish’s health.

The sequences captured the story of Bihar’s politics in miniature: transactional at its core, symbolic in its language, and competitive to the last breath. For Nitish, the long-serving patriarch of the Janata Dal (United), this election doubles as a referendum on two decades of his stewardship; for Rashtriya Janata Dal scion Tejashwi, it’s a generational battle for validation—this duality applies as well to the larger wholes they are part of.

In a polity where assembly contests have long settled into a familiar bipolar face-off between the secular grand alliance of the RJD-Congress-Left and the saffron combine of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)—with the JD(U) now here, now there and smaller partners drifting in and out of the two coalitions—Election 2025 is taking on the shape of a triangular fight. That third arc belongs to election strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, whose Jan Suraaj movement is attempting to rewrite the electoral grammar of Bihar.

The stakes are high for other reasons too.