Let us begin with a thought experiment. Imagine an election in a democratic polity notorious for being amongst the least developed places in the world. A place where educated youth have no hope of decent jobs, the elderly have no access to reliable healthcare, a place where social and economic inequalities run unchecked, and a deeply corrupt, indifferent police-bureaucratic apparatus governs daily life. Now imagine that in this polity an incumbent who has effectively ruled for two decades contests the election on the minimalist promise that the alternative would be worse, alongside a sweetener of modest cash transfers on the eve of elections—and then wins with a four-fifths majority. How would you characterise such a democratic polity?

We refer, of course, to Nitish Kumar’s Bihar, where the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has stormed back to power with 202 of 243 seats and a vote share of over 46 per cent—nearly a 10-point lead over the rival Mahagathbandhan (MGB) coalition. The term for such a polity would be a “managed democracy”. By this we mean far more than the management or manipulation of democratic institutions. We also mean the management of popular expectations: what citizens feel they can reasonably demand and reliably receive under a democracy.

These two pillars work to reinforce one another: managed institutions breed cynicism and despair, which lower citizens’ expectations, and those managed expectations in turn shield institutions from any collective action that might disrupt the status quo.

Let us not spill much ink on the first pillar of managed institutions. The co-option of the mass media and Election Commission to tilt the electoral field in favour of the ruling NDA is hardly a secret any more. Furthermore, as an explanation, the “rigged election” narrative is both limited and limiting. It is limited because this explanation can only explain the scale of the NDA victory. Most observers who covered the election agreed that the incumbent held a tangible edge throughout the campaign. It is limiting because, like the opium of a jaded civil society, it dulls critical imagination and inhibits the striving for genuine alternatives.

The management of popular expectations

The question we address here is the management of popular expectations. In his book Crises of Democracy (2019), Adam Przeworski, perhaps the leading contemporary theorist of democracy, underlines a crucial distinction between elite and popular understandings of democracy. “While elites see democracy in institutional terms, several surveys indicate that mass publics often conceive of it in terms of… social and economic equality,” Przeworski writes.

This is not a new finding. Writing nearly two centuries ago in his masterpiece Democracy in America, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “democratic peoples’… passion for equality is ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible.” This popular democratic passion is the beating heart of a healthy, functioning democracy. And if this heart is clogged, we must examine not only the venality of the ruling regime but also the failures of opposition parties to act as vessels for popular aspirations.

Democracy, as the name suggests, means the rule of the demos. This is the idea of popular sovereignty. It means the people collectively determine the direction of the political community and, through their representatives, the structuring principles of their social and economic relationships.

Does the vast majority of the population of Bihar exert any degree of control over the “ownership and control of the material resources of the community” to ensure that they are “so distributed as best to subserve the common good”, as the constitutional directive mandates? Do they get to determine any aspect of their collective lives in the police-babu raj of Bihar? Do the working classes have any substantial say over the terms of their working conditions in a State of rampant landlessness, out-migration, debt traps, and contract labour? Do women have the capability to decide whom to love or marry or how to access public space? Do marginalised castes and Dalits possess the autonomy to decide how they earn their livelihoods or where they want to live?

The answer to all these questions is no. The reason is the near absolute depoliticisation of the public sphere. And this depoliticisation is kept in place by the ideological vacuity of the opposition, which allows the incumbent to conveniently reduce democracy to the “election season”.

These opposition parties—principally the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress—have failed to mobilise a progressive coalition because they possess no organisational ideology designed to mobilise progressive constituencies. By organisational ideology, we mean a coherent set of ideas aimed at transforming society that is embedded within an organisation, which is the apparatus that enacts the ideology through rolling political struggles. What passes for ideology here is free-floating political rhetoric belted from loudspeakers to ferment campaign sentiment around a plebiscitary supremo.

Since the radical force behind the idea of democracy is easy to forget, let us quote Tocqueville again, who eloquently captures the revolutionary spirit of mid-19th century American democracy: “But the scene is now changed, and gradually the two ranks mingle; the divisions which once severed mankind are lowered, property is divided, power is held in common, the light of intelligence spreads, and the capacities of all classes are equally cultivated; the State becomes democratic, and the empire of democracy is slowly and peaceably introduced into the institutions and the manners of the nation.”

How can Indian democracy recover this revolutionary spirit?

It is easy and somewhat trivial to blame “people” for the declining state of democracy. Sure, people are far from perfect. As Super Hans says in the British comedy series Peep Show, “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people, Jez.” Yet it is important to remember that in large democracies, “people” only “speak” and “act” through the medium of political parties. Thus, the decisive role in any democracy is played by political parties, who perform the critical creative function of articulating demands and mobilising constituencies. The quality of parties is the closest proxy for the quality of democracy.

Bihar can only democratise its politics by first democratising its political parties. At present, the State’s major parties operate on a supremo-command model. The political identity of each party is collapsed into the personal brand of its leader, who centralises authority within a tight inner circle and monopolises all significant organisational decisions. This structure defines Tejashwi Yadav’s RJD just as much as it shapes Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)).

Even the Congress, a party that has operated in the State for over a century, was reduced to the handmaiden of a viceroy-like figure in Krishna Allavuru—a technocrat manager wielding authority in the name of Rahul Gandhi. Allavuru spent the election trying to craft a distinct organisational identity not through positive mobilisation but by undermining the RJD via proxies such as Pappu Yadav, the Vikassheel Insaan Party and the Indian Inclusive Party.

Having been in the glare of continuous media scrutiny for several decades, parties such as the RJD and JD(U) have shed whatever mythic aura once surrounded them as protectors of the underprivileged. What remains visible today is their raw organisational reality: vehicles for groups of office-seeking political entrepreneurs, stitched together by the familiar triad of money, muscle and caste.

Many of the candidates these parties field come from the same pool of criminal–contractor or business backgrounds, men whose economic clout provides the capital needed to enter politics, and vice versa. Carl Schmitt memorably defined the concept of the “political” as the antagonism between friends and enemies raised to the “utmost degree of intensity”, by which he meant the willingness to fight and die together. Here, legislators switch parties with the consummate ease of a GenZ professional flipping through gigs. When partisan loyalty becomes so contingent on personal rewards, the core element of “political” has been all but drained out of political parties.

As Gilles Verniers and colleagues showed for the 2020 elections, one-third of Bihar’s MLAs identified as businessmen, and another fifth listed politics as their primary occupation. Politicians from liberal professions—lawyers, teachers, social activists—have become an endangered category.

Similarly, data from the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) underlines this pattern of cross-party elite retrenchment. Between 2005 and 2020, RJD legislators declared average assets of Rs.2.14 crore, in the same ballpark as those of JD(U), BJP, and Congress MLAs.

Trust deficit

The ideological vacuity reflected by this indistinguishable class of political elites inevitably gave way to public disillusionment. A 2018 Centre for the Study of Developing Societies study on institutional trust found that political parties were the least trusted institution in Bihar, mirroring national trends. Trust was measured using net effective trust (trust minus distrust), and political parties scored a staggering 0 per cent.

In contrast, High Courts had a net effective trust of 46 per cent, the Chief Minister’s office 43 per cent, and even the District Collector—arguably the least democratically accountable institution in the system—stood at 48 per cent. In a healthy democracy, one would expect these figures to be inverse.

Parties in Bihar cannot rebuild public trust—or reinvigorate the radical possibilities of democracy—so long as they remain closed, personalistic machines dominated by wealthy political entrepreneurs. In the words of the political economist Philip Keefer, such organisations simply cannot make credible programmatic commitments.

Sure, these parties can make all sorts of ambitious promises before elections, as the MGB did throughout the campaign. Tejashwi Yadav promised women bigger cash transfers and EBCs access to better opportunities. They promised young voters millions of jobs (one government job per household). But what made these promises credible?

Leave aside the absence of a clearly sketched-out plan. More importantly, note that the RJD had not made any prior organisational investment to develop long-term relationships with groups like EBCs and women—listening to them, taking up their issues, or staying connected to these constituencies even when elections were far away.

As Lalu Yadav himself could have reminded them, long-running social struggles—such as over reservations—often have less to do with the immediate object of demand and far more to do with the slow, patient work of constituency-building through mobilisation. Furthermore, the party showed no inclination to cultivate a new generation of leaders from these constituencies—figures who could serve as credible guarantors of their interests and push their agenda within government. Instead, the RJD remained a Yadav-dominated supremo party, tightly controlled by Tejashwi and his inner circle.

Hissedari inverted

Similarly, Rahul Gandhi positioned himself as the custodian of caste-based equity, championing the principle of proportional resource distribution—“Jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, unki utni hissedari.” Yet in the party’s ticket distribution for Bihar, this principle was inverted.

Upper castes, only 10 per cent of the population, claimed around 34 per cent of party tickets. Meanwhile, extremely backward castes, who comprise 36 per cent of the population, received just 10 per cent. Remarkably, Bhumihars, less than 3 per cent of the population, got the same representation as the EBCs. For the Congress, hissedari in representation is still determined less by demographic weight than by land, money and local influence.

In contrast, Nitish Kumar has spent two decades cultivating a durable, trust-based relationship with his core constituencies—especially EBCs and women—through a blend of symbolic recognition and substantive delivery that has accumulated into a deep reservoir of credibility. His final burst of cash transfers arrived on the back of a long governance record: cycles for schoolgirls, 50 per cent reservation for women mukhias, prohibition, and the systematic institutionalisation of EBCs as a recognised and politically salient category.

Against this backdrop, the MGB’s belief that it could overturn years of accumulated trust with a few campaign sops—bigger cash promises or a last-minute “unprecedented” EBC manifesto—was clearly misplaced.

The phenomenon of managed democracy is not an altogether new experience for Bihar, or for India. After all, the management of democracy was par for the course in the Congress system, which, save a few breaks, ruled the State for more than four decades before Lalu Yadav’s partial revolution.

We can produce here an extended quote on the Congress’ political machine in Bihar from Jeffrey Witsoe’s excellent study of the State: Democracy against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India (2013):

“Electoral practice was likewise largely articulated around the caste ‘communities’ that emerged in the late colonial period, with politicians claiming to be ‘representatives’ of their communities, while at the village level the delivery of votes played out according to long-standing patronage relationships dictated by landed groups and, if necessary, through the exercise of coercion and force. Even the Congress Party at the State level served as a nexus between landowning elites, politicians and bureaucrats, all of whom came largely from upper-caste backgrounds, serving to perpetuate a broad-based upper-caste hegemony despite the national leadership’s radical rhetoric.”

The difference between Nitish Kumar’s Bihar and, say, Shri Krishna Sinha’s Bihar is not the presence of political management but the transformation of its instruments. The older forms of coercion once centred on dominant landowners; today they have diffused into a criminal-politician nexus. The State’s intermediaries now include the lakhs of Jeevika didis who channel patronage through sprawling SHG networks. The elite network has widened both caste-wise—drawing in upwardly mobile groups such as Yadavs and Kurmis—and occupationally, with a new class of contractors and “tough” businessmen whose survival hinges on political proximity in a landscape marked by weak rule of law.

The lower-caste assertion in the form of Janata Dal (later RJD) dismantled the previous avatar of “managed democracy” through, in the words of Witsoe, protracted “counter-hegemonic movements” which “interpreted democracy to mean rule by the lower-caste majority.” Yet, their limitation was their pursuit of a “one-pointed programme focussed on capturing state power” by blunt organisational methods if needed. Perhaps a historically necessary insurgent stage, but one which must now be transcended towards a broader political struggle of “izzat” and “haq” that includes the class and gender question at the forefront.

By contrast, today’s slide into bloodless, administrative politics—promising IT parks one day and doubled cash transfers the next—represents not evolution but stagnation: a form of transcendence that leads only into a dead end. Our thought experiment, then, is no mere abstraction. It is the lived reality of Bihar’s managed democracy, where lowered expectations have become the very condition of electoral success.

[Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi. Courtesy: Frontline magazine, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.]