The Bihar elections of 2025 starkly underscore the critical distortion in India’s democratic process where election victories are increasingly secured less by visionary development agendas and more by the strategic distribution of welfare dole outs, especially immediately before elections. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) victory, hinged substantially on direct cash transfers to voters, particularly women, blatantly prioritizes ephemeral vote-bank politics over sustainable growth agendas essential for Bihar’s long-term upliftment.

Welfare Dole Outs Trump Development Agenda

The NDA’s electoral strategy effectively leveraged welfare schemes like the ₹10,000 Jeevika scheme for women, unemployment benefits, gadgets for educators, and pensions for the elderly, delivered just before voting. This immediate financial gratification eclipsed the far more critical issues like education reform, healthcare access, employment creation, industrial development, and infrastructure—areas where Bihar desperately needs progress. Instead of committing to transformative development, the ruling coalition resorted to populist cash handouts that nurture dependency rather than empowerment. Such welfare populism reduces democracy to transactional politics, where votes are bought with short-term goodies rather than won through a commitment to governance and systemic reform.​

The Voter Impact and Election Dynamics

This welfare-first approach deeply resonated with economically vulnerable voters and women, drastically increasing turnout and loyalty in NDA strongholds. The extensive voter mobilization, including over 14 lakh new young voters and a widened caste coalition emphasizing EBCs and women, played a pivotal role. Unfortunately, the opposition with a development-oriented manifesto failed to translate intent into votes; its late, incoherent campaigning, internal conflicts, and failure to offer tangible welfare benefits led to its spectacular defeat with many good-intentioned parties unable to secure seats.​

Politicization of Development vs Welfare

The critique here is the perverse shift in political priorities: electoral success is now measured by dole outs, while substantive investment in sectors like education, healthcare, and employment stagnates. This short-term view sabotages long-term state-building and entrenches a welfare trap. Bihar risks perpetuating a cycle of dependency, stunting growth by diverting resources from essential infrastructural and industrial development to immediate vote-buying schemes.​

Here is a great example of the manipulative mindset – RAILWAY SPECIALS for voting

Special trains were run by the Railways to bring Bihar residents from various states back to Bihar to vote in the 2025 elections. Reports confirm that around 2000 special trains from across the country, including at least four special trains from Haryana carried thousands of migrant voters to Bihar before polling.

BJP leaders and workers were actively involved in facilitating this travel by setting up help desks, buying bulk tickets, and organizing travel logistics. However, there was significant controversy and criticism because there were no corresponding special trains arranged by Railways or political parties to take these migrant voters back to their workplaces after the elections.

This selective arrangement—providing transportation to voters only to bring them to polling stations but not to return them—shows a focused, politically motivated effort to boost voter turnout for the NDA in Bihar from migrant voters. It reflects a deliberate electoral manipulation tactic exploiting the transient migrant population by artificially increasing their presence during voting while ignoring their post-election return needs. This logistical bias highlights a transactional approach to elections, viewing voters as movable assets temporarily transported to secure votes rather than permanent constituents with continual rights and welfare needs.

In the larger context of electoral manipulation, this exposes multiple troubling trends:

• The use of public resources like Railways selectively for electoral gains instead of equitable public service.
• Engineering voter presence strategically at the time of elections while neglecting the sustainability of migrant workers’ livelihoods and journeys.
• Institutional bias towards the ruling coalition through state machinery facilitation.
• The erosion of democratic principles where electoral contests are shifted from policies and development discourse to tactical voter mobilization and resource control.

This practice deepens the commodification of votes and undermines the democratic ethos that should respect voters’ ongoing social and economic realities beyond just polling day. It also places migrant workers in a vulnerable position, treated as temporary political instruments without addressing their broader socio-economic conditions.

This selective facilitation of train travel for migrant voters to reach Bihar, without ensuring their safe and convenient return, strongly suggests electoral engineering aimed at maximizing poll advantage rather than servant leadership or comprehensive welfare.

Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and Electoral Impact

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls conducted before the elections had a complex but critical influence. By rigorously purging duplicate and bogus voters and updating rolls, the SIR upheld proper electoral integrity. However, it also potentially disenfranchised some voters amid the politically charged atmosphere, creating mistrust and allegations of manipulation. The timing and methodology of the SIR shaped voter lists profoundly and could have subtly impacted voter demographics and turnout patterns favoring well-organized coalitions like the NDA.​

Summary Critique

The Bihar election results reveal a democracy progressively eclipsed by mechanized electoral engineering—where welfare dole outs displace development agendas, and voter lists are intensely managed to advantage dominant coalitions. Such practices may deliver short-term political stability but do so at the cost of democratic depth and sustainable socio-economic progress. Reforming election conduct to prioritize meaningful developmental discourse and safeguarding electoral participation inclusively without disenfranchisement is imperative for Bihar and Indian democracy’s future.

This hard-hitting critique insists on a political culture where election victories stem from investing in society’s foundational pillars rather than superficial vote-bank strategies or administrative maneuvers like SIR. Only then can Bihar or any state for that matter can transcend its historic challenges towards genuine, inclusive development.