India PM Modi’s coalition sweeps Bihar state election criticised for voter roll purge

NEW DELHI – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s coalition swept to victory in an election for the government of one of India’s largest states, triumphing in a race that was scrutinised over a chaotic overhaul of voter lists.

By the end of vote counting late on Nov 14, Mr Modi’s coalition was on a path to form the government again in Bihar, the country’s most impoverished state and home to over 130 million people.

The coalition had won 202 of the state assembly’s 243 seats, putting it on track to improve its previous standing by nearly 80 seats.

Opposition groups had vehemently protested against a rushed exercise by election officials in the months before the election to clean up Bihar’s voter lists.

More than four million names were dropped in a process marred by confusion and chaos, with opposition leaders claiming the exercise disproportionately affected groups sympathetic to them. Similar exercises are set to be carried out in several other states.

The election commission and Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have rejected the claims, saying the exercise eliminated dead, duplicate and fake voters on the electoral roll.

Both Mr Modi and Mr Nitish Kumar, the long-time chief minister of Bihar from a local party that is allied with the BJP, have built strong support among female voters.

Mr Kumar has introduced scholarships and entrepreneurship funds for women, and his ban on alcohol in the state has been popular among women, who blame the availability of liquor for exacerbating domestic violence.

The female turnout of over 71 per cent was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the male turnout, according to the election commission.

Spokespeople for Mr Modi’s party attributed their coalition’s strong showing to their having built an expanded coalition, and to voters’ trust in Mr Modi’s leadership. They have also credited Mr Kumar’s improvement of law and order in Bihar, a north-eastern state previously marred by gang violence, as well as his programmes that focused on improving the lives of women.

“The people have given us a massive majority after witnessing our track record and our vision to take the state to new heights,” Mr Modi said on social platform X.

Just weeks before the election, the coalition government gave cash handouts of about US$110 (S$143) to millions of women in the state – an amount more than the state’s average per capita monthly income of around US$70. The opposition cried foul, saying state resources gave Mr Modi’s coalition an unfair advantage.

Mr Modi faced a setback in India’s general election in 2024, losing his parliamentary majority for the first time and needing the support of a coalition to return to power. Since then, BJP has focused on shoring up its performance in several state elections, turning around fortunes even in places where polls suggested that voters were unhappy with the incumbent.

The opposition, which had long accused Mr Modi of tilting the playing field in his favour, has begun a concerted campaign against the election commission, saying it is aiding the governing party in “vote theft”.

Mr Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Indian National Congress, has presented detailed accounts that he has said show mass irregularities in several of the local elections.

Mr Gandhi said his coalition lost the state election in Haryana, bordering New Delhi, despite growing grievances against the sitting government.

He flashed the photograph of a young woman on his screen during his presentation, saying that the same picture had appeared in the voting IDs of 22 votes cast across 10 booths, each time with a different name.

“She is a Brazilian model,” he said.

The state’s chief election officer responded to Mr Gandhi in a letter, saying that the voter rolls were prepared in a transparent manner and that he should lodge any complaints officially.

The exercise carried out in Bihar, called the Special Intensive Revision, is meant to clean up the voter lists of precisely such irregularities. It is now under way in nine other states, including three where the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP has struggled to make inroads – West Bengal and the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The voter roll purge in Bihar came a year after a national parliamentary election, in which the state gave over two dozen seats to Mr Modi’s coalition, helping to secure him a third term.

The opposition argued that revising the voter list so drastically and so suddenly now meant one of two things – either that Mr Modi had won those seats based on a questionable electoral roll or that his party was trying to influence the results of the state vote through mass disenfranchisement.

The election commission initially cut off 6.5 million people in a state where the seats in the previous election had been won with slim margins, saying about a third of the voters were dead and that the rest had moved elsewhere or had their names duplicated.

After the opposition sued the election commission, proving that several people who had been declared dead were alive, hundreds of thousands of people were returned to the voter lists. NYTIMES