Caste

Bihar goes the governance way, thrashing the RJD and the Congress

For around 2 decades now, Bihar has seemed as the basket case of India, with a low level of development, a crisis of governance, a crippled law and order situation, and the lack of political will to make changes. When Laloo Prasad Yadav came to power, he was like an emergence of the downtrodden castes (although the Yadav community is not really downtrodden), combined with the unflinching support of the Muslim community. This was enough to keep him in power for 15 years, but the incentive to improve things for his population was not really there. At the same time, India as a whole was developing fast, which made the no development stage of Bihar seem even worse.
It was at this stage, in 2005, that Nitish Kumar (in collaboration with the BJP, an ally for many years) came to power for the first time. It is now pretty well acknowledged, that even though Bihar still falls in the lowest section of states in India in terms of many indices of development, the rate of development of Bihar has propelled it one of the highest rates of development in the country. While previously, law and order and infrastructure was a huge issue, there is a huge perception of improvement of the law and order situation, as well as the environment that promotes the development of enterprises. It is this perception that makes people hopeful, gives them a sense of optimism, and which was something that Nitish Kumar was depending upon. The feeling that Nitish Kumar would be banking on would be the grand social coalition that he had built up (through some interesting feats of social engineering, providing incentives to many groups including to women in a big way) along with the promise of an improved law and order situation and development.
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Caste in census: Quick to act, and then slowly starting to realize the full impact of this on their own political future

Caste politics have been taking a major move up in the last few years, with more movements towards caste based reservations (such as adding caste based reservations in educational colleges and the push to add caste based reservations in private colleges and in private companies). As a part of this, it is also politically difficult for any current party to make any kind of opposition to caste based demands or such politics. After all, for parties such as the Congress and the BJP, it is very hard for them to accept caste based politics since they look at getting votes across castes and groups (which is slightly different from the caste based groups which are based on getting acceptance from certain caste groups and increasing the caste based politics); the Congress and BJP cannot easily fight such battles, all the more so since they are national parties and any projection with caste based groups in one state can be taken negatively in another state.
The Supreme Court has set a cap on the total amount of reservations, with a total of 50% reservations allowed. This is a limit that caste based parties are not very happy about, with the their projection being that the total number of downtrodden would be much more than 50% of India’s population. However, since the last caste based census was in the census of 1931, there are no accurate figures, and over the years, the Governments have moved away from doing caste based census since that seems like a very regressive measure, given that the aim of the Government is to move away from caste based development, and the development of a casteless society.
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