The Dye Was Always Caste In Bihar

The sun had begun to sink over the paddy fields spread throughout Samastipur district. Just a few hours earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had flown out of Karpoorigram, the birthplace of Karpoori Thakur, one of Bihar’s most prominent backward-caste leaders, who also hails from Samastipur. The dust from the chopper’s landing still hung in the air as Ram Nath Thakur, Karpoori’s septuagenarian son and a minister in Modi’s cabinet, spoke with calm conviction, dressed in a white dhoti-kurta.

“Not at all,” he insisted when asked if the Prime Minister’s visit was aimed at consolidating Other Backward Caste (OBC) votes. “Karpoori Thakur fought against injustice. This has nothing to do with caste.”

His answer appears to have leapt straight out of the modern political playbook: deny any relation to caste even though it is caste that defines the ground beneath one’s feet. Across the road, a freshly painted sign reads ‘Singh Niwas’, the home of a Bhumihar family, the local upper-caste majority.

Later, in nearby Tajpur, Sanjay Nayak, a backward-caste activist, bristled at the same question. “Those who now seek to claim Karpoori Thakur’s legacy,” he said, “were the same who insulted him when he was alive.” He recalled hearing slurs hurled at the barber-turned-Chief Minister of Bihar, along with chants mocking his caste and his 1978 reservation policy that gave 26 per cent of government jobs to backward classes.

“Modi came to Karpoorigram to woo the backward caste. But everyone here remembers the (derogatory) slogans Bhumihars would raise against Jan Nayak Karpoori ji,” Nayak said.

Roots Beneath the Soil

What Modi was invoking at Karpoorigram had roots far older than Lalu’s Mandal-era politics, stretching deep into the early twentieth century. Contrary to popular belief, caste politics in Bihar did not begin with Lalu Prasad Yadav. Its origins go further back to the 1920s, when land, labour and ritual intersected. Rakesh Ankit’s paper Caste Politics in Bihar: In Historical Continuum traces one of the earliest sparks—the janeu (sacred thread) movement, a lower-caste assertion against upper-caste Brahmins who monopolised sacred status through the thread ceremony. Both violent and non-violent confrontations broke out between Yadav, Kurmi and Koeri peasants and their upper-caste landlords during the agitation. In Lakhisarai, more than 80 people died in one such clash.

Alongside, the Momin movement emerged among backward Muslims, challenging the dominance of Syeds, Sheikhs and Pathans.

The Birth of Backward Consciousness

Out of these confrontations emerged something new: a vocabulary of dignity and self-worth among the lower castes. The Yadavs, cattle herders and milkmen, along with the Kurmis and Koeris, rich cultivating castes, began to see themselves as rightful stakeholders in the region’s economy and politics. Nitish Kumar, decades later, would emerge from the Kurmi lineage. The social ferment of the 1920s produced the Triveni Sangh, an alliance of Yadavs, Kurmis and Koeris. It was perhaps Bihar’s first experiment in backward-class solidarity, a proto-party that challenged the Congress’s upper-caste leadership. For decades, power in Bihar remained concentrated in the hands of Brahmins, Rajputs, Bhumihars and Kayasthas. Between 1952 and 1962, they held over 40 per cent of the Congress’ legislative seats. Not a single lower-caste member sat on the Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee between 1934 and 1946. Caste was not just social order; it was political exclusion embedded in governance.

Then came Ram Manohar Lohia, whose wave of ‘New Socialism’ replaced Marxist class struggle with a uniquely Indian fight against caste hierarchy. His slogan—‘Pichhda pave sau mein saath’ (Sixty out of a hundred benefits to the backward)—electrified rural Bihar. Karpoori Thakur, the socialist, carried Lohia’s torch into the heart of the state’s power structure.

Karpoori’s Revolution and the Backlash

By the 1970s, the ideological fire lit by Lohia found its most forceful expression in Karpoori Thakur. When Karpoori Thakur became Chief Minister in 1978, he implemented a 25 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes in government jobs and ordered panchayat elections to break upper-caste monopolies in local bodies. It was a revolutionary act and an unforgivable one for the entrenched elite.

By 1979, his government had fallen. Ram Sunder Das replaced him, filling the cabinet with more than half upper-caste ministers. The Congress governments that followed in the 1980s installed a series of upper-caste chief ministers, including three Brahmins and two Rajputs.

The fuse Thakur lit could not be extinguished. By the early 1990s, backward empowerment was no longer a slogan but the central political question in Bihar.

The 1980s were turbulent. Political violence rose from 260 incidents in 1977 to 617 in 1984. The 1985 election alone saw nearly a hundred people killed. Bihar’s countryside turned into a battleground for caste militias such as Lorik Sena (Bhumihars), Kunwar Sena (Rajputs), Lal Sena (landless labourers) and, later, the Ranveer Sena. Amid this chaos, Jayaprakash Narayan’s 1974 movement had already sown the seeds of a new generation of leaders, including Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar and others who would dominate the 1990s.

The Mandal Earthquake

Out of this turbulence came the next great rupture, the Mandal moment. The Mandal Commission transformed Bihar’s power structure. Backward castes, armed with the legitimacy of reservation, asserted political dominance. New parties such as the Janata Dal, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Samata Party and the Lok Jan Shakti Party emerged as vehicles of that assertion.

Yet, Mandal did not end hierarchy; it merely rearranged it. Power shifted from upper castes to Yadavs, leaving non-Yadav OBCs, EBCs and Dalits negotiating for scraps of representation.

Demographics defined destiny: EBCs made up 36 per cent and OBCs 27 per cent, together forming almost two-thirds of Bihar’s population. Upper castes, barely ten per cent, still controlled disproportionate economic and cultural capital, a paradox that continues to shape every election.

The Yadav Era and its Limits

Lalu’s15-year rule rested on the MY alliance—Muslim and Yadav. It turned political arithmetic into emotional solidarity. For millions of lower-caste voters, Lalu was not merely a leader; he was the embodiment of social justice.

But as the years passed, the same identity politics hardened into a monopoly. Non-Yadav OBCs and EBCs felt sidelined. Into that resentment stepped Nitish Kumar, who reframed backward politics through the lens of governance.

Nitish’s masterstroke was sub-categorisation, carving out a separate quota for EBCs and Mahadalits. It was shrewd social engineering that kept him relevant for two decades, balancing caste justice with administrative pragmatism.

Caste Arithmetic in the Present

Three decades later, the legacy of those shifts is visible in everyday conversations across Bihar. In Samastipur, a young man named Raghubir Yadav dismissed Lalu as “a Gaderia Yadav, not one of us.”

The loyalty that EBCs have for Nitish was evident in Agiaon while travelling through the assembly constituency and speaking to OBCs and Dalits. Ajay Prasad Saah, a man in his early fifties and a Halwai (OBC) by caste, said he would vote for the NDA candidate Mahesh Paswan. Saah, a driver of a pick-up trailer who sat cross-legged, shirtless and barefoot, said Nitish deserves five more years. Twenty years of rule, according to him, was “not enough” for development work.

“Prasad’s caste, Halwai, falls under the larger category called Vaishya. We belong to the same category. So we voted for him because we wanted to send a fellow Vaishya caste member to Parliament,” Saah said.

Next to Saah sat Ram Naresh Singh, an EBC belonging to the Kahar caste. He said he would vote for the BJP candidate because the BJP is in alliance with Nitish Kumar. “We owe the benefits of reservation to Nitish ji because he gave us our due by dividing the OBC reservation and ending the dominance of the Yadavs. Now EBCs have mukhiyas (village heads), up-mukhiyas (deputy village heads) and many more on several posts because of affirmative action,” added Singh, a lanky man in a tight white tunic and pyjama.

“We want Nitish again. Only Nitish can manage the government. There is no BJP leader who is as good an administrator as Nitish,” he asserted. But there seemed to be a deeper loyalty to Nitish at work here. He would still choose Nitish over the BJP, Singh said, if the alliance split after the elections.

For these men, caste and sub-caste are the primary bonds that unite them, and no other factor can match that strength. It is for this precise reason that Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party may not yet take root in the realpolitik landscape of the state. Any vision that does not align with caste does not fit the popular political imagination here. Development, or the idea of it, works only because it is grounded in caste.

Return of the Upper Castes

Yet, even as the backward classes remain numerically dominant, power, as ever, is recalibrating upward. Further west, in Tiwaridih—a Brahmin village in the Terari constituency of Bhojpur—a group of janeu-wearing men sat gossiping about politics on a temple plinth.

“Caste doesn’t matter,” said Tribhuvan Tiwari first. Then, almost reflexively, “We vote for Sunil Pandey—or whoever he supports.” It was the BJP, naturally.

Bihar’s upper castes—Brahmins, Bhumihars, Rajputs, and Kayasthas—may be numerically small, but their political clout far outweighs their population. The BJP’s 2025 candidate list makes that explicit: out of 71 names, 34 went to upper castes (15 Rajputs, 11 Bhumihars, seven Brahmins, one Kayastha). Another 20 tickets went to OBCs, 11 to EBCs, and six to SC/STs.

The message is unmistakable: anchor the upper-caste core, extend to select OBC/EBC allies, and sprinkle representation elsewhere to appear inclusive.

The JD(U)’s list tells a different story. Of 101 candidates allotted under the NDA, the party fielded 37 from backward castes, 22 from EBCs, 22 from upper castes, 15 from Scheduled Castes, and four Muslims. Within that mix, Kurmis (12), Kushwahas (13), and Yadavs (eight) dominate the BC segment, while Rajputs (10) and Bhumihars (nine) headline the upper-caste bloc.

Nitish’s logic is surgical: consolidate non-Yadav OBCs and EBCs, keep a toehold among upper castes, and slightly downplay the Muslim vote. It is a coalition of calculation—inclusive enough to survive, exclusive enough to be distinct.

The RJD, meanwhile, continues to orbit around its Yadav-Muslim axis. In 2025, about 36 per cent of its candidates were Yadavs—nearly two-and-a-half times their population share. Upper-caste representation ticked up slightly to 10.6 per cent, while EBC candidates fell from 13.1 per cent in 2020 to 11.2 per cent, despite EBCs making up more than a third of Bihar’s population. Under Tejashwi Yadav, the party now advertises an ‘A-to-Z’ agenda—a promise to include everyone—yet the party’s alphabet chart appears to begin with Y.

For all the talk of “development first” politics, Bihar remains a state where caste is the primary currency. Here caste is not merely a factor; it is the logic through which politics exists. It shapes memory, loyalty, grievance, aspiration and power.

Leaders speak of roads, electricity, and education, but every promise passes through the prism of caste before it reaches the voter. Those who wield influence deny caste determines their choices; those who are denied privilege assert caste more fiercely than ever. The constant disavowal only proves how entrenched caste remains—a structure so powerful that its dominance must be hidden in plain sight.

In Bihar, caste is not the past resisting change; it is the future, deciding who gets to lead the charge.

Mohammad Ali is an award-winning journalist who divides his time between New York and London

This story appeared as Let Chhath Be in Outlook’s November 11 issue, titled "The Dye Was Always Caste," which explores how caste plays multiple interconnected roles in seat-sharing and coalition-building in the land of the setting sun