What lies ahead for Tejashwi Prasad Yadav from here, after the RJD’s defeat by a narrow margin in the tightly-contested Bihar assembly elections? The answer to this question will have to first, necessarily, face another complicated question in the line of inquiry. Can democracy, development and dynastic politics, let’s call it the three Ds, co-exist and flourish at the same time? Theoretically speaking, it is quite a complicated question to answer. The complications of the enterprise further aggravate if we attribute to these three elements the following characteristics: caste-ridden liberal parliamentary democracy, exploitative economic development and party-based dynastic politics as they have been the prominent features of politics in Bihar for long.
A serious look at the contours of the evolution of electoral politics in India throws open such questions and provides no definite answers. 1990s onward, heirs of many political families have tried their hands with mixed results. Like Tejashwi, his contemporaries in Bihar and elsewhere—such as Akhilesh Yadav, Chirag Paswan, Uddhav Thackeray, Stalin, Omar Abdullah, Jaganmohan Reddy and several others—have already gained some political experience and their performance is today there for everyone to judge. But before playing the scramble in case of Bihar, a background check will be of some help.
