Bihar Elections: Tejashwi Yadav and the Architecture of a Defeat
Former Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav! (Image Tejashvi Yadav, X)
Upmanship has rarely rewarded young leaders in India; for Tejashwi, it produced the opposite of what he intended.
By AMIT KUMAR
Patna, November 14, 2025 — The rout of Bihar’s Mahagathbandhan was not a sudden event but a slow unravelling—an alliance weakened by hesitation, late decisions, and a political scion struggling to balance the burdens of legacy with the demands of leadership. Tejashwi Yadav, the coalition’s most recognisable face and its only mass vote-puller, finds himself at the centre of an electoral defeat that now looks, in retrospect, almost self-designed.
For months, political observers spoke of an opposition camp unable to negotiate with itself, let alone offer a coherent alternative to the National Democratic Alliance. The alliance’s seat-sharing negotiations dragged on interminably, finally settling only when the campaign calendar had already been spent. By the time candidates were declared, the Mahagathbandhan seemed less like a united front and more like a tired consortium of parties bargaining for short-term survival.
This delay produced a “zero-sum scramble for relevance,” with every partner acting as if distrust were a default state. That structural anxiety had a gravitational centre: Tejashwi Yadav’s insistence on asserting primacy even when compromise was strategically wiser.
Tejashwi has long been framed as the heir apparent—Lalu Prasad Yadav’s son, the RJD’s future, the young face meant to soften the party’s history. But the election revealed how that image, carefully crafted over a decade, is still fragile.
The Yadav family’s internal anxieties became political liabilities. His siblings, particularly his elder sister and elder brother, privately expressed anger at the outsized influence of political aide Sanjay Yadav, whose proximity to Tejashwi recast decision-making into a closed circle.
What should have been a party machine recalibrating itself for a generational transition instead became a household locked in a struggle over access, trust, and control.
This internal fissure weakened the alliance at its core. RJD leaders whispered that seat allocations were shaped more by Tejashwi’s personal confidants than by electoral logic. Congress leaders complained they were treated as bystanders, not partners. Smaller allies said they were handed seats as afterthoughts—symbols, not strategy.
In the unforgiving theatre of Bihar politics, this kind of misalignment is fatal. The NDA campaign, disciplined and nearly mechanical, offered contrast: a message, a structure, and a leadership pyramid. The Mahagathbandhan offered improvisation masquerading as strategy.
Tejashwi’s political instincts are often underestimated—his 2020 campaign showed he can animate crowds and elevate issues like unemployment and migration. But electoral charisma cannot substitute for organisational seriousness. In this cycle, Tejashwi attempted to be both the face of the campaign and the arbiter of alliance hierarchies, and the dual role exposed his limitations. Upmanship has rarely rewarded young leaders in India; for Tejashwi, it produced the opposite of what he intended.
The scale of the defeat now raises questions that extend beyond one election. Can the RJD modernise without fracturing? Can Tejashwi lead without alienating the very family structures that underpin the party’s political capital? And can Bihar’s opposition construct a project larger than the personality contests that have defined it for years?
For now, the Mahagathbandhan’s collapse stands as a lesson in political mismanagement. It is a reminder that alliances are not math—they are psychology, discipline, and an ability to see beyond the small rivalries that consume parties from within. Tejashwi Yadav remains the opposition’s biggest asset. But in this election, he was also its most consequential liability.
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