As Nitish Kumar quits as Bihar chief minister, what will happen to his politics of social justice?

Political eras often fade quietly rather than end with a dramatic rupture. Bihar now appears to be approaching such a moment. After nearly two decades at the centre of the state’s political life, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s exit from the stage seems both surprising and inevitable: surprising because of the durability and adaptability that have long defined his career, yet expected because the political architecture he built has gradually evolved beyond the personal authority that sustained it.

The question confronting Bihar, therefore, extends beyond succession. It concerns the fate of a distinctive political experiment – the attempt to reconcile the moral promise of social justice with the practical demands of development and social peace.

Few leaders in contemporary India have embodied democratic pragmatism as fully as Nitish Kumar. Emerging from the socialist ferment of the 1970s, he belongs to the generation shaped by Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for “Total Revolution”, a movement that challenged the dominance of the Congress system and sought to democratise power across Indian society.

This upheaval eventually matured into the Mandal moment of the 1990s, when politics across North India reorganised itself around the language of social justice and caste representation.

Nitish Kumar emerged from this same ideological lineage, yet his political project gradually diverged. While the Mandal era foregrounded representation and dignity, Kumar sought to translate the emancipatory promise of social justice into governance.

When he assumed the office of chief minister in 2005 for the first of his ten terms, Bihar was widely portrayed as a state defined by criminalised politics, administrative decay, and economic stagnation. His first task was therefore institutional: restoring the authority of the state itself. Through renewed emphasis on law and order, bureaucratic discipline, and public investment in roads, schools, and administrative infrastructure, his government attempted to rebuild Bihar’s developmental state.

While structural constraints on growth remained formidable, the psychological climate of governance began to change and the state once again appeared capable of delivering public goods.

Yet the deeper innovation of Nitish Kumar’s politics lay in how he reimagined the meaning of social justice itself. Across parts of southern India, particularly Tamil Nadu and Kerala, redistributive welfare and human development policies had already demonstrated that social justice could be institutionalised not merely through representation but through everyday governance.

Nitish Kumar quietly adapted elements of this model to Bihar’s political landscape. Instead of limiting the discourse of justice to caste empowerment, his administration attempted to embed it within welfare programmes, social mobilisation and community institutions.

Borrowing from Kerala’s pioneering Kudumbashree model, the most distinctive feature of this strategy was its focus on women as central agents of development. Policies such as the bicycle scheme for schoolgirls and programmes supporting girls’ education expanded opportunities for young women, while the Jeevika programme built a vast network of self-help groups across rural Bihar. These “Jeevika Didis,” now numbering in the millions, have become an informal civic infrastructure linking financial inclusion, local governance and welfare delivery.

The political consequences of this model were significant. Female voter participation rose sharply – at times surpassing that of men, as seen in the 2025 Bihar elections, suggesting that welfare programmes had begun reshaping the social basis of democratic participation.

Unsurprisingly, Bihar’s governance experiment has often been described as a form of maternal welfare politics, where women-centred policies created a new axis of political mobilisation. In this sense, Nitish Kumar translated the emancipatory ethos of socialism into a concrete, women-centric institutional framework.

Paradoxically, this experiment was sustained for long periods through an unlikely political partnership. Nitish Kumar’s governance model often relied on an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party. The partnership between his Janata Dal (United) party and the BJP represented less an ideological convergence than a pragmatic accommodation within India’s coalition politics.

This occurred even as the politics of Hindutva recalibrated itself – relying less on ideological mobilisation and more on drawing upon elements of socialist social-justice traditions and the language of governance within the constraints of this alliance.

Nitish Kumar utilised this alliance to ensure political stability and administrative continuity while simultaneously advancing a feminist- welfare agenda. This uniquely crafted pragmatic socialism became a defining feature of his leadership. Critics frequently interpreted his shifting alliances as crass opportunism, yet they also reflected the arithmetic of governing a socially fragmented state.

Over time, he succeeded in constructing a broad social coalition that cut across traditional caste boundaries – extremely backward classes, Mahadalits, women, minorities, and segments of the aspirational middle class. Welfare initiatives and targeted social programmes functioned as bridges across these constituencies, gradually shifting Bihar’s political discourse from one dominated solely by caste confrontation to one increasingly shaped by aspirations for development, welfare and social peace.

However, the transformation remains incomplete. Bihar’s structural challenges continue to be formidable. Migration still defines the state’s economic reality, with millions of workers leaving each year in search of employment elsewhere in India.

At the same time, Bihar possesses one of the youngest populations in the country, and the aspirations of this generation extend beyond welfare and representation toward jobs and economic opportunity.

The end of the Nitish Kumar era therefore represents more than the departure of a long-serving chief minister. It signals the possible conclusion of a political synthesis that linked Mandal-era social justice with the language of governance and development.

However, one unresolved aspect of this legacy, however, has been the absence of a clearly groomed successor, even as the BJP appears poised to play an increasingly dominant role in the state’s political landscape. Opposed to dynastic politics, Nitish Kumar long appeared reluctant to cultivate a political heir – an approach that reflected both his personal leadership style and the delicate coalition politics he has navigated for nearly two decades.

Yet, his son Nishant Kumar has now been projected either by design or by default as the potential inheritor of his political legacy and a possible future leader of the Janata Dal (United). Whether this shift will sustain a deeper democratic transformation or dissolve into familiar patterns of fratricidal caste competition, much like the internal discord Buddha once warned the people of Pataliputra against.

In that sense, the end of the Nitish Kumar era may mark not merely the closing of a career, but the opening of a new democratic moment in Bihar’s political history.

Ashwani Kumar is a professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and author of Community Warriors: State, Peasants, and Caste Armies in Bihar. Views are personal.