Bihari vs ‘Bahari': The election debate in Nitish land

India Today

13 hours ago

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated July 28, 2025)Bihar, in many ways, is ground zero for post-Mandal reservation politics. Innovations on that had started back in 2013, when the Nitish Kumar government introduced a landmark policy, reserving 35 per cent of police jobs—within caste quotas and beyond—for women. By 2016, this policy was extended to all government posts in the state. Now, nearly a decade later, there's a new twist to reservation policies.advertisementAmid a raging debate about the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and its concomitant focus on natives and outsiders, a piece of evolution has crept into that old schema of quotas that readjusts it to this new reality of electoral politics.In a quiet yet politically charged manoeuvre on July 8, the Bihar cabinet amended its flagship gender quota, restricting the 35 per cent state government jobs exclusively to women domiciled in Bihar. For the first time, aspirants from outside the state—baharis—have been formally excluded. On paper, this appears a mere tightening of bureaucratic criteria.
Politically, however, the chain of cause and effect is clear. The SIR process is creating an atmosphere polarised on nativism, of the sort only occasionally seen before in Bihar. In 2015, for instance, Nitish had drummed up some passions about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'DNA remark' and framed it as a conflict between 'an outsider and me'. Today, again, the truism that only Bihar residents can vote in its elections has been granted a certain currency. So, it makes perfect sense, with just three months or so left for the assembly election, to fine-tune quota policies to catch that vibe.There was indeed some goading. Jan Suraaj Party leader Prashant Kishor had mounted a persistent critique on this front, accusing Nitish of opening Bihar's job market to outsiders in pursuit of national ambitions. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, too, had recently promised to implement a 100 per cent domicile-based policy should his party form the next government. To head them off, Nitish appears to have stepped into—or at least nodded towards—the long-simmering bahari-bhitari (outsider–insider) debate. What better way than to inaugurate this with women, a constituency Nitish has long cultivated. Especially since women are now increasingly seen as decisive in shaping the state's electoral fortunes, with a voting percentage that has consistently outgunned that of male voters by a good country mile over the last decade and a half.INSIDER POLITICSWith the latest quota policy, Bihar has joined the ranks of states like Maharashtra and Jharkhand, where the insider-outsider divide has long featured prominently in political discourse. For years, Nitish has carefully distanced himself from the more incendiary rhetoric of his alliance partners, who frequently raised concerns about Bangladeshi infiltrators and invoked the bahari-bhitari narrative. While he never openly endorsed such language, this latest move signals a subtle yet significant shift.advertisementBy restricting job reservations to domiciled Bihari women, Nitish appears to have crafted his own version of the insider-outsider paradigm—less inflammatory, perhaps, but no less exclusionary. It's a quiet deployment of weaponry he once abjured, now repurposed in the language of administrative reform. In doing so, he has stepped into a narrative he once preferred to observe from the margins.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- EndsMust Watch