Bihar 2025 Election: A Referendum on Memory
Bihar’s 2025 election is not a contest of parties — it’s a referendum on memory and about whether the poor still believe in a Constitution that forgot them.
Bihar is not a state — it’s a metaphor carved in red soil and bureaucratic cruelty. A land where democracy first spoke in the accent of the poor and then was muted by the elite’s English grammar.
When the Mandal Commission report was tabled in 1980, it wasn’t merely a bureaucratic file — it was the subaltern declaration of independence.
“Caste is not just a division of labour, but a division of labourers,”
B.R. Ambedkar had said half a century earlier. Bihar heard that line not as a slogan but as scripture. In the dusty alleys of Gaya and the flood plains of Sitamarhi, that sentence became a war cry.
Mandal was not about reservation — it was about revenge. Revenge against centuries of being told that dignity was a privilege. Singh, the reluctant warrior, unleashed this storm in 1990.
Author summary: Bihar election is referendum on memory.