After Nitish Kumar’s announcement last month of stepping down as Chief Minister led to a bout of speculation, Bihar’s BJP chief Sanjay Saraogi said on Sunday (April 5) that the party’s central leadership and NDA allies would select a new Chief Minister after Kumar took oath for the Rajya Sabha on April 10, thus bringing the curtains down on his highly eventful two-decade leadership of Bihar.

Kumar’s departure will mean not just the loss of an important “face” for the NDA. With Nitish, what could also go away from the NDA is an intricately woven social coalition of intermediate castes and the more underprivileged sections among the Dalits. The BJP is working overtime to find a face that could help it ward off this specific danger—that of losing chunks of the extremely backward castes, the Mahadalit/ati-dalit communities, to whom Kumar had given a distinct identity in Bihar’s post-Mandal politics.

Saraogi insisted that Nitish Kumar would be involved in the selection process, as part of the BJP’s ongoing efforts to prevent the narrative that he had been sidelined by the party within six months of the 2025 Assembly election. Opposition leaders are pointing out that the NDA won the mandate in Nitish Kumar’s name, and his departure is a betrayal of the mandate. Since Kumar’s resignation on March 5 for a Rajya Sabha seat, every Opposition party has raised questions about the abrupt end to Kumar’s tenure.

Even though it had been obvious even during the campaign last year that Nitish Kumar’s failing health made it unlikely that he could continue for long, the BJP made it a point to project him as its Chief Ministerial face in order to win the election, which is why his rapid departure makes it an ethically questionable mandate.

More than the moral issue, which is unlikely to worry the party, a bigger challenge is to find its own Mr Clean in Bihar, a sobriquet won by Nitish after his first tenure as Chief Minister that went unblemished by any corruption charges. It had followed on the heels of a period of serious political mudslinging, with the fodder scam charges against the previous Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) government overshadowing not just its nine years in power but haunting the party perpetually thereafter.

In contrast to Nitish Kumar’s clean image, in the lead-up to the Assembly election, the Jan Suraaj leader Prashant Kishor raised corruption charges against the BJP. He accused the then-BJP President Dilip Jaiswal and Health Minister Mangal Pandey of financial irregularities. He also raised the issue of the conviction of Jibesh Kumar Mishra, Bihar’s then Urban Development and Housing Minister, in a 15-year-old fake drugs case.

‘More corrupt than Lalu’

Kishor charged the BJP of being “more corrupt than Lalu”. He targeted Bihar’s current Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary, raising questions about his conviction as a minor in a 1995 murder case and alleging that he had committed forgery at the time to gain an early release from prison. Kishor also raised questions about Choudhary’s educational qualifications and alleged that he had failed to clear his matriculation exam.

Despite these charges and despite a strong RJD campaign, the NDA won the election in a victory that seemed largely predicated on a pro-Nitish sympathy wave in the State. The BJP took advantage of this and promised that if the NDA was elected to power, it would be Nitish who would be the CM, now and forever. This was helped by the RJD, too, sensing the growing public sympathy for Kumar, forcing it to ease up on targeting him in its campaigns.

Kumar’s exit becoming final has now given some wind to the RJD’s sails, and its leaders are again raising questions about the many development claims made on his behalf by the NDA government, charges they are likely to double down on in the coming days. With the BJP on the back foot in the “who after Nitish” dilemma and unable to offer a leader of comparable stature to Nitish, the RJD has quickly seized the moment.

The BJP’s challenge is two-fold—it has to find a leader who is popular across communities and one who also has a clean image. The names of the Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary and the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai are the ones coming up most often in political circles.

While Samrat, son of prominent leader Shakuni Choudhary, a founding member of the Samata Party with Nitish Kumar, belongs to the Kushwaha/Koiri caste, Rai is Yadav, politically the most dominant of the Other Backward Classes in Bihar.

Although Choudhary managed to again become Deputy Chief Minister in 2025, it is unclear whether his party is ready to make him the face of the NDA in Bihar, given the allegations of forgery and the criminal cases against him, particularly since the NDA government will no longer have the advantage of Nitish Kumar’s clean image to cover up minor stains.

Moreover, Choudhary does not come from an RSS background and is not considered an insider. The BJP is unlikely to hand over its first opportunity to rule Bihar on its own to someone alien to the ideological moorings of the Sangh Parivar.

The problem with the other likely candidate, Rai, is somewhat different. With the RJD being the choice of the Yadav community for more than three decades and with Lalu Prasad still in the saddle, the chances of Rai emerging as a prominent leader and managing to breach the Yadav bastions of the RJD look bleak. Moreover, the BJP already has in its fold another important Yadav leader in Ram Kripal Yadav, once a close associate of Lalu Prasad.

The Yadav, Kurmi, and Kushwaha, moreover, belong to the upper crust of Bihar’s OBCs. The 2023 Bihar Caste Survey report identified the State’s total OBC population share at 63 per cent, with Extremely Backward Classes being a subgroup of 112 castes with a population share of a staggering 36 per cent. This has created a rising aspiration among these groups for a share in power.

It was in acknowledgement of this that the Modi government in 2024, ahead of the Assembly election, awarded a posthumous Bharat Ratna to Karpoori Thakur, the most prominent Extremely Backward Classes (EBC) leader in Bihar who went on to become its Chief Minister twice from December 1970 to June 1971 as a leader of Samyukta Socialist Party and again from December 1977 to April 1979 as a leader of Janata Party.

In fact, the country’s first Dalit Chief Minister was also elected in Bihar, Bhola Paswan Shastri in 1968. Ram Sundar Das then became its second Dalit Chief Minister in 1979 after Karpoori Thakur stepped down. It was after this that the Congress party began to give the Chief Ministership to dominant caste candidates such as Jagannath Mishra, Chandrashekhar Singh, Bindeshwari Dubey, Bhagwat Jha Azad and Satyendra Narayan Sinha, until Lalu Prasad rode to power in 1990, ending the Congress rule in Bihar for good.

BJP makes its mark

The BJP took the place of the Congress, gradually eating into the latter’s vote bank of dominant castes. From being the party of choice for most of the Vaishya and Kayasth communities, the BJP began to get money and muscle power from the landowning Bhumihar caste. Despite this gradual dominance, however, and despite winning more seats than the Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)), such was Nitish Kumar’s sway in Bihar across a rainbow coalition of castes that the BJP had to ride his coattails to stay afloat in the State until now.

By setting up the Ati Picchda Aayog (Extremely Backward Classes Commission) after coming to power in 2005, implementing 20 per cent reservation for EBCs in Panchayats in 2006, and creating the Mahadalit category in order to bring non-Paswan Dalit groups under one umbrella, it was Kumar who created a firm support base for himself and the JDU among the marginalised groups, who otherwise did not have a major share in power politics.

Recognising this emerging clout of the EBC segment, the BJP might consider the Speaker of the Bihar Assembly, Prem Kumar, who has been an MLA from Gaya Town for the last nine terms and who belongs to the Chandravanshi or Kahar (palanquin-bearers) caste, as a dark horse chief ministerial candidate. The other EBC name doing the rounds is academic-politician Sanjeev Chourasia, who comes from the betel-growers community.

Meanwhile, given the BJP’s high stakes in the 2027 Uttar Pradesh election, it might also consider the former Lok Sabha MP and Bihar Minister Janak Ram, a Jatav. BJP will be trying for a third successive shot at power in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 2027, where Mayawati’s vote bank of Jatavs is up for grabs, and thus a Chief Minister from the same community can give the BJP an upper hand in claiming it.

Dilip Jaiswal and Sanjay Jaiswal, both from the Vaishya community, might also stake a claim. Still, as for Kayasth aspirations, those have already been fulfilled by Nitin Nabin being made the BJP’s national president.

As it gets its first chance to install a person from its own ranks as Chief Minister in India’s second most populous State, the BJP has to do a fine balancing act, one that will not let its core dominant caste (Baniya-Kayasth) support base feel slighted. At the same time, tap into the rising importance of the marginalised groups among Dalits and backward classes. The challenge has become more acute after the recent dominant-caste uproar against the BJP for the UGC Equity Regulations, subsequently paused, which recommended strict measures to check and punish caste discrimination in university campuses.

Bihar is a cradle of social justice politics and, unlike neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, does not respond overwhelmingly to the Hindutva brand of communalism and majoritarian politics that keeps the BJP afloat there. Nitish Kumar’s exit is as much an opportunity as a challenge for the party, and its future in the State will ride considerably on its choice of Chief Minister.

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