Beware Bihar: Caste Is Still A Big Factor For Gen-Z

Seventy-four-year-old Nitish Kumar has returned as Chief Minister of Bihar, a state where 58 per cent of the population is under 25. This young demographic is an asset for economic development. But for politics, it is an even bigger battleground. Whoever captures these voters early can shape the next two decades of the state’s political landscape.

The 2025 election became a test case for this shift. In 2020, CSDS–Lokniti found that voters aged 18–29 were evenly split, with 36 per cent for the NDA and 37 per cent for the Mahagathbandhan (MGB). Tejashwi Yadav benefited from a low base effect, anger against Nitish’s unfulfilled promises, and a pitch centred on jobs.

By 2025, the gap widened. Axis My India recorded MGB at 44 per cent among voters aged 20–29, with NDA at 37 per cent. The common explanation, which includes migration and unemployment, captures only the surface.

In his Outlook column, Professor Ravi Ranjan from Department of Political Science, Zakir Husain Delhi College, writes, “Their political preferences are influenced by issues such as employment, skill development, corruption, and gender equality. This demographic shift is forcing parties to move beyond traditional identity politics toward agenda-based mobilisation.”

Traditionally, this has been a comfortable presumption to begin with, irrespective of geography. Such simplistic thinking can easily explain wave phenomena, ranging from a young nationalistic leader Javier Milei taking charge in Argentina to choreographed ousting of elected representatives in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Why This Phenomenon Persists

But the lens breaks down when applied to GenZ, which is not satisfied with material stability alone. Fuelled by constant micro-doses of rejection, validation, envy, and tribal belonging flowing through their smartphones, they have developed a sense of living in which a balance between tradition and modernity is key to secure themselves from risks.

For them, on one side there is the insecurity of being left out while on the other it is the comfort of discovering like-minded ideological groups, influencers, creators, and political tribes. This environment accelerates polarisation. Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have noted how this psychological environment sharpens polarisation by framing politics as a moral fight and a reactive grievance.

In a column analysing culture wars, Canadian Professor Eric Kaufman argues, “Rather than being Right- or Left-wing, it is best to think of young people as more polarised than older age groups on culture war questions.”

Caste and religion map easily onto this phenomenon, due to their deep emotional weight. Modern state policies like affirmative action which produce clear winners and losers give them material consequence as well. Those who benefit lean on identity for protection, those individuals who are excluded mobilise identity to signal dominance. Both sides now have a functional incentive to amplify who they are.

In Bihar, this phenomenon finds its loudest manifestation in lyrics of a song, which now has three versions. The generic version of this song is ‘Prakhand ho ya jila, babuane se hila’ (Be it block or district, only men of power can shake it). Since the singer was Pawan Singh, a Rajput by his family identity, Babuan was mostly seen as identifying with Rajput community.

Quickly, two more versions began circulating with one minor change in lyrics. Bhumihars and supporters used Bhumihars in place of Babuans while Yadavs (Ahirs) and its supporters changed it to Ahiran.

These songs were not fringe. They became a soundtrack to GenZ political bantering.

Influencers, both national and regional, turbocharge this cycle. One video is made on neutral topic and the next one indulges in clear-cut partisan identity rhetoric. The audience absorbs both seamlessly, without noticing the ideological whiplash.

Likes and views counts on these videos clearly indicate that pattern recognition is increasingly becoming tougher for a generation which is growing by preferring to absorb knowledge through few-seconds long snippets.

What remains is an audience that is half-informed, overwhelmed, yet confident enough to argue. The mood swings of reels become mood swings of political judgement.

Additionally, with the amount of time GenZ spends on screen, much of their thinking is built on second-hand narratives. Instead of living first and finding articulations later, the GenZ often encounters articulation first in the form of memes, rants, and viral reels, and then tries to experience the world in ways that match the script.

So, when certain Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav entered college in the late 60s and 70s, their ideological choices emerged from the combination of lived experiences, prose, poetries and explanations offered by teachers and professors.

Lalu’s politically vengeful psyche borne mainly out of lived childhood experience emphasised more on weaponising caste, while Kumar’s experience shaped him to embrace anti-casteism.

If they were students today, their content absorption to lived experience ratio would let them to ape the language of jobs, development, and national security. But beneath that surface, the caste lens, reinforced by online affirmation, would shape instinct and strategy.

This mindset does not manifest as it did in the caste wars of the 1990s, but in chatrooms where the castes of criminals, representatives, and bureaucrats are dissected with forensic zeal by the same youth who spends his day slogging through K C Sinha’s mathematics book and Lucent General Knowledge.

The separation boundary between the previous generation and new GenZ is the lived reality despite two decades of Nitish Kumar’s development model. While growing up, these young voters witnessed foundational gains made in infrastructure such as roads, electricity, and policing. Nitish had set a baseline for himself to be judged.

The story flipped by the time their voter ID cards were made. Roads constructed between 2005 and 2015 started showing cracks. The situation in other departments remained the same, making way for the private sector to pitch in with added costs while the corresponding increase in household income was slower for most individuals.

For a generation that grew up with rising expectations fuelled by smartphone aspirations, this is regression, not progress. In this worldview, Nitish Kumar of 2020–2025 is not the reformer of 2005, but an administrator presiding over stagnant incomes, decaying civic infrastructure, and a mushrooming ecosystem of small private-sector institutions charging steep fees.

Add persistent migration to this and you get a generation that does not see promise in talks of development, but a tired slogan disconnected from lived reality. On economic issues, GenZ voters do not compare 2025 Bihar to 2000 Bihar, they compare it to the futures they were promised and the lives they saw others living on their screens.

Jobs vs Caste vs Hindutva

For this generation, politics consolidated around two main impulses, namely hope of jobs and caste pride. Young leaders like Tejashwi Yadav, Chirag Paswan, Samrat Chaudhary and Prashant Kishor represented the job impulse. The second impulse was caste pride — strongest in Yadav, weakest in Kishor.

Among these two, the caste impulse played out more strongly because of collective failures of the politics on economic front. Paswan and Chaudhary were already on thin ground due to their alliances, while Tejashwi Yadav’s credibility suffered because his promise was widely seen as unrealistic. As for Prashant Kishor, lack of winning probability in media narratives further downgraded his prospects.

More particularly, the lack of a decisive option on the jobs front twisted the latest election towards local caste fights. For youth, especially men, this election was mainly about finding space for themselves in the representatives they chose. Unlike young women, who picked one man for his statewide delivery of their rights, men got caught up in individual caste battles with an iota of intersectionality as well.

Someone pressing the EVM to elect a Mahagathbandhan legislator because of caste also tends to agree with the idea of Hindus being targeted in a civilisational war, despite the M–Y combination offered by his party. This writer estimates that roughly 30 per cent of MGB-leaning GenZ men remained openly anti-Muslim while still rejecting the NDA. Their alignment is not ideological; it is tribal.

On the Gaura Bauram seat, Mukesh Sahani’s brother Santosh Sahani witnessed it first-hand when Mallahs openly said that they would vote for those who protect them during communal tensions. That held true for NDA supporters across much of the Kosi–Seemanchal and Mithila belt too.

For those NDA-supporting youth frustrated with governance, Hindutva and India’s strong response against Pakistan acted as a fallback. However, NDA’s seat distribution also shows that they were extremely careful when it came to caste combinations on seats.

Most of the tickets were given to one of the three numerically significant caste groups on individual seats, which means that the NDA was not sure whether its ideological pull would be strong enough to break the caste barrier.

The same holds true for the Mahagathbandhan. Despite all its youth-centred promises, caste remained the decisive factor in ticket distribution, despite the talk of GenZ being pro-development.

What Comes Next for NDA, MGB, RJD, and PK

For the NDA, delivering on its old promises now becomes a compulsion and non-negotiable. For that, investors will need assurance like they received in Uttar Pradesh after Yogi Adityanath took charge. First-time voters have less tolerance for administrative drift. The coalition also needs to see a peaceful power transition from the JD(U) to the BJP.

For the BJP to succeed, it has to activate its local cadre network to bring more voters, especially the vote bases of MGB leaders with clear mindsets, under its ideological fold. This may require some cabinet reshuffle and hardline actions on the law-and-order front, but it is nevertheless necessary.

For the MGB, there is the simple task of forcing its face to engage in street politics, political communication, and clear-cut agenda-driven politics. Tejashwi Yadav runs the risk of losing Yadav voters too because the community’s social make-up is more about aligning with power. It cannot be made to wait indefinitely, as Pappu Yadav’s experience shows.

Yadav also has to contest with Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party (JSP), which has emerged as a narrative-setter in this election.

The JSP has a caste-neutral supporter base, which it will look to maximise. JSP has instilled the sense of sub-nationalism and Bihar pride among youth, which has impacted political conversation and holds the potential to dilute caste factor.

The NDA, especially the BJP, can look to assimilate this sub-nationalistic virtue into nationalistic and civilisational fold.

Casteisisation can be avoided

Most of these voters are still in the nascent phase of solidifying political choices. Cheap internet and short-form content have given them both constructive and destructive avenues to fall back on. Livelihood is a constructive goal, but caste, a destructive force in the past, is no longer seen as such by GenZ and upcoming generations.

Lot of them see the politicisation of caste as a tool for accelerated empowerment. Political parties can draw a redline around it to avoid further casteisisation of politics.

Caste has acted as foundation of post-1947 life, but foundations don’t always decide what the building becomes. If policymakers add real floors  like jobs, mobility, safety, and dignity, the upper structure can overshadow the base.