With Bihar Chief Minister and JD(U) president Nitish Kumar now shifting to a Rajya Sabha role, the last active member of the triumvirate of Jayaprakash Narayan-B P Mandal movement is exiting the rough and tumble of state politics.
RJD chief Lalu Prasad has largely been incapacitated by ill health and legal battles in recent years. Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav are gone. And George Fernandes had faded away from the political scene long before his demise.
Nitish’s move has prompted commentary describing the current political contests as the “last battle” for the “Class of 1974” – a generation of politicians who emerged from the student agitations at the time – and the effective end of the Mandal-inspired socialist leaders’ command over Bihar’s political arena.
What remains are dynastic heirs – RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav and LJP (Ram Vilas) chief Chirag Paswan – a retooled JD (U) dependent on the BJP, and a ruling alliance that speaks the language of “true social justice” while discrediting Mandal-era politics as “jungle raj” and appeasement.
The exit of the socialist icons marks more than a generational shift. It closes a political cycle that began with socialist mobilisation in Bihar in the 1970s and culminated in the implementation of the Mandal Commission report in 1990 to ensure reservation for the Other Backward Class (OBC) category – a development which rejigged the state’s power structure.
Socialist stir to Mandal politics
The rise of social justice politics in Bihar did not begin with former CM B P Mandal and the Commission later headed by him. Its roots lay in the politics of socialist icon Ram Manohar Lohia, who argued that backward classes must claim a proportional share in state power. In Bihar, these ideas found a powerful practitioner in Karpoori Thakur, who as CM in the late 1970s introduced a pioneering reservation formula for backwards.
But the crucible that forged the next generation of leaders was the student movement led by veteran socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as JP. The anti-Emergency agitation in the 1970s brought a group of young socialist activists into politics – among them Lalu Prasad, Nitish Kumar and Ram Vilas Paswan. They belonged to different castes and social backgrounds but shared a common political grammar: anti-Congress mobilisation, socialist rhetoric, and the conviction that political power in India had long been monopolised by upper castes.
When the Mandal Commission’s recommendations were implemented in 1990, the moment provided both a moral vocabulary and a political opportunity. Bihar, with its sharp caste hierarchies and large population of backward communities, became the epicentre of this transformation.
Lalu Prasad: Dignity before development
Among the Mandal generation, no leader symbolised the social justice moment more vividly than Lalu Prasad. When he first became the CM in 1990, the change was as cultural as it was political. Bihar’s administration had long been dominated by upper-caste elites. Lalu’s rise marked the arrival of backward castes at the commanding heights of state power.
For millions of rural OBCs and Dalits, Lalu’s rule represented something deeper than electoral victory. It was about dignity. His rhetoric, his public persona and his politics challenged entrenched hierarchies in everyday life – from the language of government offices to the social dynamics of villages. In symbolic acts such as ordering the arrest of BJP stalwart L K Advani during his Ram Rath Yatra in 1990, Lalu positioned himself as the defender of secularism and backward-caste assertion against the rising tide of Hindutva.
But empowerment politics also came with costs. Over time, governance in Bihar deteriorated sharply. Law and order problems, weak infrastructure and corruption charges eroded the legitimacy of the Lalu regime. His opponents labelled the period “jungle raj”. By the early 2000s, even many voters who acknowledged the dignity his politics had restored were ready to consider alternatives that promised development and administrative stability.
Ram Vilas Paswan: Dalit push
Parallel to Lalu’s rise, Ram Vilas Paswan emerged as one of India’s most prominent Dalit leaders. Paswan’s politics straddled both state and national arenas. As a Union minister in the short-lived V P Singh government from 1989 to 1990, he was closely associated with the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations.
Paswan, who died in 2020, represented a distinct strand within Bihar’s social justice politics: the attempt to build an autonomous Dalit voice within the Mandal coalition. His LJP, founded in 2000, sought to consolidate Dalit voters, especially from his Dusadh community.
Yet Paswan’s politics also reflected the constraints of Bihar’s caste arithmetic. Unlike the Bahujan movement in Uttar Pradesh, which found an institutional expression in Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Bihar never developed a large-scale Ambedkarite mobilisation. Paswan remained influential but often functioned as a coalition partner rather than the head of a dominant statewide party.
Even so, his presence ensured that Dalit concerns remained integral to the social justice discourse, and his ability to navigate multiple alliances made him one of the most enduring figures of coalition-era politics.
Nitish Kumar: Mandal to governance
If Lalu represented the subversive phase of social justice politics, Nitish embodied its attempt to reconcile representation with governance. A product of the same JP movement, Nitish initially worked alongside Lalu but eventually charted a different course.
When he became the Bihar CM in 2005, with the support of the BJP, he framed his politics around “sushasan” – good governance. Roads, law and order, school enrolment and welfare delivery became central themes of his administration.
At the same time, Nitish sought to deepen the social justice framework by broadening its social base. While Lalu’s coalition relied heavily on the Muslim-Yadav axis, Nitish cultivated Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) and Mahadalits through targeted welfare programmes and sub-categorisation policies. Schemes such as free bicycles for schoolgirls became emblematic of his governance style – combining welfare with symbolic empowerment.
For nearly two decades, Nitish remained the pivot of Bihar politics, moving between alliances with the BJP and the RJD while retaining his image as a pragmatic administrator. But this political flexibility also came at a cost. Repeated realignments blurred ideological distinctions and gradually tethered the JD(U)’s social justice rhetoric to the broader framework of the BJP-led coalitions.
Future of Mandal politics
Whether this moment represents the decline of the social justice movement or its transformation remains an open question.
“The era of social justice parties is over in Bihar. Tejashwi’s limitations have been exposed in the last Assembly polls. Nitish ji remained relevant because of his continued hold over EBCs and Kurmi-Kushwahas, and the BJP’s inability to make significant inroads in the OBC caste bloc in Bihar. But now it is a matter of time that the JD(U) will disintegrate and most of its leaders will join the BJP, while some will join the RJD,” a senior BJP leader from Bihar said.
The departure of the veteran socialist leaders has weakened the ideological clarity that once defined the movement. Yet, the ground remains fertile, some argue.
“The social changes unleashed by Mandal are irreversible. Backward classes, EBCs and Dalits now occupy a central place in Bihar’s political imagination. Any party seeking power must negotiate with these constituencies. No one speaks against reservations. The BJP has already OBC-ised itself in all states,” said the BJP leader.
But JD(U) national spokesperson Rajiv Ranjan Prasad insists Nitish’s innings is “not over”.
“There have been many thinkers of social justice in Bihar who never got a chance to govern. Nitish Kumar took Ram Manohar Lohia’s ideas to the ground. Lohia had called women as the ‘single largest group of backward citizens’ in the country. His tenure as CM will be remembered as a milestone. He will continue to remain the voice of the backward classes at the Centre,” Prasad told The Indian Express.