India, Oct. 6 -- Bihar will vote in two phases to elect a new assembly on November 6 and November 11. We will know the mandate of the 74 million strong electorate on November 14. Predicting electoral outcomes in India is something best avoided. Psephologists have had to regularly eat crow in the recent past. What is more useful is to flag the fault lines which shape an electoral contest. There are five of them which can be underlined for the forthcoming Bihar contest.

The first is to avoid the cocktail of stereotyping and confirmation biases that marks analyses by armchair commentators who fail to differentiate between top-down and organic narratives in an election. The run-up to Bihar elections has been dominated by the cacophony around...