India, Nov. 15 -- When an alliance's two main constituents have a strike rate in excess of 80%, and it manages to get almost half of all votes polled (a vote share of 46.7%, 8.7-percentage points higher than the opposing grouping's), you get a result like the Bihar one, where the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won (or was leading in, at 8 pm) 201 seats in the 243-member assembly. Such was the scale of victory - no grouping or party has ever won 46.7% of the popular vote in the state before - that the NDA kept building on its lead as counting continued through the day, eventually crossing the 200-seat mark. Such landslide wins - and Bihar is definitely one - are the result of the winning side picking an issue that resonates with the electorate, or simply doing something for it (such as a Big Bang populist scheme), or the losing side imploding, or both. Bihar 2025 is a case of the third. There is a strong operational aspect to the victory - this is the kind of success an alliance enjoys when its constituents pull together, ensuring a near-complete transfer of votes to partners. The strike rates of the two main partners - the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Janata Dal- United, which contested 101 seats each - at 89.1% and 83.8% clearly demonstrate this. In 2020, the JD(U)'s chances were sabotaged by the LJP; this time, the LJP was part of the alliance, and won 19 of the 28 seats it contested. From choice of candidates to campaign effort, the NDA didn't put a step wrong - unlike the opposing Grand Alliance (or Mahagathbandhan), the divisions between whose constituents surfaced repeatedly over the campaign. Amplified by the continuing popularity of incumbent chief minister Nitish Kumar and a campaign fronted by a popular Prime Minister, the NDA's performance exceeded the most optimistic exit-poll projections. But there is also a strategic aspect to the victory, one built around several strands. The first one is welfarism, which has worked well for incumbent governments in recent polls - from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh to Jharkhand - especially when it is sharply focused on women. The NDA's margin of victory is likely to have been narrower in the absence of cash transfers to key constituencies ahead of the polls. These schemes ensured the NDA's coalition of extremes remained loyal. The second one was the BJP's decision to showcase Nitish Kumar - a largely invisible presence during the campaign on account of his indifferent health - as the face of the NDA, despite what must have been a very strong temptation to push for its own candidate in a state where it is now the single-largest political party in terms of representation in the assembly (it had won or was leading in 90 seats at 8 pm, compared to the JD(U)'s 83). And the third one was the alliance's choice of campaign issues - the old faithful duo of development and nationalism, and reminding voters (90% of whom had a first hand experience of the RJD's rule in the state) of what it termed Jungle Raj. The grouping refused to be distracted either by the traction Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party appeared to be getting - it won no seats, and managed a vote share of 3.3% - or the Grand Alliance's emphasis on the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls (and allegations of vote theft) or Nitish Kumar's health. The Grand Alliance's constituents bickered over seats, spoke in many voices, and chose issues that did not resonate with the electorate (for instance, this newspaper has repeatedly written about the revision in electoral rolls being a non-issue in Bihar). The result isn't just an extremely poor performance, but likely marks the demise of the Lalu political dynasty. One of his sons lost the election, and the other, the leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), and his chosen successor, scraped through, and the party's M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) vote bank is beginning to show cracks. The AIMIM now has more Muslim legislators in the state than the RJD. Anyone looking for answers to larger questions regarding Bihar - what it will take to boost the state's economy and create jobs; the future of the JD(U) - will have to wait. As will those who anticipated the 2025 election to break away from the prevailing dynamics of the state's political landscape, for the results once again show the importance of the around-20% vote share the JD(U) enjoys - which pretty much means any alliance it is a part of wins. Kumar's near-uninterrupted two-decade-long run (mostly in partnership with the BJP) continues. Still, the RJD's performance and the imminent challenge the victorious JD-U now faces in finding a successor to Nitish Kumar in the next few years mean that Bihar's politics could be in for a period of churn....