RJD slips below 40: Factors that dashed Tejashwi Yadav's chief ministerial ambitions

The Mai Bahin Maan Yojana, guaranteed by the RJD and Congress in their joint poll manifesto, aims to provide Rs 2,500 per month to women from financially vulnerable and backward communities if the Grand Alliance wins the high-stakes Bihar election.

Yadav’s pledge come a day after the Nitish Kumar-led government credited Rs 10,000 each into the bank accounts of 25 lakh women under its entrepreneurship and self-employment initiative, a move seen as a counter to the Opposition’s women-centric campaign pitch.

Tejashwi's inability to expand  his 'social coalition'

If one analyses the performance in hindsight it appears that Tejashwi needed to work doubly hard for the RJD to shake off the perception that it is an exclusive M-Y tent, but these are surely new and dynamic beginnings for the party.

From the very beginning of his political career, Tejaswi has attempted to remedy these mistakes. He consciously looped in a number of EBC and Dalit leaders, tagged his party as not merely one of “M-Y” but of “A to Z”, implying his intent to reach out to all sections of the population. Added to this, there was a genuine attempt to include the two most fluid constituencies -- women and youth. Quite clearly, the accumulation failed to yield anything electorally for the Yadav scion and his party.

Expanding the 'social coalition' was paramount especially in a state like Bihar. Tejashwi understood that navigating the caste matrix to create a much broader social coalition was the biggest challenge that comes in between being in power and remaining perpetually in the opposition.

'Jungle Raj': How ghost of the past haunted Tejashwi

Despite a calibrated move to project Tejashwi as the face of the party, be it on campaign banners or taking the lead during poll campaigns, the tag of 'Jungle Raj' associated with the RJD continued to haunt the party. The 'jungle raj' narrative dominated the Bihar election campaign. Ruling alliance leaders frequently invoked this term to criticize the RJD's past governance. Opposition leaders counter by highlighting current law and order issues. Voters' memories of the past influence their choices, as political rivals leverage these anxieties to shape the electoral battle.

The phrase is used and reused by the ruling alliance's leaders to refer to the alleged lawlessness and poor administration during the rule of Lalu Prasad and subsequently his wife Rabri Devi in the 1990s.

How Tejashwi's campaign lost steam in 2025?

A common perception among the RJD supporters and the Yadav-family is that the RJD and in extension Mahagathbandhan lost grounds due to its inability to lead a cogent and directed campaign. There is also a perception that Rahul Gandhi's ‘Matdata Adhikar (voters’ rights) Yatra’ in the state attracted more manpower across constituents, thereby crippling RJD's independent electioneering plans.

It took Tejashwi’s 2020 campaign for the larger opposition to make an issue out of unemployment nationally, as major opposition parties soon began to point at the Modi government’s persistent failure to generate jobs. His message struck, and he became an icon among the youth, across caste groups, and gradually began to be perceived as the only crusader against unemployment – so much so that he could steer the RJD to become the single largest party in the assembly, even when he couldn’t take his alliance past the majority mark.