Bihar assembly election: Over 27.4% Dalit voters don't trust EC, 58% consider unemployment biggest issue, says survey

The term of the 243-member Bihar Assembly ends on November 22, according to the Election Commission data.

Over 27.4% Dalit voters in Bihar have “no trust” in the Election Commission, according to a survey.

Citing a survey by the National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Associations (NACDAOR), a report by The Hindu stated that over 58% Scheduled Caste (SC) voters in Bihar thought that unemployment was the biggest issue in the upcoming state assembly election. NACDAOR is a conglomerate of hundreds of associations across the nation. “It covered a total of 18,581 SC voters from across the state and was conducted between June 10 and July 4, Ashok Bharti, Chairman of NACDAOR told The Hindu.

The NACDAOR conducted this survey in collaboration with political consultancy firm The Convergent Media.

According to the 2022 caste-based survey in Bihar, Scheduled Castes comprised 19.65% of the state’s population.

Bharti said since the Election Commission started its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the rolls as the survey was underway, one question was put on the survey mid-way, for which only around 8,500 responses could be gathered.

In response to the question “Do you fear losing your vote in the new voter list?”, over 71% of respondents said yes and 23.4% said no with a little over 5% not expressing an opinion.

On the general question of whether they trusted the Election Commission to be impartial, over 27% said no, about 51% said yes, and 21% said they didn’t know.

The survey asked 11 questions such as “who their favourite political leader at the national and state levels is”, “how is the work of the state government under Chief Minister Nitish Kumar” among others.

According to the survey, 47.5% of the respondents said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was their favourite leader at the national level, 40.3% said Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, and about 12% named other politicians.

To the question “who do they credit for the caste census?”, 33.15% respondents said PM Modi, 30.81% said Rahul Gandhi, and 27.57% said Bihar Leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav. Meanwhile, about 8% named other politicians. The survey also showed that about 48% said the work of the Nitish Kumar-led government was “bad”, while about 45% said it was good.

“A lot of people do surveys of Scheduled Castes, but hardly do many of them actually speak to us on the ground. This survey is of Dalits, by Dalits,” Bharti told The Hindu.

According to Bharti, they went through the process of training enumerators to survey SC respondents across about 49 Assembly segments in the six regions of Bihar, namely Kosi, Mithilanchal, Seemanchal, Bhojpur, Champaran, and Magadh Pataliputra regions.

“We have actually surveyed people on the ground. There was higher trust in our enumerators. Unfortunately for the question on SIR, we could not cover all respondents because it came midway,” he said.