What does the new Bihar assembly look like? What is the profile of the 243 MLAs who have been elected to serve Bihar’s citizens over the ne...
What does the new Bihar assembly look like? What is the profile of the 243 MLAs who have been elected to serve Bihar’s citizens over the next five years? And what does a timeline of data on the sociological composition of the assembly tell us about Bihar’s political class and politics more broadly?
In this article, we look at the representational outcomes of the 2020 Bihar election in terms of demographics (caste, gender and religion) and other variables, drawn from the affidavits that each candidate signed when they filed for their nomination.
The demographic data has been collected before and during the campaign by a team of researchers at the Trivedi Centre for Political Data. The affidavit data has been processed from the data made available by the Association for Democratic Reforms.
Caste
Our data reveals that 40.7% of the members of the new assembly belong to the Other Backward Classes category, above the upper castes, who make nearly 30% of the Assembly. Scheduled Caste representation is fixed at 16.5% of the seats (seldom do any Scheduled Caste candidate win in general seats) and Muslim make for nearly 8% of the new assembly.
If we look at the data in absolute numbers instead of percentages, most upper-caste MLAs...
