India, Oct. 23 -- In the 2020 Bihar assembly polls, the Opposition's Grand Alliance fell agonisingly short of the majority mark in the assembly - the difference between the winning and the losing coalitions was just around 12,000 votes - largely because smaller groups and weaker castes carried memories of Yadav dominance during the RJD heydays and counter-mobilised in the dying days of the campaign. This exposed a weakness for the otherwise robust regional party - despite its solid voter base of Yadavs, Muslims and some dominant groups, it struggles to attract wider support across castes. The only election it won in the last two decades was when Nitish Kumar helped stitch together a broad coalition of weaker caste groups in 2015.

This ti...