New Delhi, Nov. 4 -- Bihar remains one of India's most politically significant states - and one of the few in the Hindi heartland where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has never secured a majority on its own.

The battle for 243 assembly seats, with 122 needed to form a government, is being shaped by shifting coalitions, caste equations, criminal taint among candidates, and the growing clout of women voters.

A key question this time: will the entry of political strategist Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party alter the electoral calculus? And, perhaps most crucially, can Nitish Kumar's two-decade-long run at the helm endure another term?

For nearly two decades, the power dynamics within Bihar's National Democratic Alliance (NDA) told a fa...