Tejashwi Yadav's MY-BAAP versus Akhilesh Yadav's PDA: A battle for Bihar 2025 elections
Tejashwi Yadav, the Rashtriya Janata Dal's (RJD) main leader, is preparing to contest the 2025 Bihar elections under a new political acronym: MY-BAAP. This is based on a similar strategy successfully employed by Samajwadi Party's Akhilesh Yadav while he introduced the "PDA" acronym to help unite the marginalized in Uttar Pradesh. In contrast, however, Yadav's MY-BAAP campaign is at a disadvantage compared to Akhilesh's more strategic approach.
MY-BAAP represents the Muslim-Yadav, Bahujan (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes), Aghda (upper castes), Aadi aabaadi, (half the population that constitutes women), and poor classes. Yadav admitted the acronym encompasses nearly 90% of Bihar's population. This is RJD's effort to dispel the notion that the party is more or less for the Muslims and Yadavs to widen its electoral base in Bihar's forthcoming elections.
In the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections, RJD and its allies won 110 seats short of the majority. The promise of ₹2,500 a month for women has generated great interest in this promise, especially in a state where the per capita income is just a third of the national average. This financial security for women is bound to attract a large section of the electorate in the 2025 Bihar polls.
While RJD tries to dislodge Nitish Kumar's JD(U) government, which has been ruling Bihar since 2005, the political equation in the state is complicated with the entry of new players. Former political strategist Prashant Kishor, who had Jan Suraaj Party, may also cause an electoral upset. While his influence seemed limited in the recent bypolls, Kishor still has the potential to influence the Bihar political equation in 2025.
Though RJD has been very bold in the MY-BAAP strategy, Akhilesh Yadav's PDA approach in Uttar Pradesh seems to have worked better. As the Samajwadi Party won the general elections in June 2024, their by-election in November 2024 could not be as great, which again shows how a regional party strategy works in the minds of the electors. While it prepares for the 2025 state polls, political analysts suggest that the BJP-led NDA is still ahead with a lead in the State in which it had emerged dominant in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
