Overview

• India’s Election Commission scheduled voting for November 6 and 11 with counting on November 14, compressing Bihar’s assembly contest into two phases.
• NDA leaders voiced confidence of a decisive win and centered their appeal on governance, citing new cash support for 2.1 million women, higher pensions for 13 million beneficiaries, and boosted honorariums for frontline workers.
• Seat-sharing remains unsettled: within the NDA, talks are balancing JD(U)–BJP parity with demands from allies such as LJP (Ram Vilas), HAM and RLSP, while in the opposition, Congress is negotiating a smaller slate than 2020 and VIP’s Mukesh Sahani has pressed for influence.
• The BJP has assigned three election in-charges across all 40 Lok Sabha regions to manage 243 seats and plans further talks this week, even as it crafts a strategy to blunt Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj, which party insiders say could pick up a handful of seats.
• The opposition banks on Tejashwi Yadav and the Muslim–Yadav base, opinion polling points to an NDA lead, and the recent voter-roll revision is drawing scrutiny from parties that fear their supporters were dropped.