The year ahead: Back to the future
In 2025, Delhi and Bihar face key elections, testing AAP's governance and Nitish Kumar's alliances, amid shifting political dynamics in India.
On the surface, 2025 seems like a relatively quiet year for politics. After the bustle of the 2024 general elections and two blockbuster assembly polls (Maharashtra and Haryana), this year is scheduled to see only two significant electoral battles.

In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will fight to buck anti-incumbency and convince citizens to give it a third consecutive full term. It has had a bruising five years, with virtually the entire front line leadership of the party placed behind bars over corruption allegations, and with the government’s flagship schemes stuttering amid a feud between the lieutenant governor (LG) and the chief minister.
The AAP’s primary opposition in Delhi is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Buoyed by its surprise victories in Maharashtra and Haryana, it will look to expand beyond its single-digit tally by exploiting simmering middle-class angst over crumbling infrastructure in parts of Delhi, and the anti-incumbency associated with 10 years of the AAP in power.
With just 70 seats in play, Delhi might seem like a local contest. But beyond the prestige of it being the national capital, the city is a microcosm of the broader currents shaping politics.
Delhi is also the birthplace of India’s youngest major party. Born of the churn and chaos of the anti-corruption movement of 2010-11, the AAP has stamped its presence on the political landscape, storming into the Delhi assembly elections in 2013, before capturing power decisively in 2015. Since then, it has won polls in a landslide in Punjab and attempted to expand to other states, albeit with indifferent results.
It is now a national party and Arvind Kejriwal a front line leader with far more heft than would normally be accorded to the chief minister of a small city/state.
Of course, the sands of time have shifted over this decade. The AAP is the establishment, and the edge of its insurgent presence has eroded. Its pitch as the party of civic governance is being seriously challenged, and its claim of being a different kind of political movement finds increasingly fewer takers.
That said, the AAP has a dedicated cadre and a focussed machinery, and Kejriwal has a base of unswerving supporters, especially from the poorer sections, who have seen real material change to their lives from this government’s subsidies and schemes.
When the city goes to the polls this spring, it will be a referendum of sorts on the AAP and its promise.
The sandbox of caste politicsIf Delhi is the cradle of the AAP and anti-corruption politics, then Bihar is the sandbox of caste politics. No state, with the possible exception of Maharashtra, has undergone as vicious a political churn as Bihar.
CM Nitish Kumar is set to complete a five-year term, but has flipped partners twice in this period, ditching his election ally BJP in 2022 for the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and his friend-turned-foe-turned-friend Lalu Prasad. The Mahagathbandhan or Grand Alliance government survived 17 months before Kumar’s “conscience” pushed him back to the BJP.
Kumar has been remarkably successful in straddling the state’s political fault lines. Paired with his keen political instinct and appeal among key demographics, this makes him an abiding force. Backing him is the broad coalition of small backward groups known collectively as extremely backward castes, as well as women, a base that he has carefully cultivated.
Despite doing poorly in the 2020 assembly polls, Kumar’s acumen ensured that his Janata Dal (United) bounced back in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, winning the same number of seats in the state as the BJP.
Lalu Prasad and his scion, Tejashwi Yadav, face a different kind of challenge. After coming close to snatching power in the 2020 state election, the RJD slipped in the Lok Sabha polls, winning just four seats compared to the JD(U)’s 12. Behind this underwhelming show: the domination of Yadavs in the party, and the reciprocal resentment or fear among smaller groups that have to negotiate this skewed power dynamic in everyday life.
In Uttar Pradesh next door, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav worked on correcting this and was rewarded handsomely in the Lok Sabha polls, emerging as the single largest party in the state. Tejashwi will have to craft something similar to broaden his social coalition.
The backdrop of these two contests will be made up of the threads that comprise the India story: the prosperous metropolises in a poor state; the politics of aspiration and the shifting role caste plays in framing ambition; the hope of socioeconomic mobility as the central driving force of the political economy in India.
2025, therefore, is not a year of muted politics. In this year, it will be clearer if the BJP is readying a next generation of national leaders, if the Opposition can come up with a new vocabulary of aspirational politics, if smaller parties and regional outfits can move beyond the safety of parochialism and dominant vote banks, and if there are new cleavages within once-monolithic demographics such as Dalits and women.
Meanwhile, the question of how elections should be conducted will be examined, as a joint parliamentary committee takes up bills aimed at ushering in simultaneous polls. All in a year when a much-delayed census exercise is finally scheduled to begin. All leading up to a contentious delimitation exercise that could open up new fault lines. 2025 is not set to be a quiet year at all. It is likely to be a year of tectonic but subterranean shifts.
