Bihar’s Skewed Democracy And A Hoodwinked Verdict

Gallagher Index of the Bihar election is well above 20, one of the highest disproportionality levels seen in any Indian State election. It jeopardize the very spirit of democracy and election process. The 2025 Bihar Assembly election has been projected as a sweeping mandate for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), whose tally of 202 seats in a 243-member House suggests a political tsunami. But beneath the celebratory veneer lies a sobering statistical reality.

Bihar’s verdict is less a reflection of overwhelming popular endorsement and more a textbook demonstration of how the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system can distort the will of the people. At the centre of this distortion lies a scientific tool used globally to measure the gap between public will and political outcomes: the Gallagher Index.

What Is the Gallagher Index?

The Gallagher Index, also known as the Least Squares Index (LSq), is a mathematical formula developed to measure the disproportionality between the percentage of votes a party receives and the percentage of seats it ultimately wins. It was invented by Dr. Michael Gallagher, an Irish political scientist, in 1991, to provide a more accurate and sensitive tool for understanding how electoral systems—especially FPTP—distort representation.

In simple terms, the Gallagher Index asks: Do parties get seats in proportion to the votes they receive? A low Gallagher score (0–5) indicates a highly proportional system. A moderate score (5–10) shows some distortion. A high score (10–20) reflects major disproportionality. Anything above 20 signals that democracy is tilting away from fairness.

The Gallagher Index is calculated by comparing each party’s vote share with its seat share, squaring these differences to highlight distortions, adding them up, and then adjusting the total to produce a single number that shows how unfair or disproportional an election result is. The larger the gap between votes and seats, the higher is the distortion. It is widely used by political scientists, democratic reformers, and electoral commissions across the world.

The Gallagher Index in Bihar

Using the vote shares of the two principal blocs:

• NDA vote share: ~46.7%

• MGB vote share: ~37.5%

And their seat shares:

• NDA seat share: 202/243 ≈ 83.1%

• MGB seat share: 35/243 ≈ 14.4%

This yields a Gallagher Index well above 20—one of the highest disproportionality levels seen in any Indian State election. A GI above 10 is already troubling. A GI above 20 is democratic disfigurement. In Bihar’s case, 46.7% votes became 83% seats for the NDA and 37.5% votes shrank to 14% seats for the MGB. This is not electoral preference; it is statistical alchemy, a distortion created by the architecture of FPTP.

The Global Context

Countries using FPTP frequently suffer from disproportional outcomes. The UK, which uses FPTP for House of Commons elections, routinely records Gallagher scores between 12 and 17—considered very high by international standards. For example: In 2015, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) won 12.6% votes but received just 1 seat out of 650. In 2019, the Conservatives won 43.6% votes but secured 56% of the seats.

These distortions are regularly criticized by democratic theorists. Yet even the UK rarely crosses a GI of 18–19. Bihar crossing 20 places it at the extreme end of global disproportionality—more skewed than many flawed democracies regularly cited in political science literature.

Election Management, Not Popular Wave

The NDA’s triumph was not a groundswell of ideological support, but a masterclass in election management and tactical conversion like Targeted welfare timing. The ₹10,000 transfer to 1.25 crore women was made just weeks before voting. The NDA well played Micro-engineering caste clusters using LJP(RV), which flipped 17 previously Opposition-held seats. Hyper-local booth management and granular mobilization was another trump card. The NDA was Efficient in seat–vote conversion through candidate placement and alliance calculus. The NDA did not win “the State”; it won “the constituencies”.

RJD Is The Silent Winner

The most striking irony is that the RJD, with the highest vote share (≈23%), languished at 25 seats. In a proportional system, RJD would have been the single largest party and a natural claimant to government formation. But FPTP penalizes dispersed support and rewards clustered votes. Thus the RJD’s verdict was Strong in legitimacy but Weak in conversion. This is precisely what the Gallagher Index captures: the gap between a party’s democratic strength and its legislative size.

Bihar’s 2025 election should not be mythologized as a thunderous mandate. It should be recognized as a distorted outcome produced by the structural biases of FPTP. When half the voters delivered five-sixths of the Assembly to one alliance when the party with the highest vote share is pushed to the margins. Electoral design overrides popular will and democracy quietly shifts from representation to illusion.

The Gallagher Index unmasks this illusion. It does not say Bihar voted wrongly—it says Bihar’s votes were redistributed mathematically, not democratically. Bihar’s democracy did not fail; it was mechanically outsmarted.