The pivotal vote of the Bihar campaign, for ally and adversary alike, remains the Narendra Modi vote.

In successive Lok Sabha elections since 2014, the Modi sentiment has arrived like a storm on the rampage and torn Bihar’s traditional voting patterns asunder. He has created new combinations and new polarities like no non-Bihar leader arguably ever has. He remains, even at a remarkably low-voltage presence in 2024, the chief arbiter of what will go which way.

Nobody is sensed of the criticality of the Modi vote or Modi sentiment as acutely as his chief partner, Nitish Kumar’s JDU. It is the soft underbelly of the NDA alliance and where it lacks the palpable endorsement and backing of the Modi project, it appears to sag and give. The odds are the BJP’s allies will bring the NDA numbers down, not the seats where the “kamal” is on the EVM.

Munger, which Nitish’s confidant and JDU heavy roller, Lallan Singh, is seeking to retain, could be a classic example.

From all accounts, the Lallan enterprise here has been given the run and made to sweat by a political rookie who until just the other day was a pharmacist in a railway hospital in Delhi, far removed from the rough and tumble of the gangland politics of the Lakhisarai-Barahia belt.

Anita Mahto was plucked out of the hat like some trick of magic by RJD chieftain Lalu Prasad a few months ago, summarily married to party man Ashok Mahto and handed the Munger challenge against Lallan Singh.

Why her, though? A quick cameo: Ashok Mahto would have been the RJD’s natural choice, but he stands convicted of murder and was recently let out of jail. Elections were approaching and wives as a solution to trouble seems a tactic that finds favour with Lalu. Ashok was promptly given one. And therefore Anita.

But new and unfamiliar though she is with the complicated business of elections, especially in the meshed field of Bihar, she appears to have picked up the tricks of the trade swifty and, with a little help from her rival Lallan Singh, become the talk of the constituency.

“Lallan Singh kaa paseena chhoraa di hai Kumari Anita,” a young trader in the Lakhisarai bazaar tells me, “Aascharya nahin hoga agar jeet bhi jaaye.” (Anita is giving Lallan Singh a run for his money, won’t be surprised if she wins.)

In truth, it is not Anita who is doing ravingly; it is Lallan Singh who’s been faring a little poorly, despite his political and electoral heft.

At one stage he felt the heat so close he had the feared and fabled local bahubali-politician Anant Singh let out of jail on parole so he could strut about this mostly rural and ill-fed constituency on his behalf. Anant Singh, an upper caste hoodlum, went out riding roughshod and intimidating the electorate. There was a backlash whose eruption Lallan Singh must blame himself for.

The move to send out Anant Singh went down badly, especially among the Kurmis, Koeris and Dhanuks, all extremely backward castes (EBCs) that the JDU-BJP counts among its loyalists.

The EBCs are in outspoken revolt. Arjun Prasad, an EBC elder in the rural interiors of Munger, told us: “Open declaration, no vote for Lallan Singh, we voted to defeat him, saaf baat.”

On being asked if they were not Nitish-Modi loyalists, Arjun spat back: “We may have voted for them in the past but that does not mean we are slaves, we have our own will.” Gathered peers in a small assembly of sorts, agreed.

But there is more to Lallan’s discomfiture at the hustings. He is widely seen as arrogant and unapproachable, a creature of power who barely even bothers with constituents unless it is election time. “Even during elections,” carps a local teacher who wouldn’t be named, “he prefers working through his henchmen and touts. Ask anyone around and they will tell you how unpopular he is.”

Here’s where the Modi vote and the Modi sentiment come in. Here is where Lallan Singh may be feeling the pinch. Munger’s raging open secret is that the BJP-RSS network hasn’t risen to Lallan’s assistance or aid.

The Teli community, which dominates the buzzing retail hubs of Lakhisarai, is otherwise sworn to the BJP and (caste brother) Modi, but is openly campaigning against Lallan Singh; one of the top Teli traders has, in fact, opened a huge area of his private residence in the Dalpatti bazaar to accommodate the RJD office.

Teli society leaders tell me they have surprised themselves but can’t be supporting Lallan Singh. “If there was a directive from the top to help Lallan we would have been forced to, but there is no such directive,” a member of the traders’ cell of the BJP says, adding what he himself calls a “popular bazaar whisper” — that local BJP MLA and Bihar’s new deputy chief minister, Vijay Singh, “wouldn’t mind” if Lallan were to lose.

“Lallan was cursing Vijay Singh and even Modiji till just the other day, why should he now expect us to be securing his election?”

Lallan could have done well — and been a little less worried — with assurance and support from the Modi sentiment.