Category World News

Millions of voters in India’s third most populous state, Bihar, are voting on Thursday in the first phase of elections that could not only shape the state’s future but also serve as a bellwether for the broader mood of the nation, 17 months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned to power in New Delhi with a diminished mandate.

The elections for the Bihar Legislative Assembly will determine who governs Bihar for the next five years. The state is India’s poorest. But its 130 million people – more than any European nation – give Bihar hefty political clout.

Roughly half of Bihar’s constituencies vote on Thursday. The second phase of the elections will be held next week.

Here is what’s at stake.

Which constituencies are voting in phase one in Bihar?

Bihar has 243 assembly constituencies, 121 of which are up for voting on Thursday. Some of these constituencies are reserved for members of the Scheduled Castes (SC), communities that have been historically marginalised.

The Legislative Assembly, or the Vidhan Sabha, is the lower house of the bicameral Bihar Legislature. The last elections were in November 2020.

The 121 constituencies are: Alamnagar, Bihariganj, Singheshwar (SC), Madhepura, Sonbarsha (SC), Saharsa, Simri Bakhtiarpur, Mahishi, Kusheshwar Asthan (SC), Gaura Bauram, Benipur, Alinagar, Darbhanga Rural, Darbhanga, Hayaghat, Bahadurpur, Keoti, Jale, Gaighat, Aurai, Minapur, Bochaha (SC), Sakra (SC), Kurhani, Muzaffarpur, Kanti, Baruraj, Paroo, Sahebganj, Baikunthpur, Barauli, Gopalganj, Kuchaikote, Bhorey (SC), Hathua, Siwan, Ziradei, Darauli (SC), Raghunathpur, Daraundha, Barharia, Goriakothi, Maharajganj, Ekma, Manjhi, Baniapur, Taraiya, Marhaura, Chapra, Garkha (SC), Amnour, Parsa, Sonepur, Hajipur, Lalganj, Vaishali, Mahua, Raja Pakar (SC), Raghopur, Mahnar, Patepur (SC), Kalyanpur (SC), Warisnagar, Samastipur, Ujiarpur, Morwa, Sarairanjan, Mohiuddinnagar, Bibhutipur, Rosera (SC), Hasanpur, Cheria Bariarpur, Bachhwara, Teghra, Matihani, Sahebpur Kamal, Begusarai, Bakhri (SC), Alauli (SC), Khagaria, Beldaur, Parbatta, Tarapur, Munger, Jamalpur, Suryagarha, Lakhisarai, Sheikhpura, Barbigha, Asthawan, Biharsharif, Rajgir (SC), Islampur, Hilsa, Nalanda, Harnaut, Mokama, Barh, Bakhtiarpur, Digha, Bankipur, Kumhrar, Patna Sahib, Fatuha, Danapur, Maner, Phulwari (SC), Masaurhi (SC), Paliganj, Bikram, Sandesh, Barhara, Arrah, Agiaon (SC), Tarari, Jagdishpur, Shahpur, Brahampur, Buxar, Dumraon and Rajpur (SC).

What is the turnout?

According to local media reports, the voter turnout in Bihar had reached 42.3 percent by 1pm (07:30 GMT). In 2020, the final turnout was 57 percent.

How many eligible voters does Bihar have?

There are more than 74 million eligible voters in Bihar, more than the entire population of the United Kingdom or France.

Who are the main contenders?

The incumbent government in Bihar is an alliance led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the regional Janata Dal (United) or JD(U). These two are allied with smaller parties.

The JD(U) is led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who has ruled Bihar for most of the past 20 years.

On the other side of the divide is the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), also a regional political party, led by former Indian Railways Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, who is currently released on bail after being convicted in corruption cases. In effect, the party is now led by his son Tejashwi Yadav. The RJD is part of another alliance, including the country’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, and smaller parties.

Jan Suraaj, a new party founded last year by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, is also in the fray. In the past, Kishor has worked with both the BJP and Congress.

In the first phase of the elections, Tejashwi, the RJD leader, is contesting the Raghopur seat, which he won in 2015 and 2020. Running against him are the BJP’s Satish Kumar and the Jan Suraaj Party’s Chanchal Singh. Tejashwi’s father has also won the Raghopur seat twice in the past while his mother, Rabri Devi, has won it three times.

BJP candidate and Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhary is contesting the Tarapur seat. Also running on a  BJP ticket is folk singer Maithili Thakur, who is running for the seat in Alinagar.

What are the key issues in these elections?

Primarily an agrarian state, Bihar is suffering from a struggling economy and has the highest poverty rate in India, according to a report published by the Indian government think tank NITI Aayog last year.

Both major blocs – the BJP-JD(U) alliance and the RJD-Congress coalition – have pledged to create jobs to help the state’s economy.

The two alliances are also making appeals to women, who constitute nearly half of the eligible voters in Bihar. The state has seen a steady rise in women’s political participation with female voter turnout often exceeding that of men.

The Congress-led bloc has pledged welfare schemes such as a monthly allowance for women. The BJP has also implemented the Chief Minister’s Women Employment Scheme. Under this scheme, about $880m was distributed among 7.5 million women in September to help them start businesses.

Why are these elections significant?

The elections are a key test for the popularity of Modi, who won a third term in the June 2024 elections. His party failed to win a majority and is reliant on regional allies, including the JD(U), to form the government.

The BJP has won most major state elections since the national vote and will be looking to continue that streak in Bihar. The state sends 40 members to the Lok Sabha, or lower house of the Indian Parliament. In the Lok Sabha elections in June 2024, the BJP won 12 of these seats while the JD(U) won another 12. Another BJP alliance partner, the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), won another five seats.

But the RJD has a strong presence in the state too. In the last two state elections, in 2015 and 2020, the RJD emerged as the single largest party. In 2020, the two coalitions ended up almost neck-and-neck in vote share with 37 percent each, but the BJP-JD(U) alliance won enough seats to come to power.

These elections are also significant because they could mark the final political contest between Nitish Kumar, 74, and Lalu Prasad Yadav, 77. The two men have dominated politics in Bihar for nearly 40 years. They’ve often been allies and at other times have been bitter rivals.

But the elections are also vital because they come at a time when the credibility of India’s electoral politics is under rare question. The opposition, led by Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, has accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of revising the official voter list, or electoral rolls, in a way designed to benefit the BJP in the state.

The so-called Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls was carried out in recent months, and all voters were required to furnish a set of documents to prove they were Indian nationals and legal residents of the constituency where they vote.

As Al Jazeera reported in July, many of the poorest people in Bihar, like those across India, do not hold any of the several documents that the ECI listed as proof of identity. With Bihar having the country’s lowest literacy rate, for instance, many people in the state do not have education certificates, one of the documents that work as proof of identity. Bihar also has one of India’s lowest rates of birth registration, so millions do not have birth certificates, another valid document, per the ECI.

The poorest, people from vulnerable communities, like traditionally disadvantaged castes or Muslims, have historically voted more for the RJD-Congress alliance.

In September, the ECI released a list of 74.2 million voters after removing the names of 4.7 million people. In Seemanchal, where the Muslim population is especially high, the removal of voters from the list was higher than the state average.

This exercise also played out against the backdrop of a campaign led by Modi himself to portray Seemanchal as a bastion of undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants even though facts do not back up those assertions, as Al Jazeera reported in October.

In recent days, the ECI has announced it will implement the Bihar-style SIR exercise nationally.

When is the second phase of Bihar’s assembly elections?

The second phase of voting will take place on Tuesday when the remaining 122 constituencies will be at stake.

When will the election results be out?

The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act was meant to keep children safe. Instead, it is keeping the public uninformed. Within days of the law taking effect in late July 2025, X (formerly Twitter) started hiding videos of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza from UK timelines behind content warnings and age barriers. A law sold as safeguarding has become one of the most effective censorship tools Britain has ever built. What is unfolding is no accident. It is the result of legislation that weaponises child-protection rhetoric to normalise censorship, identity verification and online surveillance.

The roots of Britain’s online censorship crisis go back almost a decade, to MindGeek, now rebranded as Aylo, the scandal-ridden company behind Pornhub. This tax-dodging, exploitative porn empire worked closely with the UK government to develop an age-verification system called AgeID, a plan that would have effectively handed Aylo a monopoly over legal adult content by making smaller competitors pay or perish. Public backlash killed AgeID in 2019, but the idea survived. Once one democracy entertained the notion that access to online content should be gated by identity checks, the precedent was set. The Digital Economy Act 2017 laid the groundwork, and the Online Safety Act 2023 made it law. Today, several European Union states, including France and Germany, are exploring similar legislation, each cloaked in the same rhetoric of “protecting children”. This is not conspiracy; it is the natural convergence of corporate capture and state control, wrapped in the moral language of child safety.

The Online Safety Act empowers Ofcom to police almost every corner of the internet, from social media and search engines to adult content platforms, under threat of fines of up to 18 million pounds ($24m) or 10 percent of global revenue. Platforms can be designated as “Category 1” services, triggering the harshest rules, including mandatory age verification, identity checks for contributors and the removal of vaguely defined “harmful” material. Wikipedia now faces this exact threat. In August 2025, the High Court dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the categorisation rules, clearing the way for Ofcom to treat it as a high-risk platform. The foundation has warned that compliance would force it to censor vital information and endanger volunteer editors by linking their real identities to their writing. If it refuses, the UK could, in theory, be legally empowered to block access altogether, a breathtaking example of how “child protection” becomes a tool for information control. Already, Ofcom has opened multiple investigations into major porn sites and social networks over alleged non-compliance. The law’s chilling effect is no longer hypothetical; it is operational.

Age-verification systems are fundamentally incompatible with privacy and security, in fact, any id-verification system should immediately raise suspicion. The July 25 breach of the Tea dating app, with thousands of photos and over 13,000 sensitive ID documents leaked and circulated on 4chan, or the even more recent Discord data breach exposing over 70 thousand government ID documents after a third-part service was hacked, proved the point.

When systems store verification data that link real identities to online activity, they create a treasure trove for hackers, blackmailers and states. History already offers warnings, from the 2013 Brazzers leak of nearly 800,000 accounts to the FBI’s finding that pornography-related exposure scams remain one of the leading categories of online extortion. Now imagine this infrastructure applied not just to adult content, but to political speech, journalism and activism. The same tools being built for “child safety” enable unprecedented blackmail and political manipulation. A single breach could expose journalists, whistleblowers or public officials. And in a world where data often cross borders, there is no guarantee that verification databases in democracies will stay out of the hands of authoritarians. The more we digitise “trust”, the more we endanger it.

The most insidious feature of this legislative trend is how it absolves parents while empowering the state. Existing parental control tools are sophisticated: parents can already monitor and restrict children’s internet use through devices, routers and apps. The push for government-mandated age verification is not about those tools failing; it is about some parents choosing not to use them and governments seizing that negligence as a pretext for surveillance. Rather than investing in education and digital literacy, authorities are expanding their power to decide what everyone can see. The state should not be parenting the public. Yet under the Online Safety Act, every citizen becomes a suspect who must prove innocence before speaking or viewing online. What is framed as “protecting children” is, in practice, the construction of a population-wide compliance system.

Britain’s disastrous experiment is already spreading. France and Germany have advanced parallel drafts of age verification and online safety legislation, while the European Union’s age-verification blueprint would link adult content access and “high-risk” platforms to interoperable digital IDs. The EU insists the system will be privacy-preserving, but its architecture is identical to the UK model, comprehensive identity verification disguised as safeguarding. The logic repeats itself everywhere. Laws begin with the narrow goal of shielding minors from pornography, but their powers quickly expand, first to protests, then to politics. Today, it is Gaza videos and sexual content; tomorrow, it is journalism or dissent. The UK is not an outlier but a template for digital authoritarianism, exported under the banner of safety.

Supporters of these laws insist we face a binary: either adopt universal age verification or abandon children to the internet’s dangers. But this framing is dishonest. No technical system can replace engaged parenting or digital-literacy education. Determined teenagers will still find ways to access adult content, they will just be driven towards the darker corners of the web. Meanwhile, the laws do little to stop the real threat: child sexual abuse material that circulates on encrypted or hidden networks that will never comply with regulation. In reality, the only sites that follow the rules are those already capable of policing themselves, and those are precisely the ones the state is now undermining. By pushing young people towards VPNs and unregulated platforms, lawmakers risk exposing them to far greater harm. The result is not safety, but greater exposure to danger.

Strip away the child-protection rhetoric, and the Online Safety Act’s true function becomes clear: it builds the infrastructure for mass content control and population surveillance. Once these systems exist, expanding them is easy. We have seen this logic before. Anti-terror laws morphed into instruments for policing dissent; now “child safety” provides cover for the same authoritarian creep. The EU is already entertaining proposals that would mandate chat-scanning and weaken encryption, promising such measures will be used only against abusers, until, inevitably, they are not. The immediate consequences in the UK – restricted Gaza footage, threatened access to Wikipedia, censored protest videos- are not glitches. They are previews of a digital order built on control. What is at stake is not just privacy but democracy itself, the right to speak, to know and to dissent without being verified first.

Protecting children online does not require building a surveillance state. It requires education, accountability and support for parents, teachers and platforms alike. Governments should invest in digital literacy, prosecute genuine online exploitation and give parents better tools to manage access. Platforms should be held to clear standards of transparency and algorithmic responsibility, not forced into policing adults. Where self-regulation fails, targeted oversight can work, but universal verification cannot.

The UK’s Online Safety Act and similar legislation worldwide represent a fundamental choice about the kind of digital future we want. We can accept the false promise of safety through surveillance and control, or we can insist on solutions that protect children without sacrificing the privacy, freedom, and democratic values that make protection worthwhile in the first place. The early results from the UK should serve as a warning, not a model. Before this authoritarian creep becomes irreversible, citizens and lawmakers must recognise that when governments claim they’re protecting children by controlling information, they’re usually protecting something else entirely: their own power to determine what we can see, say, and know.

The IMF says global public debt could exceed 100% of GDP by the end of the decade.