Social media platforms have been flooded with a flurry of memes on Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s latest flip-flop. The most appropriate has been, “While colour of Opposition keeps changing in Bihar, the Chief Minister remains the same.”
Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor in his own inimitable way took a swipe at the JD(U) leader’s latest volte-face dubbing him as a ‘snollygoster’ or a shrewd and unprincipled politician. He shared his social media post from 2017 when Kumar had broken away from the Mahagathbandhan or the grand alliance in Bihar with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Congress and returned to the BJP, with whom he had snapped ties in 2013.
People are still to comprehend as to why Nitish Kumar left the non-BJP alliance in Bihar in less than two years after he had ditched his poll partner BJP and joined the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal in forming the state government in 2022. The other question is why the BJP has risked the burden of anti-incumbency in the electorally important state less than six months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
Before we set to find answers to these questions, a moment for the people of Bihar, whose mandate has been blown to smithereens time and again. For Bihar's electorate, Nitish Kumar’s leadership represents a riddle—a leader who holds onto power despite waning popularity and diminishing autonomy.
When the JDU joined hands with the RJD in 2015 and formed the state government, Nitish was seen as a possible prime ministerial candidate, a rival to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, when he cut ties with the RJD and joined hands with the BJP in 2017, he lost his credentials. This has been eroded further by the latest ‘change of heart.’
The JD(U)’s electoral slide is starkly evident from the falling number of seats it has secured in successive Bihar Assembly elections. From a formidable presence of 115 seats in 2010 to a meagre 43 in 2020, the JD(U)’s strength has fallen, downgrading it to the status of the third force in the Assembly behind the RJD and the BJP. Despite his continued occupancy of the CM chair, his party's weakening influence has made him increasingly reliant on coalition partners for governance.
The BJP, on the other hand, has been on an upswing ever since it won the assembly polls in the three Hindi heartland states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and followed it up with a great spectacle of the consecration of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. Why embrace controversy when the chances of third consecutive victory of the National Democratic Alliance led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi looks to be a forgone conclusion, is the question people are asking.
It’s said that the BJP was working on its ‘Mission-Bihar-2024’ for almost a year now. It fetched results six-days prior to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first mega rally of the year in the state. The plan gathered momentum as Nitish Kumar lost confidence in INDIAlliance following the defeat in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
When RJD president Lalu Prasad Yadav asked Rahul Gandhi during a meeting of the INDIAlliance to get married and that he along with others would like to be his ‘baratis’, Nitish Kumar believed that he may not be the choice for the Prime Ministerial seat. The RJD had been putting pressure on Nitish to vacate the chief minister’s post in favour of Tejaswi Yadav, and take up a role in national politics. But when the top opposition role eluded him, Nitish did not have anything substantial to look forward to.
He was demoralised following the decision to give the group’s chairmanship to Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge. What surprised Nitish was that not only the Congress, but other parties too did not forward his name for the top post. Since it was Nitish who had initiated the opposition mobilisation, he was expecting a leadership post. However, his past history of flip-flops weighed against him. Thus he decided to take BJP’s bait.
The question, however, remains that what was there for the BJP to gain by courting a controversial leader, who has further lost his lustre. First and foremost, the BJP would now enjoy enhanced leverage over government decisions while allowing Nitish Kumar to serve as a figurehead. BJP has appointed two deputy chief ministers—Vijay Sinha from an upper caste and Samrat Choudhary from an extremely backward caste. While these two appointments would strike a social balance, since these two leaders were the most aggressive against Nitish in the assembly and in public, it would keep a leash on the figurehead CM. This could create a new power balance in favour of the BJP.
Moreover, the BJP has been accepting Nitish as chief minister as it knows that the party cannot go it alone in Bihar and the RJD is always ready to join hands with Nitish. The BJP has many advantages in partnering with Nitish. Though Nitish may not now be able to make a claim on the minority votes he still can use social engineering mechanisms to garner backward classes and Dalit votes. He has successfully divided the other backward classes (OBC) into backward castes (BC) and extremely backward castes (EBC). This was replication of Karpoori Thakur model.
He, however, has not stopped there by going further to divide the scheduled castes into Dalits and Mahadalits. This has created a perceivable vote bank for Bihar CM, which in turn would help the BJP. The women-focused schemes, including reservation in local bodies and also prohibition have given Nitish Kumar the support of another vote bank. No wonder in 2019 when BJP and Nitish fought the 2019 Lok Sabha polls together, it got 39 out of the 40 seats.
However during the 2020 assembly polls, the BJP focussed on cutting Nitish Kumar down to size by using Chirag Paswan as a proxy. Lok Janshakti Party leaders were fielded and JD(U) was reduced to 43 seats from 75. So a bewildered Nitish Kumar, in search of an opportunity to settle scores with the BJP, joined hands with the RJD in July 2022. Since then, the BJP has been trying to take Nitish back in its fold before the 2024 elections.
Nitish’s second stint in the Grand Alliance of JDU-RJD-Congress-Left with Tejaswi Yadav as deputy chief minister was a difficult challenge for the BJP. First, the regime conducted a caste survey in 2023 in the state despite the BJP’s opposition. Then Nitish-Tejaswi government enhanced reservation for economically weaker sections up to 65 percent, with an add-on of 10 percent. Then the government appointed a large number of school teachers and policemen amid an unprecedented rise in unemployment at the national level.
For the BJP it was getting difficult to counter the government merely by the sloganeering of ‘jungle raj’. With likes of Sahibuddin out of scene, the law and order situation too under the Nitish-Tejaswi government did not turn as bad as it was during their partnership in 2015-17.
What was left to counter the impact of these two factors in the coming elections was an old bag of corruption charges against Tejaswi and other members of the Lalu Yadav family including the patriarch. The effectiveness of the corruption charges however was very much in doubt. Thus the urgency to wean away Nitish Kumar from the Grand Alliance to the NDA.
After being chief minister for nearly two decades, it’s difficult for Nitish Kumar to remain without office. As chief minister, it can be safely said, he has been more comfortable with the BJP than the RJD. The cadre of Lalu Yadav-led party exerts pressure on the bureaucracy. Nitish Kumar, on the other hand, depends more on the bureaucracy than on party cadres, which anyway has a negligent presence. The bureaucracy too prefers a Nitish-BJP government to a Nitish-RJD-Congress-Left government.
In addition to this, in Grand Alliance, the personality of Lalu Yadav talls over Nitish, whereas in the NDA, there isn’t any BJP leader to match his standing. Not a single leader from the BJP, even a Sushil Kumar Modi, have grown beyond Nitish during their on and off alliance in the past three decades.
But a Nitish Kumar of 2010 and 2020 vis-à-vis the BJP in 2024 is not going to have the same strength. Today he has lost the sympathy of leaders across the spectrum. DMK tore into Nitish Kumar and said the party tolerated Nitish Kumar’s ‘only Hindi to be spoken’ push for the sake of cordiality in INDIAlliance. Referring to the last meeting of INDIAlliance, senior DMK leader TR Baalu said, “He (Nitish Kumar) said everyone should talk in Hindi. We tolerated it. Even then, we kept quiet, as a compromise, for the sake of cordiality in the alliance. It was said that English must not be spoken.”
Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav has said that Nitish Kumar's switch is BJP's desperation ahead of the Lok Sabha election. He is reported to have said that it is move to limit a could-be PM to the CM's chair. Earlier too Akhilesh Yadav made a similar comment as he said Nitish Kumar could have become the PM face of the INDIA bloc but he lost the chance by deserting it.
Nitish Kumar’s repeated flip-flops underline the volatile nature of Bihar's politics and the challenges of coalition governance. While the BJP may currently support his leadership, there's no doubt that they would seek alternative leadership in future elections. With Nitish Kumar having severed ties with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), his options of joining the non-BJP alliance has shrunk. But then in the prevailing political culture of Jumping Jacks changing boats, last may not have been heard.
By Sidharth Mishra
(The writer is author and President, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice)
(The content of this article reflects the views of writers and contributors, not necessarily those of the publisher and editor. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only)
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