Sunil Gatade | The Significance of Nitish in Politics of Bihar: Can BJP Really Dump Him?

Amid the row over the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of rolls, the Bihar Assembly elections this time will again revolve around Nitish Kumar. The 74-year-old chief minister may not have been keeping well for some time, but his centrality in Bihar politics is unchanged.

While some surveys project Leader of the Opposition Tejashwi Yadav is on top as the best CM candidate, it doesn’t take away the focus from Nitish, given the delicate social balance of rival alliances in this politically alert state.

The entire alliance collapses like a pack of cards if one chip is taken away, and that chip has been Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), without whose support neither the BJP-led NDA nor the RJD-led Mahagathbandhan can come to power. That has been the experience for the past two decades.

In Bihar, it’s said one doesn’t cast his vote, but votes his caste. Unlike neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, communal polarisation doesn’t click. Nitish’s trump card has been his championing of a caste census, and carrying out one.

The Congress, which mostly ruled Bihar till the late 1980s, got marginalised with the advent of the politics of Mandal and “Kamandal”. Nitish, once a close associate of Lalu Prasad Yadav, could make a mark in Bihar’s politics by aligning with the BJP, under the leadership of late George Fernandes of the then Samata Party. Since Lalu Yadav’s rise, the Congress has become a “doormat” of his Rashtriya Janata Dal, to put it in the words of a former AICC general secretary.

Strange as it may sound, Nitish may be the only leader in post-Independent India who has been leading a major state for 20 long years without his party getting a majority on its own even once. It speaks of the credibility of Nitish as a leader as well as his ability to force allies to play second fiddle to him, whether they like it or not.

Interestingly, Nitish is also the only leader who has not lost his secular credentials despite sharing power with the BJP in the state as well as at the Centre.

Whether it be the BJP or Lalu Yadav’s RJD, they have been, by turn, forced to court the JD(U) leader for the sake of power. In the process, Nitish has got the unique sobriquet of being the “Paltu Ram” of Bihar politics. The controversies have not dealt any blow to the social base of Nitish.

No matter, the BJP might have attempted, overtly and covertly, to damage Nitish in the last Assembly polls, but it was still forced to do business with him as the chief minister.

Similar has been the case with Chirag Paswan, who projected himself as the “Hanuman” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and successfully damaged Nitish and his JD(U) in the last elections. Now Chirag is no longer hitting out at Nitish, having understood the Bihar game deeper.

Prashant Kishor, leader of the Jan Suraaj Party, the new kid in Bihar’s politics, is perhaps the only one who has focused on Nitish Kumar’s health. He has demanded a medical bulletin on the CM’s mental health. Kishor alleges that Nitish shows signs of “cognitive decline”, and suggests the current administration limits his public appearances to avoid scrutiny.

Both the BJP and the Opposition’s Mahagathbandhan alliance generally steer clear of the issue, apparently realising they may be forced to do business with Nitish Kumar after the elections. Discretion, they say, is the better part of valour.

Once the results are out, the BJP might be thinking of doing an “Eknath Shinde” on Nitish. While the BJP-led Mahayuti in Maharashtra fought the Assembly polls under the leadership of then CM Eknath Shinde of the Shiv Sena, when the results were out, he had to make way for Devendra Fadnavis.

Home minister Amit Shah recently hinted that a victory for the BJP-JDU in Bihar might not lead to Nitish’s return as CM.

The BJP and its allies have so far maintained that the alliance will contest the elections under Nitish Kumar’s leadership. But Mr Shah’s latest remarks fuelled speculation that the BJP may be considering an alternative.

“Only time will decide who will be Bihar CM. But what is clear is that we will fight this election with Nitish Kumar as chief minister,” Mr Shah said, responding to a question on who was the NDA’s CM candidate.

The NDA has so far maintained that Nitish continues to be their leader in Bihar and that the elections will be fought with him as the CM. The BJP-led Mahayuti in Maharashtra had adopted the same formulation, where the BJP was ambivalent on the CM candidate given that it was the largest party in the alliance. In fact, Eknath Shinde himself once implied that the BJP was the “Mahashakti” when he was in the game to topple the Uddhav Thackeray ministry and was trying to become the CM.

The BJP has been waiting in the wings in Bihar for long, with the politics of social justice taking precedence. The party has the backing of the upper castes, which was known to be anti-RJD, which drives its power mainly from the Muslim-Yadav (MY) combination. The BJP has taken pains to take along non-Yadav backwards with it. Samrat Chaudhary, deputy CM in the Nitish government, who is being groomed by the BJP as its leader, is backward.

The BJP’s tragedy is that it hasn’t been able to throw up a real leader in Bihar so far, and is forced to hold on to Nitish’s apron strings to remain relevant. The best bet it had was late Sushil Modi, but he was content to play second fiddle to Nitish, who knew how best to play the political game in post-Lalu Bihar.

The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi