Old friends, new foes
With Nitish Kumar deciding to dump the BJP and make common cause with the RJD again, Bihar’s political landscape is set for another significant churning that could see the emergence of new alliances, campaigns, and equations.
WHEN Nitish Kumar dumped the BJP on August 9 to form a new government in Bihar with the RJD’S Tejashwi Yadav, who as leader of the opposition was ever willing to brawl with him on matters of governance and had even derided him as “the biggest liar” not so long ago, it did not shock the State’s 7.3-crore electorate, who are by now used to seeing sworn political enemies reorient their ideological moorings to cling on to power.
Five years ago, in a similar act of political see-sawing, Nitish Kumar had abandoned the RJD and the Congress, which had powered his emphatic win in the 2015 Bihar Assembly election.
While political observers debated the pros and cons of Nitish Kumar’s latest manoeuvre, the BJP went ballistic. One of its leaders made the implausible claim that the 71-year-old Chief Minister intended to shield a terror nexus that allegedly exists between senior bureaucrats in the State and the Popular Front of India (PFI), a radical Islamist outfit. According to the BJP, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) abruptly jumped ship to join hands with the opposition in a bid to prevent crackdowns on the PFI. JD(U) national secretary Rajiv Ranjan Prasad made light of the allegations, framing them as the “onset of mental imbalance”.
The BJP’S outbursts indicate that fear-mongering and powerful expositions of national interest will be the main ingredient to expand its political base in Bihar, where Nitish Kumar’s monopolistic control of power had relegated the BJP to a junior ally since 1996 when it joined hands with the erstwhile Samata Party, a Janata Dal offshoot spearheaded by George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar in 1994 until it merged with the JD(U) in 2003.
BAD BLOOD WITH BJP
As the shadow of a bitter political jousting looms large in Bihar’s fractious political landscape, it is important to examine and understand the events and circumstances that provoked Nitish Kumar to bid an acrimonious goodbye to his old ally, and the bearing it would have on the State’s maze of castes and identities.
Was Nitish Kumar’s decision solely guided by the BJP’S apparent bid to split his party and his rumoured ambition to vault into national prominence, as general discussions in the media suggest? Or was there a more nuanced thinking embedded in that decision?
It is no secret that Nitish Kumar was riled by the BJP’S constant hobnobbing with the JD(U)’S R.C.P.
Singh, a former IAS officer and powerful party insider, who, like the Bihar Chief Minister, is from the Kurmi community and shares his image of an educated, sober politician, assets that qualified him to be his potential replacement. BJP president J.P. Nadda’s recent assertion in Patna that “in the times to come, only an ideology driven party like the BJP will survive” added fuel to the fire.
However, interactions with sources in the JD(U) indicated that even if the BJP had remained a quiescent player in Bihar’s politics, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that it leads would have withered. After the JD(U) was relegated to a mere 43 seats in the 2020 Bihar Assembly election, scepticism grew in the party about the electoral utility of its alliance with the BJP. The JD(U) officially blames the “Chirag model” for dissuading BJP supporters from voting for it, a reference to LJP leader Chirag Paswan’s decision to field challengers in all the seats where Nitish Kumar’s candidates were contesting. But privately its leaders claimed that they had sensed an inherent disinclination in the BJP’S savarna or upper-caste voter base for Nitish Kumar, which made them apprehensive about the party’s electoral prospects in the days to come.
The BJP’S shadow also alienated it from the State’s roughly 17 per cent Muslim population: 76 per cent of Muslims reportedly voted for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and only 5 per cent for the NDA in the 2020 election. This sparked a rethink within the party, leading to a decision to resuscitate its grand-alliance
with the RJD and the Congress as early as mid-2021.
BURYING THE HATCHET
Apparently, RJD founder Lalu Prasad favoured burying the hatchet with Nitish Kumar, but it was Tejashwi, now Nitish Kumar’s deputy in the new government, who resisted the idea, buoyed by his emergence as a formidable opposition leader. “He did not want Nitish Kumar to hijack the opposition space,” a source in the RJD said.
The current bonhomie between Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar, followers of socialist veteran Ram Manohar Lohia and erstwhile colleagues in the Janata Dal, which ended the Congress’ hegemony in Bihar in 1990 by consolidating Other Backward
Caste (OBC) votes, raises several questions.
Will the ardently felt need for opposition unity now be achievable? Will it be tenacious? Will there be consensus for Nitish Kumar’s name as the challenger to Prime Minister Narendra Modi? Can stitching up coalitions of disparate regional parties with anti-modism as the common thread counter the commanding narrative on patriotism and national security that have, under Modi’s aegis, consumed large parts of the country and heralded the supremacy of Hindutva over caste?
A recent survey by an English
news weekly claimed that despite Nitish Kumar’s departure, the NDA was pegged to win 286 seats if the general election was held today. But senior Congress leader Shakeel Ahmad dismissed the finding. He told Frontline: “The BJP’S ouster from Bihar has demolished the aura of invincibility surrounding it. It has also galvanised the secular parties’ cadre everywhere.”
A close look at the politics of Nitish Kumar, Tejashwi Yadav, and Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Akhilesh Yadav shows that these parties have reached a consensus on the need to lace together the people’s fundamental concerns, including unemployment, price rise and agrarian crisis, with a re-energised campaign to beat the rainbow Hindu consolidation of the BJP.
Throughout the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election in Februarymarch, Akhilesh Yadav raised the pitch for a caste census. In Bihar, Tejashwi has strived for the same. The JD(U)-BJP government cleared the proposal for such a census in June, after the BJP succumbed to Nitish Kumar’s pressure.
PREPPING FOR ANTI-MODI FIGHT
These developments come at a time when the Congress is unable to rebound despite confrontations with
the Modi government on matters of public interest. As a result, regional satraps are sanguine about their elevation as Modi’s primary opponents. “It is time to look beyond Rahul Gandhi”, a confidante of Akhilesh Yadav told Frontline during the Uttar Pradesh election, while discussing the contours of a potential front against Modi.
Sources confirmed that over the past year there have been on-and-off communications among NCP leader Sharad Pawar, Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav, with all of them converging on the point that the Congress was indispensable in their scheme of things, but none was willing to let it control the levers of an opposition alliance.
RJD insiders told Frontline that they were marshalling support for Nitish Kumar as the face of the opposition and were hopeful that his vast experience and pro-development image would best other aspirants. In public, however, Nitish Kumar rebuffs the idea. “I have no such thoughts,” he told mediapersons in Patna recently.
A person close to Lalu Prasad, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that when Nitish Kumar recently met Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, the two leaders underlined that safeguarding the Constitution and the social fabric and arresting the BJP’S privatisation sweep were imperatives that warranted a unified struggle by the opposition.
The source also said that Sonia Gandhi’s disposition in that meeting and in many earlier parleys suggested that she was “not hostile to their [RJD-JD(U)] proclivity for a noncongress leadership”.
But lack of hostility in politics is not approval, it is more often than not buying time. It is likely that the Congress would let the vagueness linger. There are a few reasons: one, it keeps its own prospects for the top job open. Two, in the absence of a leader with a pan-india appeal, whispering campaigns favouring more than one individual, such as Nitish Kumar in the Hindi heartland and another candidate in the south, will be a clever way to mobilise antibjp votes more effectively.
CASTE CENSUS
As Nitish Kumar, Tejashwi Yadav and Akhilesh Yadav prepare to subtly and gradually make the vexed question of a nationwide caste census the pivot of their politics, their supporters need to be cautious in their optimism. The road to Mandal 2.0 is arduous and accidentprone, as 2024 is not 1989. Over the past two decades, a large number of small, impoverished castes have grown hostile to the Yadavs, whom they accuse of nibbling away the benefits of reservation. It is this frustration that the BJP has seized in Uttar Pradesh to stir a passionate, dependable following of non-yadav OBCS since 2014.
The BJP’S meteoric rise in Uttar Pradesh also threw up an important question: can the coming together of regional leaders guarantee a fusion of the voters they patronise? RLD leader Jayant Chaudhary’s alliance with Akhilesh Yadav fizzled out in western Uttar Pradesh as the Jats were reluctant to vote for the SP’S Muslim candidates. The defection of powerful OBC leaders such as Swami Prasad Maurya, Dharam Singh Saini and Om Prakash Rajbhar from the NDA also failed to crystallise into a political insurrection against the BJP. Both Maurya and Saini lost from their constituencies. A staggering 65 per cent of non-yadav OBCS voted for the BJP, according to a Csds-lokniti post-poll survey.
In Bihar, where the RJD’S Yadav and Muslim votes are expected to
After the 2020 election, scepticism grew in the JD(U) about the utility of its alliance with the BJP.