Modi’s masterstroke helps him win another friend
With Nitish on his side, the Indian Prime Minister is running out of opposition
Whether Nitish Kumar was merely trying to alter the terms of his alliance with Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal or actually preparing the ground for a dramatic new alignment with the Bharatiya Janata Party, his resignation and re-appointment as Bihar chief minister, means an end to ‘politics as usual’ at both the state and central level. The short-lived grandcoalition, or mahagathbandhan, in the state lies wrecked, and the idea — poorly conceived and embryonic though it was — of a national-level opposition alliance to take on the BJP in 2019 will remain still-born.
But whatever happens next in terms of grand politics, it is important to clear up one misconception at the outset. The issue at stake in the Bihar crisis is not corruption and the rule of law but the manner in which politics drives public perceptions of crime, corruption and morality.
Tejashwi Yadav is not the first minister to face an FIR for wrongdoing. Weeks before the CBI charged him and other members of his family for a variety of offences — primarily possessing assets disproportionate to known sources of income — a minister in Narendra Modi’s council of ministers, Uma Bharati, was also chargesheeted by the same agency for arguably a far more grave crime, the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Last month, Narottam Mishra, a minister in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government in Madhya Pradesh was stripped of his seat for indulging in ‘paid news’ and falsifying election returns. Yet both Bharti and Mishra remain in their posts. Modi congratulates Nitish Kumar for joining the fight against corruption with his principled stand against the continued presence of Tejashwi in his cabinet but says nothing about his own unprincipled failure to push for the ouster of BJP offenders. What does that tell us about where he stands on fighting corruption, one might well ask.
Two negative tendencies
Not only is the BJP’s approach to corruption and criminality highly selective but it is also skilled at calibrating the scope and pace of anti-corruption investigations in cases involving politicians. The investigation into the Maharashtra irrigation scam remains in limbo because it does not suit the BJP to ratchet up the heat on the Nationalist Congress Party and its leaders who stand accused there. The same is the case with cases involving Samajwadi Party leaders in Uttar Pradesh. In Assam, the Louis Berger investigation corruption case is proceeding at a snail’s pace. Allegations against top industrial houses are not acted upon. In Bihar, however, targeting Lalu and precipitating a crisis in the mahagathbandhan before the ‘grand coalition’ idea goes national makes a lot of political sense.
Yet if Tejashwi’s indictment is the product of one negative tendency in Indian politics — the instrumentalisation of law enforcement — it took a second negative tendency, dynasticism, to push the crisis to breaking point.
The fact is that Lalu’s ‘putra-moh’ – blind love for his son – lies at the root of the current crisis. Tejashwi should never have been made deputy chief minister when there were other, more capable leaders in the RJD. And once there, his father should have had the sense to make him bow out at the first real sign of trouble so that he and the RJD could live to fight another day. If instead of his own son Lalu had been called upon to sacrifice some other RJD leader, it is hard to imagine him baulking at the prospect.
Today, Lalu’s party, with 80 MLAs, is the single largest party, and together with the Congress also forms the largest coalition. “By right, the governor should call us,” the RJD patriarch seemed to be saying at his press conference on Wednesday night. But in the same breath, he pointed to the speed with which Modi tweeted his congratulations to Nitish as evidence of a prior setting between the two leaders. “It is almost as if Modiji was in the meeting in Patna”, a member of Lalu’s family said. Questioning the legal and moral validity of the expectation that his son should resign in the face of the chargesheet the CBI had filed earlier this month, Lalu raked up an old murder charge against Nitish — hardly the stuff of marital reconciliation.
It is tempting to go back now and retrofit a curve to what were explained away earlier as random political positions by Nitish Kumar — his support for demonetisation (which he reiterated on Wednesday night), his support for Ramnath Kovind as president, an opposition dinner skipped, a prime ministerial lunch attended — and conclude that he has been looking for a way back to the BJP for some time now. But that would tell only half the story. If the Uttar Pradesh election result upended whatever calculations Nitish had made and remade in 2015, the lack of any drive or initiative in the opposition camp would have surely been an additional source of dread.
Bad news for Lalu
The RJD is right when it accuses Modi of misusing the CBI and practicing double standards, but it should have resolved to fight the BJP politically — by raising the issue amongst the people. By digging their heels in this fashion and allowing the JD(U) leader the luxury of a ‘principled’ exit out of the mahagathbandhan, Lalu and his family have ensured that Nitish and, eventually Modi himself, will cash in on the ensuing public sympathy. Instead of gaining a higher moral vantage point from which to expose the BJP’s hypocrisy in holding on to ministers like Uma Bharti, Narottam Mishra and others, Lalu has ended up handing over not just the mantle of anti-corruption to Modi but also the keys to Pataliputra and eventually ‘Indraprashtha’ as well — which is what New Delhi will resemble if the BJP comes back to power in 2019. —