By rejoining hands with BJP, Nitish Kumar is about to take the biggest risk of his political career

By Mohammad Sajjad

The rift between Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav has been deepening for a while now. Lalu’s intransigence with regard to his son Tejashwi Yadav’s continuation in the state cabinet as deputy chief minister is the ostensible reason for the Bihar chief minister to suddenly announce his resignation on Wednesday. After all, for the RJD chief, dynasty is above secularism.

Nitish intends to claim a high moral ground of zero tolerance on corruption. Indeed, there is a corruption case against Tejashwi Yadav that cannot be wished away. But at the same time, politics requires — actually, demands — more than just taking the higher moral ground. So, perhaps, the reason for Nitish to ‘un-gathbandhan’ the JD(U)-RJD alliance lies elsewhere.

The Politician…
Coming as this does after a series of anti-Muslim lynchings in adjacent BJP-ruled states Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, as well as Haryana and Rajasthan, Bihar’s Muslims, who constitute around 17% of the state’s population, are deeply unsettled.

One major theory to explain the disintegration of this coalition is that the Congress-led anti-NDA Opposition-in-the-making was not prepared to declare Nitish as its prime ministerial candidate for the 2019 elections. Sonia Gandhi had called a meeting of 17 parties for consultations on choosing candidates for the President and the Vice-President.

One version has it that Ghulam Nabi Azad, as Sonia Gandhi’s emissary to the Bihar CM, had invited Nitish for the meeting. This had allegedly irked Nitish, who wanted the Congress president to have directly maintained communications with him. With the RJD as a partner, Nitish allegedly did not have as much autonomy in functioning as a chief minister as he enjoyed when in alliance with the BJP during 2005-13, and with the BJP’s Sushil Modi as the deputy chief minister.

Meanwhile, reports from the ground suggest that the BJP and its affiliates have considerably expanded their social base in Bihar. There has been a consolidation of support from the aspirational middle classes and the youth, cutting across castes. After almost two decades of Mandal empowerment, this generation does not (care to) remember the atrocities upper castes wreaked on the backward castes. Instead, it looks upon the BJP with hope for a new narrative that completely breaks with the old. This ‘Hindu consolidation’ is electorally convenient for the BJP.

Through the extremely successful and sustained movement, ‘Shiv Charcha’, subaltern Hindu women are being ‘saffronised’, which also adds to the BJP’ heft in Bihar. A sign of this is the increasingly popular ‘inter-caste mingling’ of Hindu women across rural Bihar. Nitish, too, believes that he has built up a constituency of women through various socio-economic welfare measures and through the prohibition of alcohol.

From the late 1990s, there was a rapid proliferation of the RSS schools (shishu mandirs) across rural Bihar. Sunday drills of RSS shakhas started being held in every mohalla in Bihar. These members went on to become formidable BJP cadres during elections.

So, with all this bubbling in the background and Prime Minister Narendra Modi already offering unconditional support to Nitish to form a government minus the RJD and Congress, where does it place Nitish Kumar? Would he be wiser choosing amid-term poll and contesting on his own? If he opted for the latter, electoral history since 1995 suggests that Nitish alone has never been able to make a mark at the hustings.

Who knows, but is Nitish Kumar’s resignation — even at this late moment where a gath-bandhan with the BJP looks like a foregone conclusion —possibly a pressure tactic to make Lalu Yadav bow down and remove Tejashwi from the JD(U)-RJD equation? It certainly looks too late for that.

…Or the Deliverer?
Given the fast-expanding social base of the saffron forces in Bihar, it appears that Nitish Kumar might be thinking that the impending alliance with the BJP would be electorally fruitful. He also may believe that with budgetary funds from the Centre coming in more directly in a JD(U)-BJP state government, he will be able to deliver more quickly and effectively on the development front in the state.

But another possibility, too, cannot be ruled out. Having burned his boats with the anti-BJP forces, his bargaining capacity in the NDA also will be reduced considerably. It would be the BJP that empowers itself considerably in a partnership with a politically weakened JD(U).

Which is why with the dice loaded in favour of the formation of a JD(U)-BJP state government, Nitish Kumar is taking probably the biggest risk of his political career, not to mention of his image. Shall he gain anything out of such a partnership, even if it gives him a little more headroom than he was getting with the RJD? Watch this space called Bihar.

(The writer is Professor, Centre of Advanced Study in History, Aligarh Muslim University)