Nitish Kumar has only himself to blame for the mess he is in
Just eight months ago, the sudden switchover from the erstwhile ruling three-party mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was widely publicised as a “masterstroke” by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar. As of now, however, he appears to be caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea.
Nitish Kumar finds himself cornered within the NDA with a resurgent BJP trying hard to dominate him. The kind of helplessness is such that he has not spoken a word in the past one week over the ongoing communal frenzy which has gripped at least nine districts of Bihar (out of a total 38).
The main accused in the Bhagalpur communal violence Arijit Shashwat, son of BJP leader and Union minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey, was caught 12 days after an FIR was registered while the main accused in the Aurangabad communal violence Anil Singh, another BJP leader, fled from police lock-up after his arrest. He though surrendered later.
Despite all these incidents dealing a severe blow to his image of being a “Susashan Babu”, he is left with little or just no choice now. If he continues with the NDA, he will be accused of being a partner in the communal violence, thus exposing his much-touted “rule of law” claim, which won him three elections in a row.
But if he walks out and returns to the Opposition grand alliance that he quit barely eight months back, his credibility will suffer serious dent further and it will be difficult for him to explain his position.
He already holds the distinction of forming five different governments in the past five years - forming government with Opposition support in June 2013 after breaking away from the BJP, installing Jitan Ram Manjhi as his successor in May 2014 after his party JD(U)'s rout in Lok Sabha polls, again taking the oath of CM in February 2015 after forcing Manjhi to resign, becoming the CM again in November 2015 after the grand alliance win in elections and then again taking the oath of CM in July 2017, when he dumped the mahagathbandhan to form a government with the BJP.
If he walks out of the NDA again, he will only make a laughing stock of himself and formally establish himself as a “rank opportunist”.
Nitish Kumar, who won the last 2015 Assembly elections with support from his allies - the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress - had returned to the NDA in July last year, barely 20 months after running the grand alliance government.
He had broken the alliance over the issue of “corruption”, “commitment to implement rule of law” and his hope that Bihar will move fast on the path of progress with “double-engine governments” (meaning the same government in the state and the Centre). He famously said that he had listened to his "antaratma" (inner conscience).
But his idea has proved to be a big disaster so far. The first shock for Kumar came when the Centre rejected his demand for granting “special category status” to Bihar for which the JD(U) had launched extensive campaigns obtaining signatures of about 1.25 crore Biharis and then sending it to the Prime Minister's Office.
Not only that, Nitish Kumar even held month-long rallies in Bihar before holding another rally at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi.
Another setback came when a firebrand BJP leader and Union minister Giriraj Singh was booked in a case relating to alleged grabbing of land belonging to a Dalit villager in February this year.
The case was registered following an order of the district and sessions court, Patna. Kumar had walked out of the grand alliance over a similar case when his deputy Tejahswi Yadav, younger son of RJD president Lalu Prasad, was made an accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in a land-for-railway hotel scam. Nitish Kumar's logic was that Tejahswi didn’t give his clarifications in public and proved his innocence. In this case, however, Nitish Kumar didn’t dare to ask similar questions from the BJP minister.
A series of communal clashes has finally dealt a severe blow to his image. Such level of communal frenzy had never been witnessed in the state - not even during Kumar’s previous eight-year-long stint with the NDA from 2005 to 2013 - but this time he looked helpless before his dominating ally with Narendra Modi at the helm.
The communal clashes continued spreading from once corner to the other despite Kumar’s veiled threats to the BJP that "I won’t tolerate attempts to disturb communal harmony at any cost. Just like my uncompromising stand on corruption, I won’t allow communalism to flare up”.
Yet the communal clashes spread to as many as nine districts while the police really had to battle hard to restore normalcy. Although on the surface, peace has returned to the state, the usual faith and confidence of villagers looks completely shaken. This has virtually bulldozed the image of the chief minister.
Kurmis, his fellow caste men, account for little over four per cent of Bihar’s total votes. Yet Kumar has been constantly in power both at the Centre and in the state, indicating his smart political skills. He held the portfolios of railways, surface transport and agriculture in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA 1 government at the Centre. He then grabbed the throne of Bihar after the RJD was thrown out of power in 2005. Since then Kumar has been in and out of the NDA, but the change in his stand has now bulldozed his credibility.
Such was his image and credibility till a few months back that he was one of the frontrunners in the race for the prime minister with a leading historian Ramachandra Guha even stating that “the terminal decline of the Congress party can only be revived by a leadership change. For the Congress is a party without a leader and Nitish is a leader without a party”.
The same Guha later described Kumar as a “power-greedy man”.
“Nitish Kumar should have dissolved the Assembly. Nitish says Lalu has greed for money, he has shown greed for power,” Guha had tweeted soon after Kumar dumped the grand alliance to form a government with the BJP support in July last year.
He had added, "If Nitish wanted to revive his alliance with the BJP, the honourable thing was to offer Biharis the chance to vote for or against it."
Eight months later, Kumar’s overnight switchover has led him nowhere. Rather he appears regretting his decision. Sadly, there seems to be little scope for “correction”.