It's been a good year for Bihar, Nitish Kumar-Lalu kept alliance going

Stiching up an alliance, unleashing an aggressive campaign and contesting elections together were easier for Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar. Running a government for a year has surely not been smooth.

But as the year nears its end, and with the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that the two most powerful but divergent leaders of Bihar have done a decent job to keep their differences in check.

Though there have been a few stray controversies, especially when Shahabuddin attacked Nitish, calling him a circumstantial chief minister, and JD-U spokesmen issued thinly-veiled warnings to Lalu, but the two leaders have shown exemplary farsightedness to bury everything.

Both Lalu and Nitish have walked the extra mile, taking every step a little too carefully, a little too deliberately, as if they were unwilling to take even the ground under their feet entirely for granted. The end result: a successful completion of one year in office, should give them some satisfaction.

But, it has been a different story for BJP, a party that started 2015 high on spunk but spent a large part of 2016 in inertia after the Assembly election results dealt a massive blow to it. It was time the BJP central leadership should have executed a plan B, a course correction to stay relevant in a state that sends 40 MPs to the Lok Sabha.

But more than state BJP leaders, who were staring at another five years on Opposition benches, it was the central leadership that kept its head largely in the sand for much of 2016.

The inertia allowed the largely ineffective Mangal Pandey — whose inning as state president ended in January — continue for 11 more months, a period when the Bihar BJP resembled a flotsam on a storm-wreaked sea, plagued by dreams, delusions and nightmares.

The party leadership suddenly woke up on November 30 and picked two new state presidents, Nityanand Rai for Bihar and Manoj Tewari for Delhi. Rai and Tewari, both first-timers in the Lok Sabha, have a mountain to climb.

Their task of resurrecting the saffron party in the two states where it faced its worse drubbings since the Modi government took over, is easier said than done.

In February 2015, BJP could win just three of the 70 seats in Delhi Vidhan Sabha. Eight months later, the Nitish-Lalu combine decimated BJP in Bihar, reducing it to 53 seats in the 243-member House.

The BJP’s gameplan for Bihar, if not the strategy, makes sense. It believes that Nityanand Rai will chip away Lalu Prasad’s hold on the 15 per cent Yadav constituents. 

Similarly, Manoj Tewari, who inarguably sings better than he dances or acts, is expected to salvage the party in the capital. No wonder when Tewari declared to distribute laddus, it seemed he was borrowing too much from reel life scripts.

Nityanand Rai has not offered laddus, but his dare to ruling grand alliance to hold state elections afresh, which prompted JD-U to call for holding similar elections for Lok Sabha, has only been ether without any substance. So what is expected from Rai?

The 50-year-old is a formidable Yadav leader in north Bihar’s Vaishali, having won four successive Assembly polls before the Modi wave took him to Lok Sabha in 2014. BJP hopes he will stop Lalu and his sons, Tejaswi and Tejpratap, who incidentally have constituencies in Vaishali, which is also known as Rai’s political turf.

Incidentally, Rai was of no match to Lalu in last year’s Assembly polls when both his sons romped home in an area  that Rai is supposed to know like the back of his hand.

Clearly, Team Saffron has lost the “difference” with which it always defines the party with.

In fact, in the name of picking horse for the courses, a Yadav as state president and an EBC as Leader of Opposition, the BJP appears to be playing the caste games in which Lalu clearly has a supercilious superiority.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

Also read: Are Nitish Kumar and Modi coming closer?