Nature abhors a vacuum, but the nature of a vacuum defines what fills it. Ever since 2014, the anti-Right is seeking a socialist alternative to Narendra Modi. Most prominent is self-appointed contender and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar—India’s Last Socialist. With ideological soulmate, Lalu Prasad, he presides over a corrupt, poverty-struck, crime-ridden state. There is trouble in paradise, however.
Chafing under Nitish’s dominance, Lalu’s crime lord sidekick Shahabuddin’s rejection of the CM’s leadership is seen as Lalu’s potshot. Nitish has retaliated by approaching the Patna High Court to cancel the don’s bail. Politics is about alternatives and alliances. Long before Nitish, the Gandhis and the Congress had appropriated socialism as their post-Independence ideology. The Congress was everyone’s point of reference. The Left, symbiotically connected with the socialists, was anti-Congress but ambivalent towards the dynasty—the CPI was Indira Gandhi’s satellite during the Emergency. The Right was anti-Left, anti-Congress and anti-Dynasty. Congress policy was solely anti-Right. It is in this triangulation that Nitish’s politics has to be understood.
Like Lalu’s, Nitish’s career, which was fathered by Jayaprakash Narayan, cruised along on anti-Congress credentials. JP was the Anna Hazare of the 1970s, a maverick moralist who had a vision of an ideal India, acompanied by a regional passion for Bihar. Nitish tried to be his Arvind Kejriwal. On a visit to an RSS camp in Calicut in 1977, JP said, “I have great expectations from this revolutionary organisation which has taken up the challenge of creating a new India.” When the socialists protested, he explained, “They invited me and I went there. That’s all. If the Congress invites me, I will go there also.” The Congress was his mortal enemy. But he expressed the same revolutionary innocence which endeared Hazare to the people. Whether Hazare’s fate in exile would have befallen JP will never be known, but Nitish, like Kejriwal, went on to be an astute political craftsman with a burning desire to be PM. Unlike Kejriwal, Nitish was close to the BJP until it became apparent that Modi was a serious challenger. He then copied the Gujarat model to become socialism’s development man.
Lalu, too, was a socialist and part of the JP movement. But he lacked the pan-national reputation of other JP-ites like Madhu Limaye, Chandra Shekhar and Mohan Dharia, who had all made a name by rebelling against Indira. Lalu was jailed, too, but he never became a hero like Chandra Shekhar or George Fernandes. His exaggerated rusticity and wisecracks made him appear clownish rather than a socialist son of the soil.
Now, Lalu has had enough. He is a bigger mass leader than Nitish, and would have been, if it was not for his criminal record, the chief minister. Under Nitish, crime in Bihar rose by 42 per cent and conviction rates declined by 68 per cent from 2010. JP would not recognise the Bihar he had fought for, since it has only become worse under the stewardship of two of his political progeny.
If these two represent the genre of alternatives to Modi anti-BJP crusaders are looking for, JP wouldn’t approve. Democracy presupposes choice for the sake of checks and balances. But without a balanced view of history, socialism’s descent into the political vacuum will be full and final.