He is the quintessential potato in the curry that cannot be ignored. You can change other ingredients to add variety to the dish but not the tuberous vegetable. He effortlessly blended with the extreme left and the right - and others thrown in between - at various points in his long career to stay as chief minister. A new sabzi was cooked in Bihar’s political kitchen on Sunday with JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar walking out of the opposition INDIA bloc he helped galvanise and going back to the BJP alliance he dissed and ditched over a year ago. In the process, he lost and regained his chief ministerial job within a few hours. He is now a nine-time CM.
The curry was on slow fire ever since INDIA leaders Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal tossed up the idea of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge as the face of the grouping, burying the ambition of Nitish to become the prime ministerial candidate of the opposition for good. Bihar is where the opposition looked rock solid with the potential of arresting the NDA sweep in the Lok Sabha polls and significantly denting its overall tally. Yet, INDIA’s leadership did not have the collective wisdom of ring-fencing its weakest link by massaging Nitish’s fickle ego to keep the bloc stable.
RJD chief Lalu Yadav ought to personally hold himself responsible for the vertical split in the Bihar grand alliance. He ignored JD(U) feelers to promote Nitish in INDIA while obliquely nudging the CM to vacate the chair for his son Tejashwi. The new alliance Nitish heads is just above the halfway mark of 122 in the 243-member assembly. For all his Machiavellian reputation, Lalu failed to break into the JD(U) despite cultivating some of its leaders like Lalan Singh. With judicial summons dangling over the Lalu family’s head in the railways jobs-for-land scam, for them it’s present tense.
As for Nitish, he is the ultimate opportunist who personifies politics as the art of the possible. His secular credentials are mud and he may have just entered the twilight of his political career. The buzz about the deal is his possible accommodation in a glorified constitutional position at the Centre after the 2025 assembly polls so as to give the BJP a shot at CM-ship. His hold over the economically backward classes vote bank continues to be considerable, hence his utility for the BJP in the electoral scheme of things.