Switching loyalties comes so naturally to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar that, on all these tense occasions, he achieves the outcome efficiently and with aplomb. Each time he reaffirmed his unenviable moniker—Palturam—he wore his trademark disarming smile in front of the press, as though being a champion turncoat was all in a day’s work.
Politicians at the national and state levels, however, concede him an astonishing political acumen and an impeccable sense of timing. He is likely to break away from the ruling Grand Alliance in Bihar and form a new government with his old ally BJP again. If things go along expected lines, he will be sworn in as chief minister for the ninth time on Sunday.
Nitish, a seasoned politician adept at running coalitions, initially prepared the ground for dumping the Grand Alliance. A war of words between JD(U) and RJD, the two major constituents of the alliance, had been going on for over a month on one pretext or the other. It reached a peak when Lalu’s Singapore-based daughter, Rohini Acharya, posted on X taunting Nitish for frequently switching sides.
The situation is a mirror of August 2022. Nitish had snapped ties with the NDA and formed a government with the Grand Alliance despite getting the 2020 assembly mandate as an NDA member. Even then, he had given himself time to prepare before taking a shot at Delhi.
The operation to dump his then BJP deputy, Sushil Modi, was so smooth that his deputy never realised what hit him before the game was up.
Sushil Modi had clearly forgotten the events of 2013, when Nitish had walked out from the NDA after Narendra Modi was elected the BJP election committee chairman for the 2014 polls. Four years later, Nitish was back in the NDA when the partner he had abandoned, RJD’s Tejaswi Yadav, failed to respond to his charges on the IRCTC land-for-jobs scam.
There is another side to Nitish’s persona that sets him apart from other politicians of the crafty variety—he never projects himself as a prime ministerial aspirant. This time, voices of support have started coming out from within the JD(U). The party repeatedly demanded that he be projected as the prime ministerial candidate of the united opposition. Nitish, however said he didn’t wish for any post and only wanted to defeat the BJP in 2024. He had undoubtedly played a crucial role in forging opposition unity and formulating an electoral strategy. But the delay in seat-sharing and getting less importance at opposition meetings compelled him to think otherwise.
Nitish was born on March 1, 1951, at Bakhtiyarpur in Patna district, where his father ‘Kaviraj’ Ram Lakhan Singh was an ayurveda practitioner, while his mother Parameshwari Devi was a housemaker. An engineering graduate from Bihar College of Engineering (now an NIT), Nitish was an active participant in the JP movement, which proved to be a launching pad for his political career, as it did for others like Lalu Prasad and Sushil Modi. But his entry into politics was not without some initial setbacks. He suffered two successive defeats in the 1977 and 1980 assembly polls from Harnaut in Nalanda district.
He contemplated taking up a career in business, but sought a last chance from his wife Manju Kumari Sinha. Nitish’s close friend Munna Sarkar collected donations for him to contest the polls in 1985. His wife chipped in Rs 20,000 from her savings. The result: he won the Harnaut seat. This was followed by a string of victories in LS polls before he assumed chief ministership in 2005. He had become CM in 2000 too, but had resigned when it was clear he would lose the floor test. All through, Nitish has maintained a clean image and never patronised ‘parivarvad’.
His only son, Nishant Kumar, is an engineering graduate from BIT Mesra and prefers to remain out of media glare. Poll strategist Prashant Kishor once said, “One fine day, [Nitish] will appear before the media and say that he took the decision [to shift] in the larger interest of the state and its development.” India is waiting for that day again.