A harbinger of change

Irrespective of who wins, the Bihar polls have brought into focus ground level shifts in the state.
Updated on
5 min read

The exit polls are already predicting a clear victory for Nitish Kumar in Bihar, some a runaway one. From the beginning most poll pundits were convinced that the chief minister was coming back to power. In some way the 2010 election in Bihar has had a ‘presidential’ touch, and has been a battle essentially between Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad, the chota bhai and barha bhai, as they refer to them in Bihar.

Irrespective of who wins and with what majority, the Bihar polls have brought into sharp focus ground level shifts in the state. This was underlined in the way people answered questions on who they had voted for. If they replied, vikas, they meant they had voted for Nitish Kumar. If they talked about “not enough having been done on the development front”, it showed they were voting for Lalu Prasad, or someone else.

Either way, development has come to the centrestage of the political agenda. This is Nitish Kumar’s single biggest achievement. He has managed to generate hope — as also arouse huge expectations and to meet them will be a mind-boggling challenge if he returns to power given the condition of the government and political machinery at his command — in a stagnant and backward Bihar that things can be different. And if people bring him back, it will be because they believe he is the one who can do it. It is not how much he has achieved on the development front that has mattered. It was the seriousness and sincerity of his intent that got through to them.

Hypothetically, if Lalu Prasad were to form the next government in Patna, though many rule this out, he too would have to pursue the development agenda. And he is not unaware of this, and his promise of doing things differently in the future underscores this.

This is not to say that ‘development’ has overtaken ‘caste’ as the determinant of voter preference in Bihar, as some would like to believe. Caste still underpins the state’s politics. Both Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad fashioned the caste equations which would bring them victory. Nitish did it under the broad brush stroke of development, having benefited specific groups in the last five years with his policies and programmes. At one time it was Lalu who was seen as the messiah of the poor and of social justice, but he lost the plot by favouring his family and only the Yadav community. Under Nitish power devolved, empowering the extremely backward castes — they comprise 31 per cent and none of these small castes add up to more than 1 per cent of the population — the Mahadalits and Pasmanda Muslims. What is more, he focused on the fruits of governance reaching them.

Nitish was assured the support of the upper castes with his ongoing alliance with the BJP. Though the forward castes were angry with him for his attempts to bring legislation to give more rights to share-croppers, and this was evident in the recent bypolls he lost, they swung back to the NDA as the polls progressed to keep Lalu, who had projected himself as a chief ministerial candidate, at bay. The Congress did not take off as it could have done and lost a window of opportunity.

Travelling in Bihar, there were clear signs of the Yadavs (they comprise 16 per cent of the population) gravitating back to Lalu Prasad, and they were aggressive in their defence of him. They chafed at the loss of power in the last five years; they complained of being ‘targeted’ by the Nitish regime. They could no longer walk into the police stations and say “Jai Ho Lalu” and get their work done. Some said they had moved away from Lalu in the 2005 polls, but were back with him this time. A good chunk of the Muslims have also remained with Lalu, and Paswans with Ram Vilas Paswan.

There were however signs of people, and these were mostly younger people, having defied the traditional caste logic to vote for Nitish Kumar. Like the Yadav taxi driver who had taken me around had voted for Nitish Kumar because he promised a brighter future. With the network of good roads the chief minister had built, it was now possible for him to go far afield and come back to Patna the same day and safe enough to travel after dark which was not the case in the Lalu era. Like the smartly dressed schoolgirls in their blue uniforms who had persuaded their parents to vote for Nitish Kumar. Like the group of women who had come to the booth and asked to be shown the position of the teer (JD(U)’s polls symbol of ‘arrow’ as opposed to the ‘bow and arrow’ of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, which had decided to field candidates in a dozen seats) so as not to make a mistake.

The serpentine queues of women at the polling booths in the morning — their turnout was surprisingly more than that of the men and it shot up by a whopping 10 per cent compared to the 2005 poll figures — seemed to tell its own story. Nitish Kumar had exhorted women — he was the first to give them 50 per cent reservation in the Panchayati Raj Institutions — to come out and vote first and then get down to their household chores; and if their men folk stopped them, to refuse to feed them!

If it turns out that a large number of women did vote for Nitish Kumar, even if a majority of them belonged to the EBCs, he would not only have acquired a significant caste-cutting constituency, it could unleash a new energy in the state and lead to hitherto unforeseen social and political changes.

There were also signs of the Muslims — these were mainly younger Muslims and it is difficult to quantify the percentage who favoured him — having voted for Nitish Kumar, and this was surprising, given the JD(U)’s alliance with the BJP. They said they had been influenced by what the chief minister had done to improve the law and order situation, build roads, appoint teachers in schools, give Muslim girls money after matriculation, fence Muslim graveyards. The saffron party, they said, had not made provocative statements against them nor put obstacles in Nitish Kumar’s way for helping the community. Of course, many Muslims said that Nitish Kumar would have their total support, if he moved away from the BJP.

If today’s results show that Muslims did vote for Nitish Kumar, it would be an important message also to the saffron parivar, underscoring the possibility of neutralising the Muslim hostility towards them, provided the BJP moves away from a politics of Hindu-Muslim polarisation. If that happens, the BJP will be called to choose between, in the words of a young Muslim in Phulwarisharief, the “Bihar way” and the “Gujarat way” of conducting politics.

It goes without saying that whatever be the poll outcome, Bihar will have a bearing for the future of Indian politics

neerja_chowdhury@yahoo.com

About the author:                       

Neerja Chowdhury is political editor, The New Indian Express
.

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