Soon after Nitish Kumar took oath as the chief minister of Bihar for the eighth time last August after leading the Mahagathbandhan alliance to victory in the state elections, he took a deliberate jab at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cautioning the latter to worry about his party’s prospects in 2024.
While Nitish had apparently made a nuanced statement aimed more at convincing his new alliance partners about his willingness to take on the BJP and its cohorts than provoking the prime minister by throwing a challenge at him, his overzealous supporters were quick to seize the opportunity. Within no time, his name started doing the rounds as the Opposition’s prime ministerial candidate for 2024, with newspapers carrying reports about the possibility of Nitish contesting the next Lok Sabha elections from the OBC-dominated Phulpur constituency in Uttar Pradesh. A senior JD(U) leader even suggested that Mirzapur and Ambedkar Nagar, two other OBC-heavy UP constituencies, could be options for the Bihar chief minister when he seeks to challenge Modi.
Speculations in this regard continue despite Nitish’s silence on the prime ministerial post. He insists that his sole intention is to unite the Opposition ahead of the 2024 battle, which will be crucial for both sides. Irrespective of which seat the Kurmi stalwart contests the next Lok Sabha elections from, it is becoming increasingly apparent that he is preparing the ground for a switch from Bihar to national politics. As he gears up for a bigger role in the final stage of his political career, a lot would depend on how things shape up for him and the Opposition in his home state and neighbouring UP, which together account for 120 Lok Sabha seats—more than 22% of the Lower House of Parliament.
The two states also hold symbolic importance in the larger context of the next general elections. While Bihar, having just unseated BJP from power in the state, is being seen as the catalyst of a possible change at the national level, UP is India’s saffron stronghold, with the prime minister himself the MP from Varanasi. Besides, more than 40 assembly constituencies in seven districts of Bihar—West Champaran, Gopalganj, Siwan, Saran, Bhojpur, Buxar and Kaimur—share boundaries with eastern UP districts and can thus impact the outcome of both assembly and Lok Sabha polls in these areas.
The irony, however, is that despite sharing a long and contiguous geographical area and having strong socio-cultural ties, including an almost identical caste matrix, political exchanges between UP and Bihar have been limited by a strange kind of insularity. Their occasional statements of friendship and cooperation in elections, notwithstanding leaders of major parties from the two states, appear to repel each other because of overlapping caste and vote-bank interests.
Thus, even in the heydays of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, neither Samajwadi Party nor Bahujan Samaj Party could make any significant inroads into Bihar, faring rather poorly in elections in the state. The SP, vying for the same Muslim-Yadav vote bank that Lalu Prasad Yadav had consolidated for himself in Bihar, could win just two assembly seats in the state in the 1995 and 2005 elections.
In the 2015 Bihar elections, the SP walked out of the grand alliance in a huff and alone contested 135 seats. But the party failed to open its account. Mayawati’s BSP has done only slightly better than SP in Bihar; its maximum seat tally in an assembly election in the state is five.
In the past, Nitish Kumar has made political forays into Uttar Pradesh, hoping to tap into OBC, especially Kurmi votes. In 2016, a year before Assembly elections were held in UP following the ascension of the BJP to power in Delhi, the Bihar chief minister addressed a string of political events in the heartland state. These included a political convention in Phulpur and a rally in Mirzapur. However, JD(U)’s electoral outings in UP have ended in disaster.
That should be warning enough for Nitish Kumar, though UP offers ample scope to the anti-BJP Opposition to intensify the fight against its enemy by preventing a split of votes. If non-BJP Dalit leaders from UP and Bihar unite, they can easily corner the bulk of around 22% of Dalit votes in the state. Similarly, with an array of influential OBC leaders in its ranks, a serious Opposition can also draw a sizable chunk of backward ballots in the state.
But so far, the BJP has successfully split these votes by taking advantage of the clashing ambitions of major Opposition parties. And the insular nature of politics in UP and Bihar, with each trying to keep leaders from the other state at bay, offers little hope for Opposition unity.
Strangely, the insularity of Bihar, however, does not apply to “outsiders” who sought to make their political fortune in the state. With strong socialist moorings, the state offered political sanctuary to leaders like George Fernandes, Madhu Limaye and Sharad Yadav. At some other stage of their careers, they became synonymous with the politics of Bihar. Even J B Kripalani contested and won the Lok Sabha elections from Bihar.
However, with few exceptions like mafia don-turned-MLA Suraj Deo Singh, who hailed from Balia in UP but ruled the coal belt of Dhanbad with an iron hand, and former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar who won the Maharajganj Lok Sabha seat in 1989, Bihar has not been kind to politicians from its neighbouring state. There are no indications of political insularity between the two states anytime soon, and one wonders how Nitish and the Opposition will negotiate this weakness in 2024.
Ashutosh Mishra
Independent journalist