Nitish Kumar’s inconstancy—the latest demonstration being the alacrity with which he dumped the INDIA alliance and embraced the BJP-led NDA again in a little over a year—was cruelly mocked on social media. Yet, the ‘Paltu Ram’ nickname that has stuck to him means little in the larger context.
Last Sunday, he was sworn in as the Bihar chief minister for the ninth time in 24 years. Whether the new supporting cast is deemed communal or secular is inconsequential to the leaders of the Socialist vintage birthed by Ram Manohar Lohia. They have been unabashedly into power politics in the name of empowering the subalterns neglected by pro-upper-caste parties; that is, before Mandal altered the socio-political dynamics of the Hindi heartland.
Recall that in 1993, wise political commentators had predicted the BJP had again become “untouchable” after the Babri mosque demolition in the previous December. The BJP’s precursor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, had earned infamy for Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, though it was founded three years after 1948. The pundits said that no party, even the ideologically fickle Socialists, would keep it company for long.
Yet in 1994, BSP leader Mayawati crossed the line drawn by the secular establishment when she took the BJP’s support to head a minority government in Uttar Pradesh. In November 1995, when the BJP hosted a plenary session in Mumbai, Nitish and his senior George Fernandes were unveiled before a huge gathering as the party’s new allies. They had floated the Samata Party, an offshoot of the Janata Dal, which had Lalu Prasad. Earlier that year in Delhi, the BJP had iterated its commitment to three core issues—uniform civil code, abrogation of Article 370 and Ram temple in Ayodhya. But that did not deter Nitish or Fernandes. Secularism as an article of faith had started to lose credence.
Whenever the BJP signed a power-sharing covenant with the Samata Party, which morphed into the Janata Dal (United), both gained significantly in the elections. BJP’s core upper caste base—which is not so substantial in Bihar, unlike in UP—with Nitish’s backward caste Kurmi-Koeri following, augmented with the votes of the extremely backward castes, made for a winning combine.
In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, which were fought in tandem by the BJP and JD(U), they won 32 seats and cornered 37.97 of the vote share. In the 2019 parliamentary polls, the BJP, JD(U) and Lok Janshakti Party combine won all but one of Bihar’s 40 seats; the other went to the Congress. Together, their vote share was a daunting 54.34 percent.
When in the middle of these two elections, Nitish broke away from the BJP in 2014 because of Narendra Modi’s leadership and the concomitant alienation of Muslims it caused, Nitish won just two of the 38 seats he contested, with a 16.04 percent vote share. The Modi wave overwhelmed every other party.
The trends in the state polls, however, were less daunting for the non-BJP spectrum. In 2020, the NDA—which in Bihar included JD(U) and four other parties—just about crossed the halfway mark in the 243-member assembly, with 125 MLAs and 37.26 percent of the votes. Even then, the BJP emerged as the second largest party after the Rashtriya Janata Dal, picking up 74 of the 110 seats it fought. The JD(U) was the third largest.
Aware that its partnership with the JD(U) is mutually beneficial, the BJP brass invested in getting Nitish back despite intermittent spells of acrimony. Top functionaries from both sides worked on bringing about a rapprochement, which began in September 2022 when Nitish attended a dinner hosted by the prime minister for G20 delegates in Delhi. Other CMs were invited too—MK Stalin of Tamil Nadu and Hemant Soren of Jharkhand, now in the INDIA fold, showed up. But Nitish’s presence was more striking because he had boycotted the PM’s official functions after dumping the BJP for a second time in 2022 to team up with Lalu Prasad’s RJD.
There was another sign that Nitish had not irrevocably severed his ties with the BJP. His party MP, Harivansh Narayan Singh, carried on as the Rajya Sabha deputy chairperson. Nobody asked how this came to pass. Not even when Nitish took the initiative in June 2023 to found the INDIA bloc, worked hard to get the regional players on board, and signalled he had a big stake in the endeavour’s success.
But such an alliance was rooted in competing interests. The regional parties flaunted leaders such as Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal, were unprepared to accept the Congress’s stewardship, least of all Rahul Gandhi’s, and were sceptical of Nitish’s ambitions to eventually head INDIA and possibly be declared the PM candidate. At the last INDIA meeting on January 13, Nitish rejected an offer to become its convenor after Mamata Banerjee, Uddhav Thackeray and Akhilesh Yadav boycotted the session. Nitish saw that as a vote of no-confidence in his leadership and an affront to his “status”.
As Rahul Gandhi embarked on the second phase of his countrywide peregrination from the northeast, it became apparent that he was indifferent to repairing the cracks in INDIA and restoring a semblance of credibility to the alliance. Constituent after constituent made it clear that the Congress would have to engage with them in the seat-sharing negotiations on their terms. The Congress does not command respect or inspire fear.
The political wind had changed. The BJP’s electoral success in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh against the odds and the high-decibel sanctification of the Ram temple enhanced the NDA’s prospects and diminished INDIA’s. If the assembly wins re-established the BJP’s primacy in the heartland, the Ayodhya celebration not only re-mobilised the traditional pro-Hindutva votaries, but added a larger constituency sworn to faith.
To top it, Narendra Modi pulled a rabbit out of his hat—the conferment of the Bharat Ratna on Karpoori Thakur, the former Bihar CM and Socialist icon who had originally championed backward caste empowerment in the north before Mandal.
Voters are varied across the vast swath of the heartland. Religion persuades most sections to vote the BJP in UP, but caste often predominates in Bihar. In this cauldron, the BJP’s astuteness was in sensing Nitish’s restiveness with opposition politics and giving him an alibi to rejoin the NDA after the award bestowed on Thakur.
But with half a dozen allies in Bihar, the BJP will face a problem of plenty in the coming elections. Will Nitish make the gains he hoped for?