Has Nitish The Chameleon Finally Run Out Of Colours?

His incompetence, but luck in career, helped by association with Lalu Prasad Yadav and the BJP in turns, makes him the most hypocritical in the ‘merged’ lot.

So it has finally happened, or has it? Six of the former constituents of the Janata Dal (Janata Dal United, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Janata Dal Secular, Indian National Lok Dal, Samajwadi Party and the Samajwadi Janata Party) of the 1980s, which even at that point of time was a rag-tag coalition of caste-satraps, have finally ‘merged’ together to form a single party. As of now, there is no clarity over the proposed election symbol or even the name of the new party. However, all the constituents have agreed that Mulayam Singh Yadav shall be the leader of their new party. One is at a complete loss to figure out whether or not a merger has actually taken place.

In a legalistic sense, all these six parties are registered separately with the Election Commission and the modalities required to be taken care of before a formal merger is effective, are yet to be finalised. Nonetheless, the apparently anti-BJP media establishment seems to be hailing this ‘merger’ as a long overdue move to check the advancing juggernaut of the ‘communal forces’ that threaten to swamp the rather nebulous ‘Idea of India’.

A closer look at the antecedents of the various constituents would suggest a rather historically equivocal commitment to the cause of secularism on their part. The Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana has earlier done business with the BJP, which was part of the ruling coalition in the state during their last stint in power. The avowedly ‘secular’ Janata Dal in Karnataka has also been part of a coalition with the BJP. In 1999, Mulayam Singh Yadav scuttled the formation of a ‘secular’ coalition at the Centre at the behest of BJP stalwart LK Advani. Even Lalu Prasad Yadav, during the first half of his career, once regarded the RSS as the lesser of the two evils between the former and the Youth Congress. Let us not even get started on the criminal records of most of these ‘socialist’ stalwarts.

However, the flip-flops of the other constituents of the Janata ‘parivar’ notwithstanding, it is Nitish who remains the most representative example of the hypocrisy and chicanery that has characterised the so-called Lohiaite socialist politicians of this country. Another respect in which the case of the current Chief Minister of Bihar is unique is that, unlike the other major leaders of this motley coalition, he does not enjoy the support of any numerically and socially strong ‘kulak’ farmer community like the Yadavs or the Hindi-belt or the Vokkaligas of Karnataka.

Here, we must doff our hats to Nitish’s consummate political skill in engineering coalitions and mergers with political leaders and parties of different hues- all of which were stronger than him in electoral terms- and yet managing to hang on to his office of Bihar’s chief executive for almost a decade. He has also held plum portfolios at the Centre during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s regime. Hence, it would be instructive to examine the political career of this canny politician from Nalanda in the context of the upcoming elections to the Bihar Assembly because it is only in the state of Bihar that the Janata coalition stands a realistic chance of stopping the BJP juggernaut.

I am pretty sure pigs would fly before Deve Gowda can act as a force multiplier for Lalu or Mulayam or vice versa. Furthermore, it is also unlikely that the core constituency of Om Prakash Chautala would be swayed by the bombastic and mostly incomprehensible oratory of the Samajwadi Party paterfamilias.

Nitish started his political career in the crucible of the anti-Emergency agitation of the 1970s. Very early in his career, it became amply clear that his skill-set was no match for his more charismatic colleagues like Lalu Prasad Yadav who made up for the lack of substance with his oratory skills and a rather rustic charm of bombast. Once the Emergency was lifted and elections to the Bihar Assembly were held in 1977, Nitish contested and lost the elections from his own constituency in Harnaut. This was when it was said that even a ‘lamp-post’ contesting with the Janata Party symbol could have won an election anywhere in the Hindi-speaking belt! The results clearly showed that he had failed to mobilise the support of his own Kurmi community which, in any case, constituted just about two to three per cent of the population of the state.

The Congress led by the redoubtable Indira Gandhi made a comeback in the 1980s. Finally, it was in 1990 that the Janata parivar managed to win 122 seats on its own; after hectic backroom parleys in New Delhi and Patna, Lalu Prasad Yadav was installed as the Chief Minister while Nitish unofficially began to be referred to as ‘Chanakya’ to the Yadav strongman’s ‘Chandragupta’.

At some point, during his first term as Chief Minister, especially after Advani’s arrest during the rath yatra in 1990, Lalu realised that in a thoroughly feudal state splintered upon caste-lines, the combination of Yadav, Muslims and sections of the Dalit and OBC communities was enough for him to win an Assembly election on his own steam. He also knew if he could rule Bihar for any substantial length of time, he would automatically become a contender to rule Delhi. The crafty politician also realised that it was about time that he eliminated the power brokers in his own party who were trying to wield clout in Patna without having an independent power base on their own.

Sankarshan Thakur in his biography of Nitish, Single Man — the Life and Times of Nitish of Bihar, recounts an incident when Nitish and a few of his associates were manhandled and verbally abused by Lalu when they tried to seek an audience with him. Stung at what was definitely intended to be a slight, Nitish decided to contest the 1995 Vidhan Sabha election under the banner of his own Samata Party, with the support of other sidelined ‘socialists’ like George Fernandes, in an alliance with the Left Front. Despite hectic campaigning, he was unable to make headway; Lalu returned to power with an increased majority. Nitish could manage only two seats.

Apart from the burnishing of Lalu’s credentials as a mass leader, the other takeaway from this election was the emergence of the Bhartiya Janata Party as the main opposition party in Bihar. The Congress, with its 29 seats to the BJP’s 41, was relegated to the third position while the Samata Party won a mere 2 seats. The BJP’s central leadership also realised that, unlike Uttar Pradesh, Bihar was a state where the ‘Hindu’ vote could not be mobilised so easily as the Hindu community was splintered greatly along caste-lines. This is when they entered into an alliance with the Samata Party so that Nitish could act as their force multiplier in future hustings and sure enough in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections; the two combined together to win one more seat than Lalu’s 22. An examination of the Lok Sabha election results in 1998 and 1999 would show an exacerbation of this trend as the anti-incumbency against the Lalu regime as well as the increasing popularity of the premiership of Vajpayee slowly eroded the footprint of Lalu and his newly born and somewhat inaccurately christened Rashtriya Janata Dal across Bihar.

Due to legal wrangles, Lalu was also compelled to install his almost unlettered wife Rabri Devi as Chief Minister in the year 1997. He continued to rule through proxy even as his hold on the state became more and more tenuous every passing day.

Even as his inarguably more popular former colleague was now struggling, Nitish was enjoying arguably undeserved crumbs from the high table in Delhi as the BJP established itself as the party of governance at the Centre. Between 1998 and 1999, Nitish enjoyed a staggered stint as the Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways as well as another one as the Minister of Agriculture. He also used his time in Delhi to build extensive contacts within the BJP as well as the larger Sangh Parivar.

Somewhere down the line, some of the members of the Delhi cabal of the BJP with no independent mass base of their own also realised that the only way in which they could remain relevant was by scuttling the growth of a strong BJP leadership in the Hindi belt, especially in the politically important states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This was also around the time when the BJP’s central leadership courted the likes of Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh at the expense of strong independent mass-leaders like Kalyan Singh. Nitish and his Samata Party fit seamlessly into their plans. They reckoned that Nitish would be easily malleable and could easily be made to do New Delhi’s bidding if the NDA coalition were able to register a victory in the upcoming Assembly Elections. They were also apprehensive that a similarly placed leader from the BJP/RSS stable might start harbouring prime ministerial ambitions. How a former ‘chaiwallah’ from the politically much less relevant state of Gujarat finally finished off the ‘Delhi establishment’ is the stuff of legend and shall be dealt with some other time.

To return to Bihar, the Assembly Election of 2000 was one that the NDA was widely tipped to win. However, due to severe infighting between the newly minted JD(U) of Nitish and the rump Samata Party, both of which were constituents of the NDA, the ruling coalition at the Centre could only get two seats of the tally of Lalu’s RJD. Despite the fact that his party had won a grand total of 21 seats to the BJP’s 67, Nitish managed to get the blessings of the NDA bosses in Delhi in order to get sworn in as the Chief Minister of Bihar in February 2000 whereupon he promptly failed to prove his majority on the floor of the House despite tall claims made before the press. For this unedifying fiasco, which exposed his utter lack of skill when it came to realpolitik, Nitish was rewarded again with the prestigious Union Ministry of Agriculture. What is more, his portfolio was also upgraded in 2001 and he was made the Minister for Railways.

It was on Nitish’s watch as Railway Minister that the Godhra train massacre took place in February 2002. Even as the aftermath of the Gujarat riots rocked the government, Nitish steadfastly refused to interfere in the intra-BJP wrangling between the Vajpayee and Advani factions of the party as he had no wish to incur the wrath of either. He knew extremely well that he owed his Cabinet position and possible chief ministerial chair in the future not to his own political skill and acumen but to the fact that he was adept at currying favour with the BJP. In the year 2003, Nitish also went public with his adulation of Narendra Modi. So much for his commitment to ‘secularism’!

While Nitish was consolidating his own position within the NDA, the central government took another momentous decision to carve out Jharkhand from the state of Bihar in 2000. This region had historically been a stronghold for the BJP; with the bifurcation of the state, Nitish leveraged his clout in the NDA to project his own ragtag band as senior partner in the alliance with the BJP at the state level. However, the ground reality was that his party legislators comprised of quite a few politicians sent on ‘secondment’ from the BJP as he still had no independent mass base of his own.

The BJP-led government at the Centre lost power in 2004 as Lalu made a comeback of sorts at the national level by winning 22 seats out of 40 in the rump state of Bihar. The stage was thus set for a battle royale in February 2005 between Lalu and Nitish, with the latter still piggybacking on the support of the BJP despite getting the better of the seat sharing arrangement.

True to form and past record, Nitish’s performance was underwhelming as he was yet again unable to prove his majority in a hung House as his past colleague Ram Vilas Paswan, now with the NDA, played spoiler. It was only in the fresh polls held later that year that Nitish could realise his long cherished dream of emerging as the chief minister for a full five-year term with the support of the BJP. The JD(U) with 88 seats, reinforced by the Samata Party’s merger with it, along with the BJP’s 55 seats, formed the government in Patna.

Nitish’s administration was widely perceived to be less corrupt than the previous dispensation and he was widely lauded by the media for having brought down the level of crime in Bihar. It is another matter that Bhumihar criminals like Anant Singh flourished during his rule as well. But then, the bar for Bihar had been set so low for the past 15 years that even minor improvements on the economic front registered as huge growth rates on all parameters. Slowly and insidiously, the chief minister projected himself as the sole leader and spokesperson of the alliance even though a lot of the good work done during his first term in power could be attributed to the BJP ministers and legislators concerned.

The comatose and geriatric BJP leadership at the Centre was in no position to put a stop to this. On the back of his ‘sushasan’ (good governance) initiative, Nitish won a fresh term in power in the year 2010. He also tried to engage in a bit of clumsy social engineering by carving out special categories like Extremely Backward Classes and Mahadalits out of the larger SC and OBC categories. This was nothing but a blatant perpetuation of the politics of caste-based entitlements which, as the electorate would soon show, was past its sell-by-date.

During this period, the BJP at the national level was licking its wounds after a humiliating and embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls of 2009. The likes of Saba Naqvi of Outlook had already begun to exhort the BJP to “contemplate its own mortality”. But notwithstanding the English language commentariat, it was clear that the green shoots of recovery for the BJP were just about beginning to sprout in Bihar. The ‘saffron’ party did win only 91 seats to the JD(U)’s 115 in an Assembly of 243. However, its success rate at 89 per cent was much better than the JD(U)’s 82. Also, in less than about a year, it also became amply clear that UPA II had begun to lose the battle of the hearts and minds of the people of India, quite miserably.

At this point in time, Nitish, canny politician that he is, started weighing his options. It was clear that, even though there was a groundswell of opposition to the Congress owing to the widespread perception of corruption and  because of the indifferent performance of its various state governments, the BJP just did not seem to be battle-ready enough to step into the breach at the national level. The only man who seemed to be capable of galvanising the BJP’s core vote was still ensconced in Gandhinagar. Even within the BJP, some leaders nurtured a bit of wishful scepticism in relation to Modi’s appeal to a vast cross section of voters.

Nitish also realised that he could leverage his own opposition to Modi as an ally of the NDA in order to perhaps even become the prime ministerial face of the alliance at the Centre with the blessings of the same aforementioned Delhi cabal of the BJP. He also knew full well as the Congress knew for a fact that it was finished in Bihar in the medium term. The ally at the Centre would have no problem with showering Bihar with special packages- which Nitish could market to the electorate as his own achievement – in return for support at the Centre.

As the Congress government careened from one disaster to the other, Modi won a third term as chief minister in December 2012. The fact that he delivered his thanksgiving speech in Hindi made it amply clear that he was now speaking to a national audience. On the other hand, Nitish knew that the most potent argument in the hands of Modi’s detractors in the BJP was that he would be unable to mobilise the allies needed to prop-up a possible BJP led government in Delhi. According to Nitish’s reckoning, even if the BJP were to go ahead with Modi, he could exercise Plan B — which was to join the UPA. The political atmosphere heated up and, perhaps because he was exhorted by a section of the media and another section of the BJP, Nitish committed what was perhaps the greatest political error of his career.

In April 2013, Nitish cancelled a dinner invite to the BJP top brass in Patna ostensibly over an advertisement published by the state unit of the BJP that showed Nitish and Modi sharing a stage in Ludhiana as comrades in arms. This thoroughly unedifying drama also set the cat amongst the pigeons in the BJP. Murmurs about how a divisive Modi would make the national party even more of an untouchable than it already was, had started becoming louder and louder. Notwithstanding the misgivings of the entrenched but now geriatric old guard of the BJP, and the obviously stage-managed shenanigans of Nitish in Patna, the RSS top brass, in an audacious move, decided to stake all on Modi and the Gujarat strongman was anointed as the chief of the BJP’s campaign committee in June 2013.

At this point, Nitish should have realised that he had already overplayed his hand and, pragmatically speaking, ought to have withdrawn from any direct confrontation with Modi. Sadly for him, his bravado got the better of him and he ejected the BJP from the state government and engineered a fresh trust vote victory on the floor of the Vidhan Sabha with the help of the Congress and sundry independents. However, when the campaign for the Lok Sabha elections actually commenced, it became clear to all observers that despite all the pre-campaign rhetoric, Nitish really was a peripheral player in the battle for Bihar which was essentially one between the BJP on the one side and the RJD on the other.

The BJP was bolstered by the presence of force-multipliers like Ram Vilas Paswan and the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party — another breakaway from the Janata Dal and its charismatic leader, Upendra Kushwaha. It also benefited greatly from the sympathy wave generated by bomb attacks on Modi’s rally in Patna. On the other hand, it seemed that Lalu, despite his pyrotechniques on the campaign trail, was being saddled with the baggage of a comatose and defeated Congress. In their own respective inimitable styles, both Lalu and Modi attacked Nitish in the most trenchant possible manner. Both of them questioned his commitment to secularism and interrogated his hypocrisy over the principle above. Nitish’s own rallies proved to be colossal flop shows; on one occasion, he was also heckled with chants of “Modi-Modi”.

When the results did eventually come out, it was Modi’s BJP with 282 seats emerging as the first political party in the post-Rajiv Gandhi era to win a majority on its own steam. It also registered a brilliant victory in Bihar where it won 22 seats out of 40 on its own while the Lok Jan Shakti Party of Paswan and the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party of Kushwaha won 6 and 3 seats respectively. Lalu could manage 4 while the JD(U) was reduced to a total of two seats.

However, there was a little bit of a catch here. Unlike states like Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP had won by a veritable knockout bagging close to 50 per cent or more of the total votes polled, the victory in Bihar was more of a victory on points. The BJP and its allies combined to poll just about 38.8 per cent of the popular vote of which the BJP’s share was about 30 per cent. On the other hand, even though the RJD and the Congress’s combined share was slightly less than that of the BJP’s individual share, the JD(U) had also polled 15 per cent of the popular vote. Hence, pure arithmetic seemed to suggest that the combined strengths of the RJD, JD(U) and the Congress could outstrip the Modi wave even at its peak.

Perhaps chastened by such psephology, Nitish decided to abdicate the chief ministry assuming, what he termed, as “moral responsibility” for the defeat in the Lok Sabha polls. Jitan Ram Manjhi, a serial party-hopper and Mahadalit, was installed as the Chief Minister of Bihar on 20 May 2014. At the same time, hectic parleys commenced between the JD(U) and RJD and the two decided to contest the upcoming Bihar Vidhan Sabha by-polls in alliance with each other. The arithmetic seemed to come together for the two former ‘Lohiaites’ as they trounced the BJP in the by-polls held for 10 Vidhan Sabha seats by a margin of 6-4.

Even as the modalities for the merger/alliance of the erstwhile constituents of the Janata Dal were being worked out, the JD(U) chief was confronted by another crisis when Manjhi accused him of trying to use the Mahadalit chief minister as a puppet and briefly threatened to leverage the BJP’s support to remain in the CMO in February of this year. Although the crisis eventually blew over as the BJP did not go along with Manjhi’s plan, the entire chain of events did leave a bad taste in the mouth of the members of the Mahadalit community, who had been aggressively and assiduously courted by Nitish.

Finally, Nitish was once again sworn in as the Chief Minister of Bihar in February 2015. At this point, it seems that, as far as pure arithmetic is concerned, the constituents of the Janata parivar are the frontrunners as far as the Bihar Assembly elections, to be held later this year, are concerned. Nonetheless, in the final reckoning, before the action actually commences, a few points may be in order.

1. The most important question that warrants an answer from Nitish’s point of view is whether his vote-share shall be fully transferrable to Lalu and vice versa, given that the EBCs and Mahadalits have a mutually adversarial relationship with each other in Bihar’s violently charged feudal milieu.
2. The full impact of l’affaire Manjhi might be unclear as of today. However, one may safely assume that the manner in which a Mahadalit chief minister was hounded out by Nitish might just end up making the community a tad wary of the present chief minister’s overtures — especially when he has now joined hands with the ‘kulak’ farming communities whose interests are directly opposed to theirs.
3. Most importantly, even if one were to assume that the new Janata Party would defeat the BJP and indeed sweep to power, a possible scenario would be for Nitish to be installed as chief minister while Lalu’s daughter Misa is appointed the deputy chief minister. In such a scenario, given that the loyalty of most of the legislators would be with Lalu and even those inclined to support Nitish would surely be wary of the anti-defection law, is Nitish sufficiently insured against the possibility of a potential palace coup? It is important to remember that Lalu has plenty of reason to hate Nitish on a personal basis as he has done more than enough to have him exiled from the political stage.

In the final analysis, it seems that Nitish has painted himself in a rather tight corner indeed. Is his luck finally running out? We need to wait just a few more months to find the answer to this question. As far as the writer is concerned, he would fervently hope that Nitish’s hypocrisy is finally called out by the electorate!