Brand Nitish vs Achhe Din 2.0: Round two of Bihar battle goes to PM Modi

Less than six months ago, Jitan Ram Manjhi was the chief minister of Bihar, and Nitish Kumar was a demoralized man. He had broken his 13-year-old alliance with the Bhartiya Janata Party because Narendra Modi wasn’t acceptable to him as the Prime Minister. Modi not only became Prime Minister, the BJP won 32 of 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar, showing the JDU its place. Encouraged by the Delhi assembly election results and Modi’s former strategist Prashant Kishor, Nitish Kumar took back the reign of Patna from Manjhi, and then began a campaign to change the political discourse. Suddenly, the big question in Bihar was not how unstoppable the BJP was, but how Nitish Kumar was inseparable from Bihar’s progress. The Prashant Kishor strategy has been to project Nitish, Nitish, Nitish to the extent that the primary political question in Bihar is: do you want Nitish or not? That rendered the Bihar election as a personality contest between Nitish and Narendra. If that was round one of the Bihar 2015 battle was taken by Nitish, Narendra Modi gave a strong reply to that today, by spending just a few hours in Patna and Muzaffarpur. [caption id=“attachment_2363204” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=" “] PM Modi and Nitish Kumar at a function in Patna on Saturday. PTI[/caption] At an official function in Patna, chief minister Nitish Kumar welcomed prime minister Modi with pointed attacks at him and all the central ministers present. Modi gave it back in kind. Nitish mentioned complained that a rail line in Bihar hasn’t been completed even though he announced it when he was railways minister in 2004. Modi shot back that his successor in the Railways ministry was another Bihari, a reference to Lalu Prasad Yadav, who didn’t manage to complete the project. The attack must have stung, because Nitish and Lalu, once sworn enemies and bitter opponents, are now in a formidable alliance in Bihar against the BJP. If this is how an official function went, Modi’s speech in Muzaffarpur was unsurprisingly full of bitter personal attacks on Nitish and Lalu. Modi said that the main issue in this election was whether people wanted Lalu’s “jungle raj” back or not. That was to remind people how bad the Lalu years were. Yet, Modi spent most of his speech attacking not Lalu but Nitish Kumar. Modi said that Nitish had not kept his promise of giving electricity to the people, which isn’t exactly true. Travelling in north Bihar recently for three days, this writer found that the single greatest reason for Nitish Kumar’s popularity was the recent improvement in the electricity situation. Such nit-picking apart, where Modi stumped Nitish Kumar was his sheer oratory superiority. It seemed as if Modi is still in his 2014 mode, making people dream of progress and prosperity at a scale they aren’t used to. The biggest danger to Nitish Kumar’s strategy of projecting Brand Nitish now is Narendra Modi’s Achche Din Bihar Edition. The best example of this was Modi’s response to Nitish Kumar’s allegation that Modi wasn’t keeping his promise of giving Bihar special status, which would bring another 50,000 crore rupees from Delhi to Bihar. Modi said that he studied Bihar’s situation and thought about a vision for a new Bihar, and realized 50,000 crores won’t be enough. Modi said he’ll announce a package for Bihar after the parliament session, and it would be more than 50k crores. IN one fell swoop, he took the winds away from Nitish’s sails on the special status question. Modi made it clear that this assembly election is an issue of prestige for him. After all, there was a time not long ago when Nitish would insist that Narendra Modi’s entry into Bihar would endanger to the JDU-BJP alliance. Modi took a dig at Nitish’s problems in making smooth his alliance with Lalu, and said that these people should sort out their differences privately, and the people should meanwhile give Modi and the BJP a chance to take Bihar on a new journey of progress. Modi recalled the day when he was in Patna for a BJP national executive meeting in 2009. Nitish had invited BJP leaders for a dinner at Maurya hotel but then he saw Modi publish advertisements in Patna papers informing people of Gujarat’s aid for Kosi flood relief. The ads included a photo of Nitish with Modi together. Nitish was incensed, and this was a turning point in Nitish Kumar’s life. Not only did he withdraw the dinner invitation that night, he also decided he will break the alliance with the BJP if he has to put up with Narendra Modi. “Thaali cheen li,” Narendra Modi told a huge crowd in Muzaffarpur. Modi said he didn’t care about the personal humiliation, but Nitish’s personal ego problems with Narendra Modi meant that he has put himself in a belligerent situation with New Delhi. This is how, the prime minister said, Nitish had sacrificed the state’s development for personal ego. Similarly, he counted Nitish’s betrayal of George Fernandes and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi as proof that Nitish is a man who can’t be trusted. There’s something wrong with Nitish Kumar, he doesn’t have values and respect for others, something wrong with his DNA. Modi’s powerful oratory won round two in the battle for Bihar, but there will be many more rounds in the next three months. Already, Nitish Kumar has responded to Modi’s victimhood about political untouchability by doing some victimhood of his own. My DNA is the DNA of a Bihari, Nitish tweeted, asking the people of Bihar to decide how they want to reply Modi’s comments on their DNA.