Will Nitish Kumar pay the price of ensuring progress in Bihar?

In September 2012, the battlefield of 2014 was still only a blip, and BJP leader and then deputy chief minister of Bihar Sushil Modi’s remark that his chief minister Nitish Kumar was certainly prime ministerial material may have annoyed BJP top brass, but the official response was merely that SuMo had made a too-premature remark. Shaadi hui nahin, dulhe ki baat karte hain, one BJP leader said. [caption id=“attachment_1471277” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Nitish Kumar. Reuters.[/caption] Cut to two years later and SuMo is not only terming Nitish persona non grata in national politics with the proposed Federal Front failing to take off. He’s also predicting that the Modi wave in Bihar, a state where the Gujarat chief minister could not even enter so long as Nitish remained in the NDA, is strong enough to dislodge the state government. A report in The Economic Times quotes the Bihar BJP leader as claiming that over 50 JD (U) MLAs are in touch with the BJP. “They are also supporting our candidates in the polls. But the BJP will not make any effort to topple the government. It will, however, fall due to the party’s inner contradictions,” he is reported to have told media. With the BJP pulling out of the Bihar government in 2013, the Janata Dal (U) government was dependent on four Congress MLA, but there is a possibility that a poor showing in the Lok Sabha elections could lead some JD (U) members to leave. Just how did it come to be that the man considered PM material and mostly credited for the booming Bihar story is now also being blamed for anticipated losses in the Lok Sabha elections? So much so that even party chief Sharad Yadav derided him at a Muzaffarpur rally this past weekend, saying the Bihar chief minister and Lalu Prasad were both equally guilty of continuing to stoke the caste cauldron in the backward state instead of focusing on development. Yadav issued a hasty clarification a day later, but the damage had been done. Simultaneously, the beleaguered Lalu Yadav and his Rashtriya Janata Dal are seeing an unexpected resurgence . Reports now foretell the possibility of a Lalu surge tripping the Modi juggernaut in the state that sends 40 MPs to Lok Sabha. In his Writings on the Wall column in The Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta says much of the change brought about by the Nitish government is behind the increased expectations among people. “That is change. And if Nitish is now looking at what can only be described as a downturn in electoral fortunes as dramatic as his sweep in 2010, could it be because he failed to appreciate this? Nearly nine years of great governance, exemplary law and order, among the highest rates of economic growth in India and a most dramatic improvement in social indicators, however low the base may have been, has changed voter attitudes in Bihar more radically than he imagined when he broke off from the BJP, driven by hubris that he couldn’t escape in the halo of 2010 and imprisoned mostly by bureaucratic sycophants who converged around him in its wake. A better fed, less insecure population is tougher to satiate. It wants more. It is less bound by ideology because more that is material, and now matters, is within its reach, a possibility. The more aspirational — or, okay, materialistic — a people, the less ideological they become.” But just as Nitish is not getting the support he might have claimed as his for breaking away from what he calls a divisive agenda, he’s also not getting the support of groups traditionally opposed to the BJP. Being a general election, the Muslims, who backed Nitish strongly for breaking away from the NDA, are now back in the Congress-RJD fold. The upper castes, already basically NDA supporters, are now increasingly wary of Nitish’s efforts to promote the extremely backward castes (EBCs) and the Bihar government’s Mahadalit Commission. Reservation for various caste groups in urban local bodies put general category males in a small minority in these institutions, one more reason for this community to stop supporting the JD (U). The anti-Nitish sentiment might see a reversal in next year’s Assembly elections, but for now, the Bihar chief minister is facing a lonely week ahead.