Bihar’s defector diaries

Politics is nothing if not sending a man to his humble pie. It’s for a good reason that the broadest smiles at the swearing in of Nitish Kumar’s latest turncoat regime in Patna on Sunday were on the faces of BJP leaders rather than Janata Dal (U) netas, whose visages seemed a bit botox-stretched. While the terms of Nitish Kumar’s serial remarriage will make him Chief Minister of Bihar for the ninth, and nth, time, it will be as the BJP’s cat’s paw for the remainder of this term of the Bihar Assembly.

With only weeks to go before the Lok Sabha elections are called, the BJP will now gain access to the state’s official machinery, which it so loves to misuse. More importantly, having the easily seducible Nitish Kumar on its side in Bihar will enable it to breach the Extreme Backward Class (EBC) vote, which, according to the recent caste survey, is 36% of the state’s population.

The caste survey was commissioned by Nitish Kumar himself while in the just-deceased coalition with the Rashtriya Janata Dal. It was supposed to be his master-stroke to stop the march of Hindutva in the Hindi states. The caste vs Ram trope was so alluring to anti-BJP parties that Nitish’s refrain was taken up in state after state, and gave him something like the aura of a master strategist and, potentially, a Prime Minister. Now the latter is not a status the much-travelled and much-married defector would spurn, and he took the lead in bringing together 28 disparate parties, scattered countrywide, into an anti-BJP front called the INDIA alliance.

But Nitish’s fervour for his own alchemy dimmed the moment it became clear he would not be acceptable as the PM candidate to some of the other major constituents of the alliance. Mamata Banerjee’s clever gambit of proposing Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge as the chairman of the alliance effectively put paid to his ambitions of leading the front in the coming elections. The offer of the convener’s post instead seemed to Nitish an insult of his talents. It speaks of the paucity of choices left to Nitish thereafter that he reckoned returning to the arms of the BJP was his best bet.

But he returns a much-reduced man. The saffron party’s 75 MLAs in the Bihar Assembly dwarf the 43 of the Janata Dal (U). Both by numbers in the Assembly and vote shares in the past two Assembly elections, the BJP is the senior partner in the alliance. But under the tutelage of Amit Shah and Narendra Modi, the BJP is not the friendly beast it used to be in the old NDA. The tail can’t wag the tiger anymore. In fact, it was by an Amit Shah sleight of hand that Janata Dal’s numbers plummeted to 43 from 71 in the 2020 Assembly elections. This was achieved by the gambit of persuading Chirag Paswan’s Lok Jan Shakti Party to contest 140 seats solely with the sole purpose of eating into Nitish Kumar’s EBC vote bank.

Foiled in his Prime Ministerial ambitions, Nitish has taken the only recourse open to him: to spend the evening of his political life under the wing of Narendra Modi, a man he once vowed never to accept as Prime Minister. This is Nitish’s final resignation.