Is Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal United (JD-U) leader Nitish Kumar likely to return as chief minister of Bihar after the Assembly elections in October-November this year? Or, is Bihar going to see a great Lalu Prasad revival? Or, is it heading for another prolonged spell of President’s Rule as no grouping will be able to form a government, because of a badly hung Assembly?
All that this column would like to offer are hypotheses.
Kumar came to power by forging a social coalition of extremes. The Bhumihars supported him along with the most backward castes (MBCs), many effectively the Dalits of the Dalits.
There is weakening of support from both groups.
The Nitish Kumar government’s biggest achievement was controlling crime. Obviously, the evidence is anecdotal but the Dalits have always been the victims of crime and the upper castes have used kidnapping and extortion to get on in life. As the conviction rate has been going up in Bihar, the feeling that Kumar is victimising the upper castes alone has intensified. Earlier, an MLA could telephone the police station and have an FIR registration stopped. That is no longer possible. The upper castes, Bhumihars with their “senas” (militias), are now the most deprived lot, relatively speaking, as the state asserts its authority.
Simultaneously, it is a fact that the balance of social advantage is in favour of the lower castes, whether it is through panchayats or the Assembly. Therefore, the empowerment-disempowerment matrix is changing. This makes the upper castes feel vulnerable. If the bataidari (land to the tiller) programme is finally implemented, this will once again shake up the upper castes, specifically the Bhumihars.
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This dynamic was very much in evidence when Munger MP Rajiv Ranjan (Lallan) Singh, a prominent Bhumihar leader and president of the JD-U unit in Bihar, quit the party in February. Quite apart from everything else, Singh was a close personal supporter of Nitish Kumar, from the days when they were both in the Opposition. Then it was Singh who used to provide the car and driver that Kumar would use when he was in Patna. Singh’s role in keeping Kumar’s accounts in politics is also well known.
So, when Singh quit the JD-U protesting Kumar’s “autocratic ways”, it wasn’t just he who was leaving, rather it was a swathe of Bihari Bhumihars who deserted the coalition.
They are not un-influential men. The infrastructure revolution that is sweeping Bihar — the road and bridge building project of the Nitish kumar-led government — is helping the marginalised sections, but it is also the upper caste people who are getting the contracts and funds. Construction-centric growth should be secular in theory, but it does favour those who have capital. So, if castes are getting economically powerful but politically disempowered, they will seek other avenues to show their newly acquired clout.
In short, the Bhumihar drift could deal a body blow to Nitish Kumar’s plans for returning to power. The other crucial element is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — Kumar’s ally in power with 38 seats in the Assembly. The JD-U and the BJP have had all the usual spats — who will get what portfolio, etc — but the BJP has had to watch helplessly as Kumar determinedly went about carrying out his own agenda. He has provided state funding for fencing off kabristans (burial grounds) that used to be a source of a huge land-encroachment racket and the origin of all communal riots in Bihar. All Muslim boys who pass the matriculation exam in the first division will get Rs 10,000 from the state. Similar incentives have been provided for the education of Muslim girls. All this is irritating the BJP which is harping time and again on minority appeasement by a government of which it is an ally. Recently, a demonstration by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP, against the state government’s allocation of land in Kishanganj for a university on the model of Aligarh Muslim University, was lathicharged by the police. Sushil Modi, deputy chief minister and former ABVP activist, faced resistance and criticism when he went to see the injured students in hospital. The Muslims in Bihar will not vote for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). But they might vote for Kumar. The BJP is uncomfortable with this fact.
So, if the JD-U cannot form the government in Bihar on its own; and if the BJP’s strength in the Bihar Assembly falls, what is Kumar going to do? Will he jump ship, shaking the BJP off? Or, will he and the BJP offer to sit in the Opposition, challenging the other parties to form a government if they can?
It all depends on the number of seats each party gets. The government formation process in Bihar in October-November will be even more interesting than the election that precedes it.