Nitish Kumar to take oath as Bihar CM on Sunday

Kumar will have to prove his majority in three weeks

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received a major setback after rebel Janata Dal (United) leader and Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi lost nerve at the last moment and resigned instead of facing a floor test in the Assembly on Friday.

Nitish Kumar will be sworn in on Sunday and have to prove his majority in three weeks.

BJP was non-committal on whether Manjhi would be joining the party and found it difficult to brush aside parallels between its strategy to back Manjhi and choosing Kiran Bedi as its chief ministerial candidate in Delhi.

The developments in Bihar are the second jolt for BJP strategists in less than a fortnight after the massive defeat in Delhi Assembly elections and are likely to make the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) intervene more often in party decisions.

The BJP leadership maintained its only role in the episode was to support Manjhi, a Mahadalit, whom JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar had “insulted”, emphasising Kumar had “betrayed” all his friends — from socialist leader George Fernandes, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad, BJP and now Manjhi.

However, the entire episode seems to have strengthened Kumar, while doing little to benefit BJP.

There were other parallels with Delhi, too, as events unfolded in Patna. Kumar did an Arvind Kejriwal after being invited to be the chief minister, a post he had quit in the wake of his party’s defeat in the Lok Sabha elections. Kumar, like Kejriwal did in the run-up to the Delhi elections, apologised to the people of Bihar for having resigned in May 2014. “With folded hands, I apologise to people of Bihar. Never again I will take such a step. I am ready to lead from the front,” he said.

Manjhi’s rebels, with support from 87 BJP members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs), were to face a confidence vote at 11 am in the Bihar Assembly. All BJP MLAs knew Manjhi was likely to lose the trust vote but had decided at a meeting on Thursday night they would support him, their eyes sharply fixed on the sizeable Mahadalit votes that Nitish Kumar commands.

But Manjhi took nearly everyone by surprise, including his new friends in BJP and old ones in JD(U), when he drove to the Raj Bhavan and gave his resignation. He later said rebel MLAs had received death threats. Manjhi supporters were startled by his resignation. "I don't know what transpired last night but we didn't have a clue he was going to resign," said rebel JD(U) legislator Rajiv Ranjan. It became clear Manjhi had lost support of many of the rebel MLAs in the intervening night and thought it better to resign than expose how his overtures to attract support from JD(U) MLAs had flopped.