'Not ideology, plain politics causes rift between BJP and JD(U)'

The weak links in the alliance came out in the open in 2009, when Kumar wanted to implement the recommendations of the Sachar Committee report

Even as Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is gearing up to break his party’s 17-year long alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the latter appointed Narendra Modi as its election campaign chief, senior BJP leaders say it’s not ideology but realpolitik that caused the rift between the allies.     

Kumar feels his association with Gujarat chief minister Modi will hurt his secular credentials. In fact, the alliance between the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), and the BJP has been kept afloat for the last several months only on the strength of one or two individuals like the Bihar deputy chief minister and BJP leader Sushil Modi. Otherwise, the two parties would have drifted apart much earlier.

Kumar has not hidden his antipathy towards the BJP in the past. In his second term as the chief minister, the JD(U) made a conscious effort to reach out to the poorer Muslims in the state. Also, to keep his base intact, he had to treat the BJP both as an ally and an opponent.

When the BJP mooted a sugestion that singing Vande Mataram be made compulsory in government schools, Kumar shot it down immediately, causing a lot of rancour in the BJP. When a team came to Bihar to review if the Sachar committee’s recommendations on uplifting the Muslim community had been implemented, Kumar refused to meet them, saying he needed no nudging in this direction.

The weak links in the alliance came out in the open in 2009, just a year before the assembly election, when Kumar wanted to implement the recommendations of the Sachar Committee report. BJP leaders openly opposed the move.“Bihar has 16 per cent Muslim population and Nitish is worried that they might vote for Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and he wants to block that. If there is an alliance between the RJD and the Congress against the JD(U), it is possible that Nitish will face severe losses,” said a BJP leader, who did not want to be named.

Kumar had publicly hit out at the Shiv Sena, a National Democratic Alliance ally, for what he called “loose talk” about Biharis in Mumbai, and had cancelled a dinner with top BJP leaders after the Gujarat government made unfavourable comparisons between the treatment given to Muslims in Gujarat and Bihar.

Understandably, there was retalitation from the BJP. The BJP’s member of Parliament from Purnea, Uday Singh, attacked the JDU in no uncertain terms. On the basis of a survey he carried out, he charged that none of the flagship schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) had been implemented with honesty in the state.

The sample size of the survey was decent — 210,000 households of a total of 350,000 in his constituency. Singh said only 13 per cent of the households – in a region where over 80 per cent of households are dependent on casual labour for livelihood –were getting work under MGNREGS.

Only five per cent of the respondents from the Mahadalit and minority communities had ever received any support from state government schemes.“When Samata Party had joined NDA, L K Advani was facing charges for demolition of Babri Masjid. There were charges of financial wrongdoings also against Advani in the Jain hawala case.

Yet Nitish Kumar had no problems. Now, when the BJP is trying to promote Narendra Modi, he has issues and wants to break the alliance. This is not an ideological war but the real reason to capture the votes of minorities in Bihar,” said another senior BJP leader

BJP leaders also point out that Kumar didn’t want Modi to campaign in Bihar and often pressurised BJP leaders to block his entry in the state because the chief minister didn’t want another backward leader to emerge in the state. “Both Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi belong to OBC (other backwar caste),” the BJP leader said.