Upendra Kushwaha: The Bihar leader who jumped ship for greener pastures

After months of haggling, angst and heartburn, Bihar leader Upendra Kushwaha has left the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and joined the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). What does this mean and does it even matter? 

Here is a quick primer on where he stands in Bihar. While the Yadavs back Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad, the Kurmis and the Dalits broadly support Janata Dal (United) President and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kuma. But there is one other caste which is strongly anti-Nitish. That is the Koeri, whose leader is Upendra Kushwaha, formerly Union minister of state for human resource development.

Kushwaha was one of Prasad’s lieutenants — that is to say, he was bitterly against the Congress and sided with Prasad’s social justice plank. When Prasad cosied up to the Congress, Kushwaha walked away from his mentor. He was made the leader of the Opposition, replacing Sushil Modi, before Kumar came to power. 

In 2005, Kushwaha suffered a setback. He lost his own seat in the Vidhan Sabha. Kumar accommodated others like Ramashray Prasad Singh who had also lost the election in the council of ministers but not Kushwaha. Right or wrong, Kushwaha nursed a grievance. 

It became worse. Kushwaha expected to be promoted. Instead, Kumar promoted others. Although Kumar did send him to the Rajya Sabha, Kushwaha kicked the berth aside two years before the end of his term. In 2013, he launched his own party, the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP).  Later, he reached an electoral alliance with the BJP.

The Koeris are backward (they are mostly landless and have small businesses), but they are non-threatening. They are not like the Yadavs, in whom everyone sees aggression. This is partly because only in a few constituencies are Koeri votes so numerous as to upset calculations. They are distributed uniformly all over Bihar, ranging from 2,000 to 4,000 voters in most constituencies. In around 25 seats, they number more than 10,000. There is no Koeri leader in the BJP. 

The RLSP contested and won three seats in the Lok Sabha elections of 2014. Arun Kumar, a Bhumihar, won from Jehanabad. Kushwaha himself was elected from Karakat. The Sitamarhi seat also went to the RLSP.  Then the RLSP itself split. 

The BJP knew that so long as Kushwaha was in the NDA, no Koeri vote would have strayed. The RLSP got 2 per cent of the vote in the 2015 Assembly polls. 

Worse was to come. The BJP and the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), decided to go together and according to news filtering out of  the discussions, Kushwaha’s party would have got just two Lok Sabha seats to contest in 2019, with the BJP and the JD(U) deciding to take 16 each with the rest six for their other partner, the Lok Janashakti Party.

When asked what he thought of the seat-sharing proposal, Kush-waha said: “I have never played 20-20 cricket in my life and neither am I interested in playing it now. Instead, I would love to play gilli danda." His intentions were clear then. Recognising that it was a battle of fronts in Bihar and the NDA could be a losing front, he decided to shift sides. In terms of percentage, the Grand Alliance received an average 41.9 per cent vote share against 34.1 per cent for the NDA in the Assembly polls. The Grand Alliance’s vote share performance beats the historic high of the 2010 BJP–JD(U) combine. Its 41.9 per cent average vote share converted into 73.2 per cent of the seats, less than the winning coalition of 2010, which won 84.8 per cent of the seats on a 39.1 per cent average vote share. But in all this, smaller groups like the RLSP felt they had lost out.

There is, inevitably, considerable suspicion in Prasad's party, whom Kushwaha “betrayed”, the Congress and others. But for Kushwaha, it is a battle of survival. Although his MLAs have said they would continue to stay in the NDA (which means he will have to rebuild his party), for him it makes more sense to go with people who might offer him more options than he currently has.