Alternates between gaiety and sombreness, with the diverse messages in a massive return.
Even when he is happy, Nitish Kumar, to again be Chief Minister of Bihar, does not normally allow himself to seem elated. He is too cautious, too watchful.
Today, however, was an exception. A handful of well-wishers – a chosen few – were invited to his home immediately after his press conference. Present were advisor and spokesman, Shivanand Tiwari, former Lalu Prasad supporter and now JD(U) member, Ranjan Yadav, and two or three reporters.
Kumar was glowing. “I’m the one who’s won the election. But I’m the only one who’s not been given tea,” he complained playfully to one of his peons. Unsure if Kumar was joking or serious, the man scurried to do so. Staccato firecrackers outside provoked a flash of temper. “This is the Chief MInister’s residence. It is not some road. You can’t burst crackers here. Please tell them to stop” he told his aide. What next?
“So, next stop is...Delhi in 2014?” asked a reporter.
“Please. as much as I respect Ramachandra Guha, I have to point out that I don’t think that far ahead,” he said, referring to the historian-writer’s assessment that he would make a good Prime Minister. “For me, it is governance and good governance. The real work starts now.”
Kumar has a blog and had written in it that power sector reform was going to be his first priority if returned to power. “Yes, we have already taken the initiative. There is the issue of coal linkage. But the Barauni power plant is being expanded, with two plants of 250 Mw each. Kanti will have two 195 Mw plants. and then there is Nabinagar, that will have three plants of 650 Mw each. We are building this with NTPC...”
“And, of course, there is a power plant in Barh,” he went on. “When I mentioned it to Rangarajan Kumaramangalam (when the latter was Union power minister), I didn’t think anything would come out of it. I was offering land in Barh to build a 2,000-Mw plant. To be frank, I never expected anything would come out of it. But it came to the cabinet within two weeks. Then he asked me where I would like the plant to be located. I said, ‘Anywhere outside 20 km east of Patna, from there you can go up to 100 km further’.. He didn’t know this but that’s where my (then parliamentary) constituency began.” The room burst into laughter.
“Once all these projects are complete, Bihar will be power-surplus,” he said with quiet confidence.
From the field
Suddenly, the television screen caught his eye. “Pashupati Paras (opponent Ramvilas Paswan’s younger brother) has lost by a margin of 17,000 votes...I went to the constituency. The crowd – there is no English word to describe it, it was that huge. I asked them, ‘This person (that is, Pashupati), don’t you get tired of looking at his face? You keep returning him to the assembly but what has he done for you?”
He then reflected about a JD(U) candidate who had lost the election even in the current wave. “I campaigned intensively for him. When I said to the crowd, ‘Do you want development’, they all shouted ‘Yes’. When I said, ‘Vote for this man’, they shouted, ‘No, never.”
“This is an election where people have voted for hope,” he said quietly.
What was he going to do about the Public Distribution System (PDS)? “We have already done it,” he said. “We first tried coupon-linked allottment and from this year, we have introduced bar codes. We have refined it to make the bar codes panchayat-specific. now we are looking at biometric food coupons. Our problem is, there are more poor in Bihar than most other states. So, our PDS will have to be run on finances that will come out of the state budget. We will subsidise it from our own funds.”
He is about to go on to what the new government would do on health and on roads. But, once again, the TV catches his eye. It is his Gujarat counterpart, the BJP’s controversial star, Narendra Modi, neither congratulating him nor the state BJP, but the people of Bihar for having voted in development. Nitish Kumar’s face looks like a little boy’s, whose candy has just been snatched out of his hand. “OK, we will meet,” he says, suddenly distant, dismissing all present. Kumar is back in saddle, the Chief Minister again.
