The result may signal the end of Bihar’s caste and identity politics
To say nothing of political adversaries, not even the most ardent backers of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar could have anticipated the scale of the NDA’s triumph — a greater-than-three-fourths-majority win in the Assembly election. The Janata Dal (United), the chief minister’s party, fielded 142 candidates — of whom 112 coasted home, taking the JD(U) close to the halfway mark on its own steam. Perhaps the nearest parallel comes from the 1995 Assembly election in Bihar, when Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD contested 225 seats (out of a total 325) and won 167. The striking magnitude of the NDA victory powered by Kumar’s leadership — a Houdini dream come true — has seen to the folding up of any form of Opposition in the Assembly. Looking at the present result, it is not inconceivable that the idiom of politics purveyed by Yadav for two decades has had its day. Trying to rebuild itself from scratch, the Congress has also fallen flat on its face, slipping below its paltry 2005 numbers, but the ideas that animate the party don’t leave it utterly without a chance in the future if it can get its organisational act together. For Kumar, the victory is all the more eloquent, as his own and allied caste groups are only a tiny fraction of the electorate, unlike, say, the Yadav vote that the RJD chieftain commanded so imperiously once and began a poll race with a distinct lead. The voting pattern is also likely to show that the so-called Muslim vote did not turn away from the NDA, since the alliance is led by someone they are comfortable with by now.
In all, the celebration of the chief minister’s impressive gains has somewhat obscured the fact that the BJP, so far the JD(U)’s junior partner in Bihar, has been thrown up in this election as an almost-equal. No less significant, the BJP’s extraordinary gains are also likely to give the party confidence in dealing with, say, the disorder within its ranks in Karnataka, and give an additional boost to its challenge to the UPA. We also should not forget the extraordinary work put in by the Election Commission of India that ensured that the electoral turnout was the highest in recent times, thanks to the effective squashing of both money and muscle power. It is a remarkably clean election that produced a most remarkable result.
Deccan Chronicle
