Nitish plays the markets

The Bihar chief minister keeps his options open and tries to preserve his political capital

Of all politics, it is the keep-all-options-open politics that is the hardest to decode. For those engaged in it, it is akin to having all your savings in equities: if you sell at the right time, you can reap enormous benefits. But what is the right time? And if you buy at the wrong time, you can lose what capital you have.

Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar is not known to be a risk-taker, but those who know him say he's playing a risky game. He's keeping all his options open. He is venturing out of Bihar in small expeditionary moves. His last big engagement was in Delhi to address the Adhikar rally last week - when it is in Bihar that his party really needed him. He is making the most extraordinary statements: recently, reacting to the Bihar Budget, he shied away from making the usual sarcastic, loaded references to his bitterest rival Lalu Prasad, instead observing contemplatively that it was "we (the Bihar socialists) who made Laluji the chief minister of Bihar". To listeners, it sounded almost as if he was reaching out to Lalu Prasad - although those who know Bihar politics say any kind of coming together between Kumar and Lalu Prasad is impossible because their political base won't allow it. To friends, he has said if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) declared Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate, he would leave the coalition. At the Adhikar rally, he said he would support anyone who offers "special status" to Bihar, suggesting to the BJP and anyone else new terms for his support after the 2014 general elections. He has thanked the Congress at least four times (thrice "from the heart") for the Union Budget promise of reviewing the financial status of backward states. So, in a manner of speaking, he's telling investment bankers he's got money to invest - so they should make their best offer.
 

First, contrary to general expectation, even if Kumar's JD(U) pulls out of his coalition with the BJP in Bihar, his government is at no risk of falling. Bihar has a 243-member Assembly and the JD(U) has 117 members of legislative Assembly (MLAs). The 50 per cent mark is 122, and there are six independents who will be more than happy to oblige him.

So you could ask why, if he is so unhappy with the BJP's efforts to foist Modi on the nation, he hasn't done it till now?

The Congress knows this and it could have made the first move. But it hasn't. This is because, internally, a large part of the Congress feels it would be a mistake to change partners in Bihar. They are going by the vote percentages in the Assembly elections in November 2010. Although Lalu Prasad's party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), managed to get just four seats in the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, it still got 18 per cent of the popular vote in the Assembly elections in 2010. True, the number of Assembly seats that the RJD notched up was just 22. But if the Congress had done a deal with Lalu Prasad and the Lok Janshakti Party (as they did in 2005 Assembly elections when the combine got 31 per cent of the votes), the vote might not have split. Make no mistake, the Yadav vote might have temporarily gone to the JD(U) (out of 18 Yadav MLAs, 14 are from the JD(U)-BJP stable). But they will return to Lalu Prasad the minute he calls out to them.

The Muslim-Yadav factor is what Lalu Prasad leveraged to stay in power. It is true that Bihar is one of the few - perhaps the only - states where the Muslims also voted for the kamal ka phool. Of 18 Muslim MLAs, eight are from the JD(U)-BJP alliance. But if Modi becomes the BJP mascot, it is to Lalu Prasad that the Muslims will throng. Then, Kumar's credibility will be questioned by the Muslims - he has said he's opposed to the Modi-type of Hindutva. The Congress is conscious of this.

Caste politics is also at play here. Kumar is a Kurmi. What should really happen is a tie-up of the Yadav-Kurmi-Dalit-Muslim vote as an alliance of the socially backward: the original Janata experiment, if you will. But that is like going back in time. Both Lalu Prasad and Kumar are no longer the same political figures they were in the 1970s and 1980s. They have an independent following, and they need the permission of that following for this kind of a political upheaval.

The fact is, while outside Bihar, Kumar might be gaining in stature, acceptability and popularity; inside Bihar, his stock is going down. The people of the state want more, and faster. All they see around them is corruption, and evidence of a state that finds it much easier to stay weak than to become strong.

Faced with all this, Kumar is opting to take the only course he can: he's not going to anyone, he's telling everyone to come to him. He has 40 Lok Sabha seats on offer. That is as it should be. So, if his threat to leave the National Democratic Alliance deters the coalition from considering Modi as prime minister; if his seeming overtures to Lalu Prasad make the Congress sit up and wonder how to leverage this new development; if MLAs from his own party are galvanised into action by the signals he's sending to his (and their) rivals, then... well, that is all part of the uncertainty of the equity market. Kumar is keeping all his options open at the moment, waiting for the best offer.