By VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN
Nitish Kumar being administered the oath of office by Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi on July 27 PHOTO/PTI
Nitish Kumar’s power play in Bihar, while dealing a crippling blow to the entire mainstream opposition in India, sends out the unmistakable message that the BJP has started a no-holds-barred campaign for the 2019 elections.
NITISH KUMAR’S choice of words to describe his return as Chief Minister of Bihar at two different junctures in the past 20 months is a study in contrast. In November 2015, immediately after the Mahagathbandhan—the grand alliance consisting of the Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Congress and the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United)—swept to power defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the Chief Minister sought to place the electoral triumph in a larger sociopolitical context with ideological overtones. He stated that the most important message of the victory was the resounding popular acceptance of one development paradigm and the emphatic rejection of another; the Bihar electorate apparently had voted for development with social justice and democracy while categorically repudiating the notion of development that promotes crony capitalism and seeks to cover up this anti-people mission by perpetuating communal divisions in society.
Approximately a year and a half later, when Nitish Kumar broke up the Mahagathbandhan and revived his erstwhile alliance with the NDA and once again took oath of office as Chief Minister, political and ideological formulations were conspicuous by their absence. The single most important thrust of the pronouncements of the four-times-sworn-in Chief Minister was individualistic. “My conscience did not allow me to continue in the Mahagathbandhan,” he said, adding that he would not compromise when it came to corruption in governance and the development of Bihar. The reference to corruption was, of course, in relation to the cases and investigations that came up recently against the first family of the RJD, including party president Lalu Prasad and son Tejashwi Yadav, Deputy Chief Minister in the Mahagathbandhan government.
Political observers and analysts were quick to deduce the rise of the “Me” element in Nitish Kumar’s latest manoeuvre and the abdication of the sociopolitical paradigm he had expounded in November 2015. “The invocation of the ‘my conscience’ phrase is almost like a political Freudian slip. It unravels the urge of a particular type of hyperindividualism that seeks to acquire and cling on to power at the personal level, whatever the social cost,” pointed out the veteran socialist Shivanand Tiwari.
The former JD(U) Rajya Sabha member told Frontline that the maudlin conjuration of “conscience” needed to be analysed in a political and historical framework, both in the immediate and in the medium term. “The leader holds forth on morality, conscience and all that one evening and what does he do in the next six hours? Join hands with the very forces he had castigated as communal and crony capitalist in a hard-fought election barely a year and a half ago. If he was such an epitome of political and personal morality, the right way would have been to dissolve the Assembly and call for a fresh mandate. But what does he do? Creep in less than 24 hours through the back door,” said Tiwari.
Disowning a development model
Tiwari also pointed out that it was Nitish Kumar himself who had chosen to present the 2015 electoral victory and the rallying of political forces that created it as a model for the rest of the country to adopt and advance the politics of development with social justice. Tiwari said: “He had held forth that there is a pointer to India as a whole in this massive ratification of the development paradigm. He had explained that this paradigm as well as the political leadership that advanced it were more suited than its rival to the interests of the socially and economically marginalised sections of the country. It was also argued [that] the Bihar Mahagathbandhan paradigm nourished democracy and through that the lives of the people, while the Modi model helped a select few get richer and unleashed economic hardships and social divisions in society, literally debilitating democracy. Now, those were proclamations laden with a great sense of responsibility towards the country, its social ethos and its people. Why is that there is no prick of conscience in the abandonment of this national responsibility?”
Tiwari went on to add that he could not see much merit in Nitish Kumar’s discovery of troubling corruption charges against his erstwhile deputy, Tejashwi Yadav. “In any case, the case against Tejashwi is only at the investigation stage. It may get proved or not. Why not let the law take its on course? What is the need for this hurry?” he asked.
Tejashwi Yadav reflected the sentiment. Talking to Frontline on phone, he said that when Nitish Kumar aligned with the RJD in 2015, his party’s president Lalu Prasad was already convicted on corruption charges. “Where was Nitish Kumar ji’s moral compunction then?” he asked.
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