SINGLE MAN
The Life and Times of Nitish Kumar of Bihar
Sankarshan Thakur
HarperCollins
309 pages; Rs 599
Bihar's turnaround under Nitish Kumar is a well-documented story. Good roads and bridges being built, record growth rates year after year, investors showing interest, an improved law and order situation, and criminals being convicted in record time - these are just some of the manifestations of changes that have occurred under the leadership of Nitish Kumar in Bihar. What is not so well documented is how this turnaround began to take shape. Was it a top-down change? How did the state make a transition from one of lawlessness to one that has some resemblance to the rule of law? And, more important, is the process going to stay even after changes at the top have been made?
Single Man addresses all these - and many more - issues and offers convincing answers. Bihar's turnaround can be traced to something Mr Kumar said to himself in front of some of his friends at a Patna coffee house in the 1970s: "Satta prapt karoonga, by hook or by crook, lekin satta leke achha kaam karoonga [I shall get power, by hook or by crook, but once I have got power I will do good work]." It seems hard to believe now that he would have said something like this.
Mr Kumar had to wait for more than three decades to live up to the promise he made to himself. In between, he lost two elections, helped Lalu Prasad become the chief minister of Bihar, broke away from Lalu Prasad, formed the Samata Party in 1994, served as a minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Cabinet at the Centre, became chief minister for seven days and, finally, dethroned Lalu Prasad from power with an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Once Mr Kumar assumed power, his first priority was to restore the rule of law in a place where the state had literally withered away. Barely a month before Mr Kumar was to be sworn in as the chief minister of Bihar, the Jehanabad jailbreak occurred. In November 2005, "armed guerrillas set up diversionary explosions in several parts of Jehanabad town, scale the district prison walls, shoot down two junior jail staffers, grab the keys under cover of general panic and walk out with some 200 inmates". On the day of the incident, the district magistrate was in Patna, the district jail had no jailer and no one had a clue where the assistant jailer was. The sergeant of the district police lines got to hear about the incident from his daughter, who was working with a news channel in Delhi! The story is illustrative of the rot that had set in before Mr Kumar took over as the state's chief minister.
But Mr Kumar's unwavering commitment to "lekin satta leke achha kaam karoonga" literally pulled the state back from the abyss. He did this with the help of chosen bureaucrats who were promised a fixed tenure and non-interference from their political masters. And one of his first instructions to his ministers and top bureaucrats was: "The message should go out that not only will crime not get any political protection, it will not pay to be a criminal. Crime will no longer pay." As a result, "crime dropped drastically, by an average 68 per cent over five years from 2005 to 2010. Bihar breathed like it hadn't in a while," observes the author. This was followed by a major drive to build roads and bridges. The Nitish Kumar government is estimated to have built 16,000 kilometres of new roads and nearly 4,200 bridges, both big and small. The literacy rate shot up from 37 per cent in 2004 to 63.8 per cent in 2012.
The credit side of Mr Kumar's ledger as chief minister looks impressive. He more or less achieved what he had sought to. But the ways and means of achieving those objectives may well fill certain columns in the debit side of the ledger. "The downgrading of political sway over matters of state and the upscaling of bureaucratic authority became a signature feature of the Nitish Kumar dispensation," the author says. But the flip side is that Mr Kumar's over-reliance on bureaucracy to deliver the goods has alienated the political class. And it is the political class to which he has to turn to win elections now that the long-term ally, the BJP, is gone. And the political class is bound to ask for its pound of flesh. Can Mr Kumar resist giving in to such pressure? What will then happen to his dream of "lekin satta leke achha kaam karoonga"?
The author has brilliantly chronicled the Nitish Kumar era with well-known and not-so-well-known stories. The chapter that discusses the break-up of the 17-year-old alliance between Mr Kumar's Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), and the BJP offers insights into what lies ahead in Bihar. Now that there is a rupture in the broad coalition of social groups he had nurtured all these years, the road ahead for Mr Kumar looks less certain. What will then happen to the "new Bihar" dream? Let me end with the author's concluding remarks on the JD(U)-BJP break-up: "He'd decided to be alone again, a single man on the rough side of the street, though a vagabond no more."
