Nitish's U-turn

INDIA's future looks bleak

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s third tieup with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, may not change the fortunes of Bihar. After being sworn in nine times as he switched allegiance between the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), governance had taken a distant back seat long ago. In the state’s political affairs, Mr Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), is an influential power despite holding just 45 seats against the BJP’s 78 and the RJD’s 79 in the 243-member Assembly. Bihar’s Assembly elections are not due till 2025 but the real significance of Mr Kumar’s latest embrace of the NDA is an electoral calculus that probably spells the decimation of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), led by the Congress. Mr Kumar was seen as one of the prominent architects of this alliance. His exit, following the statement last week of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal that it will go alone, is a blow from which INDIA will struggle to recover.

Interestingly, both Mr Kumar and Ms Banerjee have complained that former Congress president Rahul Gandhi embarked on a east-to-west journey — the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra — without consulting them, including permission to travel through their states. The overall thinking was that the yatra should have been organised under the INDIA banner. The underlying narrative, however, is that neither politician sees the Congress as a viable winning partner in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, especially after the latter’s heavy losses in the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh Assembly elections. In the 2019 general election, the Congress won one seat in Bihar and two in West Bengal. The exit of the JD(U) from INDIA and the decision of Trinamool to go alone are likely to undermine the bargaining positions of the Congress with other allies in the grouping.

The working principle of the alliance is that the partner with the most seats in the state would be making the decisions on seat-sharing. But there have been accusations that the Congress is trying to browbeat alliance partners in some states. In Kerala and Punjab, for instance, where the Congress is the main opposition to the ruling Left Front and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), respectively — the BJP has a negligible presence here — the arrangements are uncertain. In Punjab, the chief minister had said AAP would go it alone, even as the party’s high command has said it has reached a preliminary understanding with the Congress. Much will depend on negotiations in Uttar Pradesh, the state with the highest number of seats in Parliament, with Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP) saying it has made some headway in talks with the Congress.

The biggest gainer from Mr Kumar’s latest U-turn is the BJP. First by appointing one representative each of the Koeri and Bhumihar castes as deputy chief minister, the party has emphasised its case for caste inclusivity, weakening a core INDIA plank. Bihar was the first state to conduct a caste census, an exercise that had gained traction in INDIA. Second, the BJP and JD(U) together won 33 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in 2019; 39, when the Lok Janshakti Party’s six seats were added. If this performance is repeated, the ruling alliance would be assured of total control of the Hindi belt with Bihar in the bag.