Fall of a rising star

S Nihal Singh

It is sad to see the fall of a promising leader. While the country has been astounded by the performance of Mr Nitish Kumar befitting a trapeze artiste resigning from the chief ministership of a grand coalition to become a chief minister again on the coat-tails of the Bharatiya Janata Party within the space of 24 hours, he crossed the thin dividing line between political opportunism and betrayal.

Indeed, the sense of betrayal is so deep in Bihar and in the country outside of the partisan warfare being carried out by his erstwhile ally Lalu Prasad that Mr Kumar has had to offer an unconvincing explanation four days later, saying that he had no option but to do what he did. He had the obvious option of dismissing his deputy, Lalu's son Tejashwi Yadav, and sort out the problems arising from it in the coalition.

Now that the dust has settled on the climactic events, its consequences and Mr Kumar's calculations that led to them have become clear. Mr Kumar has handed the BJP a double triumph by returning the party to power reversing the electoral verdict of two years ago and fatally diminishing his own stature to place himself at the mercy of the BJP leadership.

Looking back, Mr Kumar had been preparing his ground for the switch some time ago. First, he sided with the demonetisation decision, which was opposed by his fellow Opposition leaders; then he supported the BJP candidate for the presidency instead of the joint Opposition candidate and made a habit of absenting himself from Opposition meetings while lunching and dining with the Prime Minister.

Mr Kumar's moves seemed to be predicated on the belief that he could end up as the joint Opposition candidate in the 2019 general election to fight a losing battle and court political wilderness. He said as much in predicting that the Opposition could not match Mr Modi's popularity in 2019. Thus he chose self-advancement over anything resembling a will to fight a good fight. In the process, he shocked some of his own followers in the party, in particular the veteran leader Sharad Yadav. Only his chief spokesman on television remained superbly unperturbed.

Mr Kumar has been with the BJP earlier in the tolerant era of Vajpayee both at the Centre and in Bihar. Before his ambition destroyed him, he did some good work in administering Bihar. He made a string of compromises along the way. After the assembly elections, his JD (U) was the smaller party, compared  to Lalu Prasad’s RJD. To become Chief Minister, he had to take two of Lalu's neophyte sons in his Cabinet, one of them as his deputy, and send a daughter to the Rajya Sabha from the coalition’s quota. As is universally known, Lalu treats politics as a family business. With time running out, Mr Kumar took the extraordinary step he did to sign up with the BJP.

Mr Kumar's volte-face raises the important question of what happens to the Opposition's plans for using the Bihar model for building a grand coalition to contest the 2019 election. That model is now destroyed and there are quarrels enough for the Opposition parties to deal with. In immediate terms, it is a blow, but it is time for the Opposition to start framing a blueprint on the Sangh Parivar's weak spots.

The BJP's singular weaknesses in the three years it has been in power at the Centre and longer in the states are: neglect of the farm sector leading to rising suicides and much suffering, poor funding of education and health, except for indoctrination of the young, creating an atmosphere in which cow vigilantes, genuine or fake, lynch cattle traders, on occasion to death and the absurd levels to which the propagation of a Hindu India is being taken, with cow ambulances in one BJP-ruled state while the poor carry their dead on bicycles.

While the Congress and other Opposition spokesmen have raised some of these issues in Parliament, the need of the hour is to do ground work to exploit these deficiencies to build solid voting blocks. While the BJP has made the token gesture of making a Dalit the country's President, the Dalit community is still suffering every day from the depredations of Hindu vigilantes and resent the BJP's mindset in relation to their lot.

Before gaining power at the Centre, the BJP with its pronounced caste prejudices was essentially an urban party. Its legacy of a Brahmin-Bania configuration came at the expense of other lower castes, as recent occurrences in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana have demonstrated. Its desire to cast its net wide in view of its national ambitions is obvious. But such gestures as the presidency and other token moves such as party president Amit Shah dining in Harijan homes will not fool many Dalits.

The Opposition has its own dilemmas. The hoary old Congress Party is essentially leaderless, with Mr Rahul Gandhi more a liability than an asset. Ms Mamata Banerjee is devoting all her energy to safeguarding her dominance in West Bengal from a prowling BJP. Tamil Naidu is poised at a delicate stage with the BJP fishing in troubled waters depending on the chances of a merger of the two AIADMK factions with the self-proclaimed successor to Jayalalithaa, Sasikaka, making waves while still in jail after causing the transfer of two senor IPS prison officials on the perquisites she reportedly enjoyed after paying handsome bribes.

The one message the BJP and the Sangh Parivar are sending out is that they are no respecter of norms or morality to win electoral power. If they are short of votes, they manoeuvre to form governments through inducements, as in Goa and Manipur. In the case of Bihar, as we have seen, they lure the Opposition leader to their side and offer him support.

In short, in common with the Trump presidency in the United States, Mr Modi believes in his form of transactional relationships to climb to power across the country. Morality can look after itself, he seems to suggest, while his party reigns supreme with the aim of converting India into a Hindu country.