Pandemic, floods test Nitish’s political acumen

Nalin verma

Journalist and Author

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has been maintaining a low profile for the past over four months. While Nitish mostly prefers to stay away from the public glare, the official handouts update the media on the Covid-19 situation, while his ministers and other leaders of the Janata Dal United (JDU) routinely campaign for their party through virtual media for the Assembly elections due in the state before November 29.

Bihar is under the worst spell of misery in living memory. Covid-19 has infected over 50,000 people and the figure is rising every day, with casualties mounting to nearly 350. The floods from the rivers originating in Nepal are wreaking havoc on over 10 districts of north Bihar. The people are scampering for treatment and relief.

The Opposition, though weak and incoherent, is relentless in attacking Nitish for his inactivity, demanding postponement of the polls. Its weakness is rooted in RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav — convicted in fodder cases— languishing in jail and his son and leader of Opposition in Bihar Assembly, Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, failing to replicate the charisma and skill of his father.

But to the Opposition’s advantage, Chirag Paswan, president of the LJP which is a part of the ruling National Democratic Alliance, is as scathing in his attack on Nitish as Tejashwi and the Congress are. Be it the washing away of a portion of the Rs 264-crore Sattarghat bridge by the turbulent Gandak river or the mismanagement in Bihar’s healthcare system — Union Food and Civil Supplies Minister Ram Vilas Paswan’s son is on the same page with Tejashwi in attacking Nitish. Chirag has repeatedly demanded postponement of the polls against the JDU’s insistence for holding it on the scheduled time.

To the chagrin of Nitish, the BJP which he returned to in July 2017 after breaking away from the RJD-Congress grand alliance, seems to be enjoying the odds piling up against the CM. The BJP though has declared Nitish the NDA’s leader for the November elections, but has shown no intention to rein in Chirag. The grapevine has it that the saffron party is using Chirag to corner Nitish and in the process, increase its hold on the politically important state that Bihar is.

Why has Nitish, who was known for his sushasan and used to take the moral high ground, been inactive? It is not that he has suddenly gone into his shell in the face of the pandemic. His pronounced inactivity coincides with his compromise with the BJP on his party’s ideological principles. The JDU supported the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and expelled senior party leaders, Pavan K Verma and Prashant Kishor, for opposing the ‘deviation’ of the party from its ethos. The JDU supported Article 370 in the context of Jammu and Kashmir and stayed ambivalent on the triple talaq bill.

Nitish had carved out an image of a performing chief minister, sticking to his self-declared principles of not compromising on ‘crime, corruption and communalism’, famously abbreviated as the ‘Three Cs’. To be fair to him, he largely adhered to at least, two Cs — communalism and crime — even when he ruled the state with the BJP till 2013 and also in company with the RJD-Congress from 2015 to 2017. His much-vaunted three Cs stand abandoned. Nitish who earned praise for carrying out phenomenal relief operations during the devastating 2008 floods — caused by a breach in the Kosi river at Kusaha in Nepal— and building road and electricity infrastructure in the state, is found wanting on the yardsticks he himself set.

Asked why Nitish has abandoned the practices he was earlier known for, the senior Bihar socialist leader, Shivanand Tiwary, who has worked with both Nitish and Lalu Prasad, said, “His ineptitude lies in the manner he broke away from the grand alliance and returned to the BJP. If one does something unethical or immoral, one loses the moral strength to act. It’s more pronounced in the case of Nitish, because he used to flaunt moral posturing.”

Shivanand’s remarks are not wide off the mark. Nitish has so far been unable to explain why he abruptly broke away from the grand alliance and returned to the BJP fold. He had prepared a solid ground to dump the BJP. He had made it obvious to the people at large that he was opposed to the emergence of his then Gujarat counterpart, Narendra Modi, in the national role in 2009 itself. He, subsequently, came out with a series of statements asserting that he would leave the BJP in the event of projection of Modi, albeit without naming him as its prime ministerial candidate. And within a week of the BJP declaring Modi as its campaign committee chairman in June 2013, Nitish dumped the NDA. His JDU then had 115 MLAs, short of only seven in having a majority, in the 243-MLA Bihar Assembly. He formed the JDU government with the support of independents. The Nitish government then had an aura of legitimacy as he didn’t seek the RJD or Congress support at that time.

Two years after breaking away from the BJP and almost a year after the Modi-led BJP won the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, Nitish joined the RJD-JDU-Congress grand alliance and returned as the CM in 2015. The alliance won, reducing the BJP to 53 MLAs in the 243-member House. The mandate was clear and loud, the electorate had rejected the BJP, giving 178 seats to the RJD-JDU-Congress alliance.

During the campaign, Nitish gave a call for Sangh-Mukt Bharat (RSS-free India) to counter Narendra Modi’s slogan of Congress-Mukt Bharat and vowed, ‘Mitti mein mil jayenge, lekin BJP mein nahin jayenge.’ He rubbished PM Modi’s package of Rs 125 crore to Bihar in 2015 and pilloried him for his ‘false promises and lies’.

But he suddenly returned to the BJP in 2017, forming the government with it — which the electorate had rejected one year and nine months ago— on the very day he had quit the alliance. Tejashwi Yadav has alleged that Nitish has fallen to the BJP’s blackmail over the Rs 2,000-crore Srijan scam that rocked his government; Nitish has not countered it.

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