In supporting Nitish Kumar, the BJP patriarch has hurt his own party
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s exit from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), swiftly followed by ex-convener Sharad Yadav’s ‘offer’ to return if ‘the party’ is headed by LK Advani, is a Freudian admission of the deep links between the two, often at the cost of the BJP State unit. Most commentators have missed the significance of this slip.
Since the NDA has not been officially dissolved so far, and Advani is still its chairperson, Sharad Yadav is obviously demanding the exit of both Rajnath Singh as BJP president and Narendra Modi as campaign committee chief. As the duo are now an inextricable package, only the exit of Rajnath Singh can pave the way for downsizing Modi as default Prime Ministerial candidate of the BJP-NDA. While this is the most startling case of interference in the internal affairs of a political party by an outsider, it reflects the desperation and anxiety of those with whom the former NDA convener is working hand in hand.
Advani’s policy of keeping the BJP and its rising leaders as ‘bonsai’s’, clipping their roots from time to time and deflating their aspirations and ambitions, is part of a well developed strategy that has sadly had the concurrence of the RSS. Many decent leaders at various levels of the party bit the dust as Advani and his coterie mercilessly purged the slightest hint of deviance from his line. In the name of party discipline, a ruthless ‘thought police’ ran the party and quashed murmurs of dissent even after potential state victories were gambled away through poor alliances or cussed refusals to make the right alliances (Assam and Haryana come readily to mind).
In this context, it may be pertinent to examine Nitish Kumar’s first stint in office as Bihar Chief Minister, in 2000. The Bihar Assembly elections had thrown up a hung house: BJP had 65 MLAs and the Janata Dal United 35, while the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) won 103 seats.
Constitutionally, then Bihar Governor Vinod C Pande, an appointee of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime, should have invited Lalu Prasad as leader of the largest single party, to try to form the government. Certainly his tally was higher than the combined tally of the BJP-JDU.
What happened, however, was shocking. The BJP central leadership (no prizes for guessing who could enforce such a diktat) coaxed the Governor to invite Nitish Kumar to try and form the government. Pande gave him a generous ten days to prove his majority on the floor of the House, but a nation-wide outcry brought the time slightly forward. The result was that Nitish Kumar could not win the requisite support (read horse-trading failed), and bowed out after seven days, the shortest stint of any Chief Minister in the State.
The 2000 Assembly result clearly shows that the BJP had double the strength of the JDU, and there was no reason why the party should not have built on its strength to emerge as single largest party in the future, with the capacity to form the government in its own right. What happened was the exact opposite. The central party leadership decided to build up Nitish Kumar at the expense of the party and leaders like CP Thakur and Sushil K Modi.
Nitish Kumar reciprocated BJP generosity by demanding, after merger with the Samata Party in 2004, that Modi (55 MLAs) give the post of Leader of Opposition in the Assembly in his favour (56 MLAs combined).
Since 2000, the BJP has steadily lost ground to the JDU, and were it not for the groundswell of support for Narendra Modi across the country, it would not know how to revive itself, and would be reduced to a paper organisation like the Odisha and Andhra Pradesh units. In both States, the dominant central leadership deliberately curbed the growth prospects of the State units to keep Naveen Patnaik and Chandrababu Naidu in good humour, with results that are there for all to see. The sordid saga in Karnataka is fresh in everyone’s minds.
The question vexing most observers is why Nitish Kumar and Advani upped the ante so sharply in recent days. The answer seems to lay with the recent Maharajganj Lok Sabha poll. It is obvious that the non-cooperation of the BJP State unit gave the JDU the drubbing it got (defeat by a margin of 1.37 lakh votes); that this was possible only with the party aggressively revitalizing its Bhumihar vote base; and that this strategy was blessed by party president Rajnath Singh.
It is a moot point if RSS pointsman Suresh Soni was kept in the loop; what is certain is that Advani was not. And there lies the rub. This explains the rage of both Advani and Nitish Kumar, and also why Sharad Yadav is willing to come back only if Advani returns as helmsman.
BJP is going to go back to the grassroots with a vengeance. Time will tell if can wrest primary position in the State. Nitish Kumar, however, is a clear loser, with the upper caste vote sure to slip away in its entirely; Muslim vote torn between opposing or endorsing Narendra Modi; and a potential Congress ally a complete non-entity in the State. Meanwhile, Lalu Prasad retains his core OBC votebank, centred on the Yadav community, and Congress is formally allied with him, for whatever that is worth.
It is irrelevant that Nitish Kumar continued in the AB Vajpayee government after the Godhra train burning of 2002 sparked off violent rioting across the State. What is pertinent is that his association with the BJP won him three chances as Chief Minister of Bihar, once in 2000 (seven day wonder), and then a full term (November 2005-10) and the current term (November 2010 to present).
This election is the high noon of his career – the JDU-BJP coalition won a four-fifth majority (206 seats), with the result that the State does not have an official opposition party as 25 seats are the minimum required for the post of Leader of the Opposition. It would always be difficult to repeat such a feat. But to look towards a blank future on account of misjudging which ‘god’ commands the waves is a horrific non-application of mind.
Sitting on the soil of the mighty Magadh Empire, Nitish Kumar would have done well to study the precepts of Kautilya. Perhaps the extinct Nalanda University he has struggled in vain to revive is a metaphor for his political career.
Ditto for Advani. His political strategy of keeping non-coterie members out of the loop has been used by his juniors to upstage and out-manoeuvre him. Tantrums can never make up the loss of control. His time on the Indian political spectrum is up.
Niticentral.com, 18 June 2013
