Nitish Kumar’s final somersault?

By Vivekanand Jha*

Patna: After severing ties with the ‘Grand Alliance’ of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Congress Party and the Left, and resigning as Chief Minister in the morning, Nitish Kumar was sworn in again for the ninth time as Bihar CM today evening at 5 pm. This time he got the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partner Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), and an Independent legislator Sumit Kumar Singh, who was promptly included in the council of 8 ministers who too took oath along with Nitish.

The ministers who took oath today included three BJP members – Samrat Choudhary, Dr Prem Kumar and Vijay Sinha. Out of the three, Vijay Sinha and Samrat Choudhary would hold the portfolio of deputy chief minister.

While three of the ministers who were sworn in today – Vijay Kumar Choudhary, Bijendra Prasad Yadav, and Shravan Kumar belong to Nitish’s Janata Dal (United), Santosh Kumar Suman is the chief of  HAM and is the elder son of former chief minister Jitanram Manjhi.

Nitish took care of the sensitive caste factor, inducting only three forward caste members as ministers. There may be further expansion of his ministry later but the symbolic significance of his initial move cannot be overlooked. Of the newly inducted ministers, Bijendra Prasad Yadav belongs to the Other Backward Caste (OBC) along with Nitish Kumar and Shravan Kumar (both Kurmis) and Samrat Choudhary (Koeri). Vijay Sinha and Vijay Kumar Choudhary belong to the forward Bhumihar caste and Sumit Kumar Singh belongs to the forward Rajput caste. Dr. Prem Kumar (Kahar) represents the Extremely Backward Caste (EBC) while Santosh Kumar Suman (Musahar) represents the Dalits.

With Nitish back in the saddle, it may be recalled that Nitish had gone hammer and tongs for conducting his much vaunted Caste Census, with the prima facie focus on the vote bank of EBCs,  against the will of the BJP-led Central government which had advised him patience till the general election of 2024.

Significantly, the underlying mission was to wean away the Dalits and Maha Dalits (EBCs ) from the clutches of the BJP by increasing the percentage of reservations for them.

However, as the situation stands now, with Nitish Kumar yet again switching sides, his fastidiously nurtured vote banks of Dalits and Maha Dalits will now vote for the BJP. Also, the allocation of lakhs of jobs to teachers, earning the government certain brownie points, which the RJD leader and former deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav sought to appropriate as his achievement, is now left for the people to decide who should get the credit for the same. Tejashwi’s attempt to appropriate the credit for the jobs also heightened the tensions between the JD(U) and the RJD.

Bihar, which suddenly became the cynosure of all eyes as the job destination, leaves the question hanging fire: which Nitish Kumar’s government should get the credit for the same: whether the former one with the RJD or the current one with the BJP? This shall remain the moot question for the Bihar electorate to answer in the upcoming general election of 2024.

Nitish Kumar’s fifth time changing alliances, for the sake of retaining his chief ministerial position, which was purportedly in jeopardy, as the unsavoury and unceremonious ouster of Lalan Singh (a Rajput) from the position of JD(U) chief on December 29, 2023, unequivocally vindicated, the role of the BJP, which, not too in the distant past, mouthed all sorts of invectives, suddenly began singing paeans for Nitish when the latter walked yet again into its fold. To top it all, there was the reported collusion between Lalal Singh, the then president of JDU and Tejashwi, where the former was purportedly given the offer of deputy chief minister if he could bring twenty JD(U) legislators to defect to RJD, to enable Tejashwi to become the chief minister of the state.

The political game of one-upmanship going on in Bihar has been rotating around two personalities, Nitish Kumar and the RJD supremo Laloo Yadav. Whereas Nitish’s dream to reach the nation’s highest political position, was the trigger behind his pioneering initiative to form I. N. D. I. A block to take on the Narendra Modi regime, he was kept on tenterhooks despite his desperation to be appointed as the convener of the Opposition block.

On the other hand, in a closed-door meeting with Laloo, where Nitish Kumar had impressed upon Laloo that he was interested in playing a role in national politics, he would do everything to make Laloo’s son Tejashwi Yadav the next chief minister of Bihar. However, the opposition, including Congress, poured cold water on this plan too. The last straw was the Modi government’s masterstroke of conferring Bharat Ratna posthumously on the backward icon of Bihar, Karpoori Thakur.

Nitish has somersaulted again. Will this be his final somersault to be seen?

*Author, Academician and Public Intellectual. Views expressed are personal.