Janata Dal-United supremo and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar
By Atyasha Singh
Patna: Narendra Damodardas Modi owes his record-equalling third term as Prime Minister to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar who joined the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in January 2024.
Incidentally, Kumar was at the helm of the oust-Modi campaign and was instrumental in bringing together political parties of different hues to fight the BJP-led NDA. He, however, opted out following differences over the nomenclature of the anti-Modi alliance.
What irked Kumar, the Janata Dal-United supremo, the most was the refusal of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) to appoint him as its national convenor as West Bengal Chief Minister and the Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee proposed the name of the All India Congress Committee president Mallikarjun Kharge as the potential Prime Minister candidate and Convenor the I.N.D.I. Alliance.
Soon thereafter, on January 28, 2024, Kumar severed ties with the Mahagathbandhan in Bihar – an alliance between the JD-U, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India. He joined the NDA and continued as Bihar’s Chief Minister with NDA’s support, prompting a Congress party leader Shashi Tharoor to call Kumar a “snollygoster” (meaning a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician).
What happened next is for I.N.D.I. Alliance to rue not having Kumar on its boat otherwise the Opposition would have been within striking distance of dislodging the NDA from power.
The “snollygoster” not only managed to win 12 Lok Sabha seats but he helped the BJP to win as many in the 2o24 Lok Sabha elections. Riding piggyback, Lok Jan Shakti and Hindustani Awam Morcha (which was a part of the Mahagathbandhan in Bihar but had withdrawn in 2023), two constituents of the NDA in Bihar, also won 5 and 2 seats respectively.
In all, the NDA managed to win 30 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar in 2024 losing only 9 seats as it had won 39 seats in 2019. On the contrary, the BJP lost badly in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh and surrendered 29 seats to the I.N.D.I.A. bloc.
The JD-U’s performance surprised all and sundry for Kumar had been written off by political experts and declared a liability for the BJP. His falling health and his off-the-cuff remarks during electioneering were cited to browbeat the Bihar Chief Minister.
Now the same set of political experts admit in private that the 2024 poll outcome would have been just reversed had the JD(U) contested in the company of Rashtriya Janata Dal and the grand old Congress party. They feel the BJP would not have reached double digits in Bihar and Kumar would have led the Mahagathbandhan to a landslide victory.
Citing a sizeable drop in the vote share of the BJP (3.5 per cent) in Bihar this time coupled with a low margin of victory, they claim that the BJP on its own could not have won more than five seats in the state as most of the BJP MPs were faced with anti-incumbency.To name a few Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Radha Mohan Singh, Sanjay Jaiswal, Janardan Singh Sigriwal, Giriraj Singh, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Nityanand Rai would have lost in such a scenario.
Going into permutations and combinations, the BJP-led NDA would have been poorer by at least 35 seats and its tally (292) would have come down to 257 and the I.N.D.I alliance would have surged away jeopardising Narendra Modi’s chance of equalling Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s three consecutive terms as PM.
Now that Narendra Modi is set to become the Prime Minister for the third term, the I.N.D.I.alliance lost the battle of ballots by underestimating the power of “snollygoster”.
