Saturday, March 21, 2009

Aditi Phadnis : Can Nitish Swing Bihar ?



The JD(U)'s real politics will come out in the open after Election 2009.
Can Nitish Kumar swing Bihar for the Janata Dal United JD(U)? Not for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with which the JD(U) has had an alliance for more than 15 years, but the JD(U), his own party?
For the first time since the Gujarat riots, Kumar’s party is making a distinction between the NDA and the JD(U). Party bosses, including President Sharad Yadav, are realistic. Political autonomy of the party is all very well. But the government in Bihar is there because of the support of the BJP.
This somewhat hamstrings the JD(U) and prevents it from the kind of autonomy of action that the Biju Janata Dal has displayed in Orissa. Till now, Naveen Patnaik’s principal enemy was the Congress. Having worked hard and secured the BJP’s support in decimating the Congress, he is well onto making the BJP the principal enemy, gathering together all other forces, small and big, to help him push back the BJP in Orissa, and eventually out of it. In the process, he has neutralised the Congress so badly that it is just a marginal force. Thus, Patnaik has not only rewritten the rules of power politics of a regional party, he has redefined his own Opposition.
The implications of this on the nature of the BJP, the permanent tussle between the BJP’s parliamentary wing and the unstructured forces of Hindutva like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), are yet not clear. Could the VHP force the BJP in Orissa, pointing to its emasculation in taking the Hindu project forward, along more adventurous paths? If so, wouldn’t this increase the possibility of incidents like the murder of Graham Staines? But that is for forces opposed to the BJP (and in the BJP) to consider. In Orissa, Patnaik has reworked the rules of the game of power to the extent to which a regional party can.
There are very good reasons why Nitish Kumar can’t do the same in Bihar, although he might want to. The main reason is his opponent, Lalu Prasad. Till ten days ago, it was the Congress bigwigs who were talking about intervening in the ego clash between Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan of the Lok Janashakti Party (LJP), pointing out that an alliance between the two alone would be able to beat back the BJP-JD(U) alliance. Things were so rocky between Lalu Prasad and Paswan that Paswan had said that he would ally with the RJD only if he got 16 or more seats; otherwise he would set up candidates in all 40 seats.
The way this alliance has worked out, Lalu has given LJP 12 seats that Paswan has accepted without a murmur. Of these, there are at least four that Lalu has conceded all right, but where proxy candidates are going to act as spoilers (like the Gopalganj seat that his brother-in-law Sadhu Yadav is going to fight). He may be fighting from another party but “seat to Laluji ke ghar mein hi rahegi” [(the seat will still be Lalu’s), a colleague commented, chuckling].
It was important to strike the alliance. In 1999, the NDA won 41 out of 54 seats in the then united Bihar, simply because it had Paswan on its side. Lalu was then defeated in his own constituency, Madhepura. In 2004, Paswan shifted to the UPA and it won 29 out of 40 seats.
The two Assembly elections in 2005, which ultimately led to Lalu Prasad’s downfall, were also in large measure dictated by Paswan, unity with whom became the fulcrum of anti-BJP-JD(U) forces. Today, the NDA is not just looking at the Dalit vote which was so strongly behind Paswan, but also the Muslim vote, that is now behind Nitish Kumar. So the RJD, which contested 26 seats last time, finally decided to put up candidates only in 25 in 2009.
Having bowed before Ram Vilas Paswan (to put it in Lalu’s brother-in-law’s words), has the Yadav leader managed to put in place an unbeatable alliance for the Lok Sabha elections? Not really. One, everyone, even the voters can see that this is a tactical alliance — for Lalu Prasad doesn’t really want Ram Vilas to emerge as Bihar’s most important leader and will do everything to stymie this (the politics behind Sadhu Yadav’s rebellion, for example). The lack of sincerity behind the alliance is patent.
Two, the Congress is playing its own games. Although the party has made no serious efforts to expand its social base in the state, it continues to suffer from delusions of grandeur. In 2005, if the commitment to secularism had been more than skin-deep, the Congress would have contested the Assembly elections in alliance with Lalu Prasad. It didn’t. The result is there for all to see and the current phase of bitterness is a hangover of those days.
Nitish Kumar’s own politics in Bihar has created a new set of political images: Gestures like going on a rickshaw to see Slumdog Millionaire and having a dosa in a restaurant in Patna, have great traction with urban voters and projects like the state government’s health and education policy have shown and continue to show results in rural Bihar.
In the absence of an otherwise wave-less election, Bihar is going to deliver a decisive verdict: Whether in favour of Nitish Kumar or Lalu Prasad. And it is after the 2009 general elections that the real politics of the JD(U) will come out in the open.

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