#dnaEdit: Caravan to Bihar

With strong indications that Jiten Ram Manjhi’s tenure as Bihar Chief Minister could be coming to an end, the political battle between the BJP and its rivals will shift from Delhi, where at present heated campaigning is underway, to Bihar where assembly elections are due later this year. Apparently, the Rashtriya Janata Dal(RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, on whose support the JD(U) government is dependent, has not taken kindly to Manjhi’s recent “praise” for the Narendra Modi government. Manjhi, who had thanked the Centre for its “benevolence” in including Gaya among the list of heritage cities, had raised eyebrows earlier when he sought special status for Bihar from the Modi government. Anywhere else, such statements would be viewed as innocuous attempts by an Opposition Chief Minister to ensure a fair deal for his state. But not in heavily politicised Bihar where any quarter to the opponent is viewed as a sellout. Manjhi, who was handpicked by Nitish Kumar as his replacement, after the 2014 Lok Sabha election debacle, has hardly turned out to be the proxy that Nitish wanted him to be. 

Manjhi has contradicted Nitish on several occasions and his derogatory statements about upper castes, wives of migrant labourers, and justifying Maoist extortion have embarrassed the JD(U) and sowed confusion within the party ranks. He has also snubbed suggestions by the JD(U) leadership to temper his public statements; his attempts at fashioning himself as a Dalit leader only further adding to Nitish’s discomfiture. The irony is the swift unravelling of Nitish’s ploy to draw mileage from the powerful symbolism of having installed a Dalit from the backward Musahar community as CM. Bristling over being called a puppet, Manjhi’s departure from the script Nitish chose for him and his determined efforts to break out of his mentor’s shadow cannot be faulted. The chief ministership of a state is an important constitutional position which cannot be reduced to mere proxyship as Nitish has tried to do. He only had to recall the disastrous attempt to rule Bihar by his friend-turned-foe-turned-ally Lalu, through wife, Rabri Devi.

At the root of Nitish’s troubles is his party’s weak organisational apparatus. By leaning heavily on the bureaucracy, Nitish may have helped restore Bihar’s governance deficit, but this strategy appears to have sapped the JD(U)’s organisational vitality. Though he quit the CM post to focus on party work, Nitish was quick to realise that a quick turnaround was impossible. He has subsequently gravitated towards a merger or an alliance with Lalu’s RJD as the best bet to fend off the BJP challenge. The recent by-elections proved this assessment correct with the alliance bagging six of ten assembly seats. Nitish’s pitch to fight the assembly elections as the CM candidate of a united RJD-JD(U)-Congress front is also predicated upon his being in the chief ministerial chair when elections are announced. With Lalu disqualified from electoral politics, and propping Rabri or the couple’s children as CM unlikely to appeal to the JD(U), Congress, or the electorate, Nitish is counting on the lack of credible alternatives. However, he will have to surrender a larger share of the seats to the RJD. Ever since Nitish ended his alliance with the BJP, Bihar’s focus has shifted from governance to politics. Will the remaining months in power  see Nitish harping on the development agenda, which was once his USP, or the return of social engineering with a vengeance? If the RJD-JD(U) alliance holds, the BJP will have a tough fight on its hands, but the Janata parivar’s fissiparous tendencies raise fears of Bihar’s slide back to chaos.