Is this the final break between Nitish and Lalu? History may hold a lesson

Midway through the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign that would decimate both of them, Laloo Yadav vehemently asserted his rejection of Nitish Kumar. Journalist Madhu Trehan had brought her multimedia portal Newslaundry team to Patna and persuaded Laloo to sit down for a live studio interaction that would be aired on NDTV. I was among those invited to the makeshift studio on the upper floors of Patna’s Maurya Hotel and I asked Laloo if he would, in order to fend off what he called the “grave threat” of Narendra Modi, consider joining hands with Nitish Kumar.

He stared coldly at me a moment, as if I had tossed him an incredulous query, then said: “But I thought you knew Bihar, Thakurji. This man (Nitish) has been sitting all these years in the BJP’s lap, he unseated me from power, he is the BJP’s pet. How could you even ask if I will join hands with him? Out of the question, Laloo Yadav is here to fight communal forces and those that connived with them to serve their own interests. Hum Nitish se haath milayenge? Hunhh! Kabhi nahin, never.”

A year later, months short of the battle for the Bihar assembly, he quaffed the poisoned chalice and announced Nitish Kumar not merely a lost-and-found ally, but also his leader. Narendra Modi cannot be allowed to take Bihar, he said, he would “do anything” to quash the head of the ‘communal serpent’. Even become number two to his chief political adversary in Bihar.

They began as socialist mates of youth, fell bitterly apart, fought the most fabled battles, said the most terrible things of each other, took turns vanquishing each other and lording over Bihar.

Now, panicked by the threat that the Narendra Modi juggernaut would come to roll across Bihar yet another time and snatch from them their realm, they were together again, two rivals in a desperate SOS clinch to save it. An unlikely, unwieldy tandem, but all the same a most engrossing one, chalk and cheese trying to smelt an uncertain alloy as battlement against the formidable siege laid by Prime Minister Modi’s BJP.
They seemed no longer masters of the Bihari game they once were, Laloo and Nitish.

In October 2013, Laloo had been convicted in the fodder scam and been virtually debarred from the electoral arena for life; unless a higher court overturns that sentence, Laloo will not be able to contest polls or hold public office until 2024. His eldest daughter Misa, the only one of the clan to contest the 2014 Lok Sabha election, was beaten by his former lieutenant Ram Kripal Yadav. His two sons, Tejeswi and Tej Pratap, equally keen to inherit the father’s twisted crown, weren’t of age yet; neither gave any hint they possessed their father’s genius for the political stage. He headed a dwindled party and a demanding family.

Nitish kept his family banished from politics, but he was in a trough of his own making. Since severing ties with the BJP on the Modi question in the summer of 2013, he appeared to have lost both focus and momentum as chief minister; his concern, suddenly, was not governance but survival. Under attack from his ally of nearly two decades, he moved to shore up his defences. Administration took a back seat, political manoeuvring gobbled up his attention. The battering at the hands of Modi in the Lok Sabha polls shook him up.

He quit office, installed a Dalit from his menagerie called Jitan Ram Manjhi as chief minister and retreated from public vision. Mauled, he quietly licked his wounds. By the time he returned as chief minister, cajoled by partymen and having had to fight off Manjhi who had by then developed a fair appetite for power, another battle loomed in his face.

Had he made a mistake in jolting an alliance that had run smoothly for eight years, and given Biharis the hope that things could change?

Had Nitish sacrificed Bihar’s interests in order to wage a personal battle against Narendra Modi? Had he jeopardised his own political future? Nitish suffered for breaking ties with the BJP, but it is unlikely he was unaware of the consequences when he finally took that plunge.

He sees Narendra Modi’s mien and politics as so antithetical to his own, there wasn’t a common ledge between them. Modi was, to him, a divisive, sectarian leader who had fundamental quarrels with syncretic India. Modi cut such a radical contrast that Laloo Yadav, a man Nitish fought most of his life, whose brand of politics and governance he battled against, became suddenly more acceptable. For better or for worse, a life-long adversary as late-life ally.

Someday soon these men will slip out of these pages and become greater or lesser. There are no last words on lives; they end in ellipses, often suffixed with a question mark. The protagonists of this volume are a work in progress; when the last word has been written, a trail would already have leapt off it. There will be more to tell. Part of the charm and challenge of this pursuit has been the chase itself.

Laloo and Nitish together make a seamless continuum of the narrative of contemporary Bihar. Two of its great sons, who embossed the state with their imprint on either side of the millennium. One made a story of hope wantonly betrayed, the other ventured its unlikely kindling in the mire of collective cynicism and resignation. They make a strange diptych, Laloo and Nitish, a fracture of the same bone, separated by radical contrasts yet locked on the hinges by an uneasy sameness.

For far too many reasons, understanding Laloo is critical to understanding Nitish, and very often the opposite is equally true. One significant change they have together wrought on Bihar is that, like in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, upper-caste dominance of politics has become a thing of the past. In the twenty-five years since Laloo came to power in 1990, the transfer of power hegemony from the minority upper castes to backward and Dalit representatives has become complete; that process is in irreversible stability, the pyramidal order of caste dominance turned on its head.

Nitish Kumar has never won Bihar singly.

He has, in fact, never won without a significant bankable ally. When he tied up with the CPI(ML) in 1995 and attempted his first overthrow of Laloo Yadav, he was tossed out by the electorate – he got a mere seven seats in the Bihar assembly. It was not until he tied up with the BJP and persevered another decade that he was finally able to turf Laloo Yadav out of power and become chief minister.

When he was trounced in the 2014 LokSabha polls by Narendra Modi’s BJP, he may well have been reminded of his 1995 rout. He had left himself single yet again by breaking with the BJP in mid-2013; he was blown in the Modi wind.

It cannot be Nitish was unaware of the risk he was taking in severing ties with a reliable seventeen-year-old ally. But his revulsion of Modi and his brand of politics ran so deep, he left himself no option. “I cannot work with this man,” he told me repeatedly in the months before and after the break-up, “Everything cannot be measured in terms of electoral gain on loss, the battle against Narendra Modi goes beyond merely electoral battles, it is a battle of ideas.”

But political careers don’t run on grandiose grandstanding alone. Having been cast away by the Modi blizzard, Nitish needed to claw back lost ground. But how, was the big question. Typically, he lapsed into recluse-mode for a period following the defeat, installing the little-known Jitan Ram Manjhi as chief minister and retreating from public gaze. Not for the first time in his life, Nitish was taken by the political blues; his despondency was not so much over having been trampled by Narendra Modi, it was over his sense that the Bihari voter had not responded to good work done.

But such is the matrix of identity politics, it determines itself not on performance but around tribal loyalties to caste and kinship. When Nitish had led his NDA alliance to an unprecedented landslide in the assembly elections of 2010, he had come out to bravely proclaim a “New Bihar”, an electorate that had risen about caste moorings to reward good work. He had spoken vastly prematurely – what had given him the surge was the coalition of extremes that had come to coalesce under him: the BJP’s upper-caste constituency, sections of backward communities, and Dalits. The moment he broke from the BJP, that caste alliance came undone.

Bihar was still very far from casting caste away; Nitish had only deluded himself if he believed he had made a fundamental difference to the way Biharis thought and acted, especially when it came to electing governments.

This was the irony that confronted him: in poll after opinion poll, Nitish had been voted the most popular man to lead Bihar, but the same polls made it plain his JDU would figure close to the bottom if it contested alone. Nitish had built himself an image, but not strong enough legs to take it the distance solo.

It was not for nothing he would go on to negotiate a deal with Laloo Yadav, who had far more boots on the ground than Nitish. The alliance with Laloo was not strategy, it was necessity, a compulsion.

In the weeks after quitting office, Nitish spoke, occasionally and cynically, of giving up politics in conversations with close friends and colleagues. It was a phase he gradually moulted out of as assembly elections approached. His appetite for politics returned and fed his ambition anew; a few months out in the cold, Nitish was ready for the street—and office – again.

Senior colleagues had begun to coax him to return as chief minister and face the battle head on. He himself realised he could not fight a credible battle to retain power a third successive time with Manjhi as chief minister. He would have to return; but he took his time chewing over how and when.

Meanwhile, he had undertaken a key undercover negotiation with Prashant Kishor, the activist-strategist who had designed Narendra Modi’s stunning 2014 campaign. Kishor had found himself at a loose end after Modi came to power. His hope that he would play a key advocacy role on the social sector from Modi’s PMO lay thwarted. BJP president Amit Shah and other senior colleagues of the new prime minister would not brook a lateral entrant to create a new power centre. Kishor was frustrated, and looking for ways to keep himself relevant in the political consultancy game. He went, cleverly, and probably a little vengefully, to Modi’s bitterest political adversary.

A few meetings is all it took for Nitish to decide Kishor was the man for him. A most radical pendulum shift in the annals of backroom politics was effected. Kishor leapt from the Modi bandwagon right into Nitish’s Patna office and authored a campaign such as Bihar had never before seen in style and scale. Its theme was not terribly distant from “Single Man” – Bihar mein bahar ho, Nitishey Kumar ho, it ran, borrowing on classic Bihari intonation.

Like for Narendra Modi during 2014, Kishor had resolved on singular projection of Nitish Kumar as Bihar’s “sole credible hope”, brand Nitish for brand Bihar. But there was also, very close by, Laloo Yadav, the man Nitish fought bitterly with for over a decade but could not now afford to do without.

Excerpted with permission from The Brothers Bihari, Sankarshan Thakur, HarperCollins India.