This election is like the last contest for Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar, the two leaders who have decided the condition and direction of Bihar’s politics for the last three and a half decades.
Bihar, which is synonymous with politics of ups and downs, has been dominated by only two leaders, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar in the last 35 years. Both grew up from the same socialist ideology, were close allies and staunch rivals. Sometimes their paths parted, sometimes they forgot all their grudges to achieve a common goal. There were disagreements and differences of opinion between them, but in their sometimes harsh and sometimes soft relationships, both of them took care that whenever they got a chance to make mistakes again, no one should feel embarrassed. This has been the gist of Bihar’s electoral politics in recent years.
The two leaders, who have known each other closely in social life for more than fifty years, are once again face to face in this assembly election, in a struggle to save their political supremacy and legacy. The credibility of both the old rivals is at stake in the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections to be held in two phases on 6th and 11th November and it will be known who has won this time only after the election results are announced on 14th November.
Nitish is once again the ‘leader’ of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in this election, while Lalu is the symbol of the ideology of the Grand Alliance, on the basis of whose political strength every ally of his wants to cross the electoral hurdle. Despite the new challengers, like many previous elections, this time too the fight in Bihar is between Nitish Kumar vs Lalu Yadav.
Although BJP is the biggest ally in the alliance in which Nitish is, whose trump card is Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, but the command of the battle of the state is still in the hands of Janata Dal-United. In the last 20 years, due to his political skills and social engineering, Nitish has created such a winning formula, for which neither BJP has been able to find an alternative till now, nor has Lalu been able to find any solution to it. Recent electoral history confirms that the alliance in which Nitish is part of wins elections. This is Nitish’s unique selling point (USP) in Bihar politics, due to which he keeps winning election after election. Ever since Nitish came to power in Bihar, this has become a tradition.
Ever since Nitish Kumar became the Chief Minister after winning the November 2005 assembly elections with the support of BJP, he has not looked back. When the next elections were held in the state in 2010, he won a huge majority. However, within three years he became disillusioned with his old ally, when the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi took over the leadership of BJP in place of LK Advani. Nitish had to bear the brunt of this in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections when his party’s number of MPs dropped from 20 to just two. But Nitish learned a lesson from that election result that if he wants to maintain supremacy in the arena, then JDU will have to be a part of the alliance with either Lalu or BJP. Nitish formed an alliance with Lalu in the 2015 assembly elections and became the Chief Minister again after giving a tough defeat to the BJP.
In fact, Nitish felt that if the leadership of NDA would go into the hands of BJP’s ‘hard liner’ Modi, then the Muslim voters of Bihar would go away from him and it would be easy for Lalu Yadav to return to power. So, he continuously urged the BJP high command not to send Modi to campaign in Bihar elections during the Atal-Advani era.
Actually, Nitish had made this strategy to break into the electoral fort of Lalu’s strong M-Y (Muslim-Yadav). The population of Muslims in Bihar is about 17 percent and that of Yadavs is 13 percent. For this reason, he felt that unless that equation was destroyed, the ‘threat’ of Lalu’s return to Bihar would always remain. Therefore, he launched many minority welfare schemes to woo Muslim voters. During that time, Nitish emphasized that his party has different views from BJP on three major issues, Ayodhya Ram Temple construction, Uniform Civil Code and Article 370.
Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar
Under this strategy, during the BJP National Executive meeting in Patna in June 2010, the banquet to be given in honor of senior BJP leaders was canceled at the last moment because the top leadership of BJP rejected their demand to keep Modi away from it. Nitish also returned an amount of Rs 5 crore sent from Gujarat by the Modi government for the relief of Bihar flood victims.
Obviously, Nitish wanted to send the message that even though he is running the government in alliance with BJP, he is more committed to the welfare of minorities than Lalu. Some effect of his efforts was visible in the 2010 assembly elections, when a large section of minorities supported him. It was a big success for Nitish that he had broken into Lalu’s fort called ‘vote bank’. Nitish wanted to strengthen it further because he wanted to increase his party’s support base by causing electoral loss to Lalu Yadav. So when the news of Modi being projected as the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate in 2013 came, Nitish broke the seventeen-year-old alliance with the BJP.
At that time, Lalu’s entire attention was focused on Delhi politics as the Railway Minister of the Manmohan Singh government. When Nitish ended the 15-year tenure of Lalu Prasad-Rabri Devi as Chief Minister in 2005, Lalu focused all his energy on central politics, and showed no interest in thwarting Nitish’s strategies in Bihar. They considered Nitish merely a pawn of the BJP and based their fight around the issue of BJP’s alleged communalism. Due to this, Nitish found the field vacant to advance his development agenda. Ally BJP also gave full support to Nitish in ‘reconstruction’ of Bihar.
Learning from the mistakes of Lalu-Rabri tenure, after becoming the Chief Minister, Nitish mainly focused on three issues, strengthening law and order, eradicating corruption and cracking down on communalism. RJD’s fifteen-year tenure was even called ‘Jungle Raj’ due to poor law and order. Therefore, when Nitish started streamlining the law and order, a large section of the voters of Bihar was greatly impressed by him. He did not compromise even on corruption and communalism. Strengthened the political ground by giving 50 percent reservation to women under the Panchayati Raj system, setting up a system of speedy trials against powerful people with political patronage and improving the field of education and health.
Nitish knew that if he did not draw a long line of development during his tenure, then a grassroots political rival like Lalu could not be kept out of power for long. Therefore, he worked day and night for the all-round development of Bihar, so that Lalu’s return would not be easy. The irony was that after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, both the leaders needed each other because under the leadership of Modi, the BJP’s support base started increasing not only in the country but also in Bihar.
After the massive victory of the BJP alliance in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, both Nitish and Lalu were facing political crisis. Taking moral responsibility for his party’s defeat after the Lok Sabha elections, Nitish resigned from the post of Chief Minister and made Mahadalit leader Jitan Ram Manjhi his successor, but after taking command, Manjhi broke the impression that he would work as Nitish’s ‘proxy’. Nitish camp also suspected that Manjhi had made some ‘secret deal’ with BJP.
In such a situation, Nitish had no option but to remove Manjhi. In such a situation, Nitish and Lalu probably had no other option left but to forget their bitterness and come together. Their alliance was effective, leading to a massive victory for the Grand Alliance in the 2015 assembly elections. However this alliance did not last long. Within two years, Nitish broke ties with RJD and formed the government again with BJP.
Lalu and Nitish got acquainted in the early seventies when they were students of Patna University. Both came close during Jaiprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti movement and their relationship remained close till Lalu became the Chief Minister. After coming to power, Nitish, angry with Lalu’s working style, separated from him in 1993 and tried his luck in the 1995 assembly elections by forming Samata Party with George Fernandes. His party got only seven seats. A year later, on Advani’s advice, he formed an alliance with the BJP against Lalu.
In fact, in 1990, Lalu Yadav, when he was the Chief Minister, had Advani arrested in Samastipur during the Rath Yatra. Due to this, his popularity increased among Muslim voters, who were looking for an alternative to Congress after the Bhagalpur riots of 1989. Lalu got help in strengthening the M-Y equation which proved to be his electoral Brahmastra.
BJP had emerged as the main opposition party in the nineties, but its efforts to oust Lalu from power were not successful. In Nitish, he got a non-Yadav OBC leader who had the courage to challenge Lalu. Therefore, despite being a bigger party than Samata Party, when NDA coalition government was formed after the dismissal of Rabri Devi government in 2000, BJP happily made Nitish the Chief Minister. Due to lack of majority, the government fell in seven days but it became clear to BJP and Nitish that more preparations were needed to end RJD’s power. After the formation of a hung assembly in February 2005, when elections were held again in November of the same year, BJP for the first time presented Nitish as the chief ministerial face of the alliance before the elections, after which BJP-JDU got help in forming the government.
The irony is that Nitish formed the government in 2015 with the same people who came to power by making issues of poor law and order and corruption during Lalu Raj. It is another matter that Nitish again separated from Lalu on the alleged issue of corruption. It is noteworthy that after the 2015 victory, Lalu’s younger son Tejashwi Yadav became the Deputy Chief Minister while his elder son Tej Pratap was made the Cabinet Minister. After breaking the alliance with BJP, Nitish had announced that he would never go back to NDA but after the formation of the new cabinet, he started looking uneasy in his relationship with RJD.
He started receiving complaints that Lalu was interfering in all the departments given to his party including the ministries of his sons. The remaining task was completed by BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi. He held 44 press conferences and leveled corruption allegations against the Lalu family including Tejashwi and Tej Pratap. Nitish asked Tejashwi to answer the allegations. When he did not do so, he broke the alliance with RJD and went back to BJP.
In the 2015 elections, RJD emerged as the largest party by winning 80 seats. JDU had got only 71 seats. Despite this, Lalu had to accept Nitish as the Chief Minister because he had approved it before the elections. As days passed, Lalu started assuming the role of elder brother within the alliance, due to which Nitish started becoming uncomfortable. Nitish’s experience of running the government with BJP was completely different. Nitish did not have to face this when he was the Deputy Chief Minister of Sushil Modi.
However, in the later years, Nitish’s relations with BJP were not as cordial as they were before 2013. He realized this bitterly in the 2020 assembly elections when Chirag Paswan of Lok Janshakti Party, a constituent of NDA, started a campaign against Nitish and fielded his candidates against all the JDU candidates. Nitish felt that Chirag was doing this under some internal agreement with BJP, so that Nitish could be weakened in Bihar. That also happened. In that election, BJP emerged as the largest party with 75 seats while JDU had to be content with only 43 seats. JDU lost 36 seats due to Chirag’s party contesting the elections separately outside the alliance. Before that, after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, despite winning 16 seats in Bihar, JDU was given only one ministerial post at the Center and six JDU MLAs from Arunachal Pradesh joined the BJP camp.
Nitish was also not happy that after the 2020 elections, BJP gave the post of Deputy Chief Minister to other BJP leaders instead of Sushil Modi. His growing distance from the BJP gave rise to many rumors that he might again forge an alliance with Lalu before this election. However, senior BJP leader Amit Shah put an end to all the speculations by announcing at the very beginning that NDA will fight this election under the leadership of Nitish. But, whether Nitish will be BJP’s choice for the post of Chief Minister of NDA this time too, BJP has not made any promise on this yet.
As far as Lalu is concerned, this election is a do or die election for him and his family. In the last elections, Tejashwi had come very close to forming the government. In the last two assembly elections, RJD emerged as the largest party in the state. Lalu hopes that Tejashwi will prove to be ‘third time lucky’. With this hope, despite his deteriorating health, Lalu is making election strategies based on all his experiences. However, the internal strife within his own family has come to the surface before the elections. After being expelled from the party, his elder son Tej Pratap has rebelled and fielded his candidates against RJD in many constituencies.
However, this time the fight has become triangular with Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraj Party contesting elections in all the constituencies. This may cause damage to both the major alliances. This election is being seen as the last contest between Lalu and Nitish. For the last 35 years, both of them have determined the direction of Bihar’s politics. Only after the results will we know whether this will prove to be their last fight against each other in Bihar politics?
