Apart from other things, the Bihar verdict is a personal victory for Nitish Kumar. Ever since he broke away from the BJP on Narendra Modi’s nomination as the party’s prime minister candidate, the party did everything it could to destroy him.
It started with a campaign that development was stalled and ordinary people’s life had become insecure since the BJP moved out of his government. They carried on with the propaganda even though facts did not support it.
The main reason why the party and Narendra Modi marshalled all their resources, energies and time for the Bihar campaign was but their motivation to make Nitish bite dust. It is unlikely that Modi would address 30 rallies in elections in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu or other states which are expected to go to polls next. Nor is party president going to set up temporary home for three months in any state. Nor are half a dozen central ministers going to spend months to micro manage booths.
Modi had been ‘humiliated’ several times by Nitish when he was in alliance with the BJP. Modi got his first revenge when he proved Nitish Kumar wrong by winning a massive majority at the 2014 Lok Sabha elections nationally as well as in Bihar. Humiliated, Nitish quit chief minister’s office. Modi and BJP would have never mounted such a gigantic campaign as they did had Nitish not come back as chief minister. He was like a snake that was hurt but not de-fanged.
It was the BJP and Modi who turned elections in a state as national election. Had the BJP and Modi named a state party leader as chief minister, it would have remained state elections.
However, as elections drew nearer, BJP’s grassroots feedback conveyed to the leadership that Nitish remained very popular. How to demolish him? The party used Lalu as stick to beat Nitish. They wanted to demolish him by telling people that alliance with ‘discredited’ Lalu was a disgrace for Nitish.
When that did not work, they attacked Nitish with an old video showing him with a tantric.
Despite marshalling of all kinds of resources and mounting one of the nastiest slander campaigns the BJP and Modi failed to defeat Nitish. In fact they made him a titan.
The Bihar verdict is a massive endorsement by the electorate for the Nitish model of development. It is a recognition of his work for the past ten years which has brought the state out of deep pits. Despite severe odds of financial inadequacy and systemic inertia he has been able to give Bihar a growth rate more or at par with developed states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Punjab.His policies and incentives have brought down the below poverty line population substantially and raised school enrolment to phenomenal level. He has put in place administrative mechanisms which have kept communal situation from getting out of control despite provocations.
After Bihar, the scale of Modi-Nitish confrontation is going to go up. The political alliance model that succeeded in Bihar is going to be tried in other states and at the national level. It is too early to say if Nitish will become the nucleus of the national alliance, because the Congress still has 20 per cent national vote. But Modi has made Nitish a titan and it would be interesting to see how he fights the threat to his political career from him.
