The lost reformer of Pataliputra

Nitish Kumar rebuilt the state on the ruins of Lalu raj and allowed his hatred for Narendra Modi to cloud his political judgement.

Maneijar Rai is one of those rickshaw pullers in Patna who warms up to an out-of-towner easily. This sultry afternoon, he’s pedalling furiously from the city’s Gandhi Maidan to Dak Bungalow chowk, but is generous enough to take a pause and tell the curious journalist of his choice in this election. On polling day, he travelled to his village of Jamui, which lies 160 km away from Patna, to cast his vote. “I voted for the laalten (the lantern), and Lalu will win.”

After pronouncing his preference, Rai pedals away. The tarred road is as smooth as his words. Ten years ago, in the final days of the Lalu-Rabri raj, Rai would have been braving a stretch of potholes pretending to be a road. What Rai plies his rickshaw on today is a tribute to the man he did not vote for, the man who partly rebuilt Bihar on the ruins left by a decade-plus of RJD rule. “True, things are so much better for us now. There were times in the past when passengers would get off at their destination without paying me my fare. On occasion, I have been thrashed for daring to ask for my payment.”

In 2012, Bihar, among the worst performing states in the country on all social indices, matched the national infant mortality rate of 44 per thousand births and actually bettered the national average in rural areas (45 per thousand against the all-India 48 per thousand). Bihar’s life expectancy is now 65.8 years, just short of the national 66.1. Bihar’s death rate is down to 6.7 per thousand people, against the all-India figure of 7.1. This reflects huge progress in immunisation. Each of these social transformations would have directly touched the lives of Rai and his family. But neither the state’s transformed class narrative, the noticeably improved social order, nor even the significant infrastructural changes in Patna dampen Rai’s enthusiasm for Lalu Prasad’s RJD.

Why did Rai vote for Lalu Prasad? Pat comes the reply. “Okra mein hamaar dil ba… jaat ki baat ba.” (In him lies my heart… it’s about caste). That is why the Bihar model of development is not vote worthy. In this state, people habitually tend to ‘caste’ their vote. Add to that one of the most acrimonious separations in Indian politics: the end of the JD-U’s alliance with the BJP. Nitish Kumar of the JD-U wanted a veto over the BJP’s choice of a prime ministerial candidate, and this unreasonable demand was an expression of his visceral hatred for Narendra Modi. Nitish Kumar’s secularism needed a convenient enemy. He did get one—and gained little politically.

The transformation that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar wrought across Bihar is evident in Gopalpur, too. This village in Saran, where Lalu Prasad’s wife and former Chief Minister Rabri Devi is pitted against the BJP’s Rajiv Pratap Rudy, has power supply for 20 hours a day, an achievement by any rural standard in the country. Farmers are assured sufficient water for their agricultural needs by the state irrigation department, and the roads leading here are no longer a rollercoaster ride through dust and dirt.

Still, there are few who talk of Salim Pervez, Bihar Legislative Council vice- chairman and JD-U’s candidate for this constituency, as a serious contender. BJP supporter Sanjay Kumar Singh says it’s a direct battle here between Rudy and Rabri Devi. “There is a BJP wave sweeping the country. Everyone wants Narendra Modi as Prime Minister,” he contends, earning the instant endorsement of those gathered around. “Only a section of Yadavs and Muslims will back the RJD,” asserts Singh.

Ironically, Singh, whose electoral choice is the BJP, has only praise for Nitish Kumar, his development work and governance model that have transformed his home state over the past decade. “When Lalu Yadav was in power, we could not leave home after sunset, the law-and-order situation was terrible.” More specifically, he backs the JD-U leader’s political bete noire, Narendra Modi. “This election is for deciding who should rule the Centre,” he says, “and Modi is the only one on the scene.”

Singh argues that it is the Gujarat CM rather than the local BJP candidate who is drawing votes for the party. “The M-Y voters (the social coalition of Muslims and Yadavs that Lalu forged) will vote for the RJD. Every other Hindu caste and subcaste, barring Kurmis (a numerically weaker OBC caste to which Nitish Kumar belongs) will rally behind the BJP,” he says.

Curiously, Kumar’s JD-U appears missing from the main electoral discourse despite the party’s pre-poll strategy of wooing Muslim MLAs away from the RJD in a bid to strengthen the party’s social base among Bihar’s Muslims. These voters, it seems, may favour Lalu’s RJD this time round, seeing it as the state’s best-placed challenge to the BJP.

Under Nitish Kumar, the economy of Bihar—a so-called ‘Bimaru’ state faring worse than the national average on just about all social indicators—has registered an average annual growth of 12 per cent for eight years, the fastest among major Indian states.

Its social indicators have shown remarkable progress, too. Literacy in the decade 2001-11 rose 17 percentage points, the country’s biggest gain. Female literacy improved even faster, by 20 percentage points, perhaps a world record.

The extent to which the ruling JD-U, despite the palpable developmental makeover of Bihar, has been marginalised in the 2014 General Election can be made out at Darbhanga town’s Anjuman reading room, where a group of elders are engaged in a heated discussion on the polls. One of India’s 250 districts officially identified as economically underdeveloped, this district is a recipient of special aid from Central Government schemes such as the Backward Region Grant Fund Programme. Politically, this Lok Sabha constituency has swung between the RJD and the BJP, making it a tough task for the JD-U to mark its presence. The main contenders here are Kirti Azad of the BJP, who holds this seat right now, and many-time winner Ali Ashraf Fatmi of the RJD.

The JD-U’s best shot here would have been on the development plank. Referring to the JD-U candidate Sanjay Jha, who led a motorcycle rally to drum up support in the town just hours earlier, Ajmal Khan maintains “the issue this election is development”. Reclining on a nearby charpoy, an elderly Shahabuddin intervenes to disagree. “That’s far from settled. Muslims here will only decide after a meeting at the madrassa,” he says, adding that “any split in our votes will only help the BJP”.

In fact, the JD-U’s gradual loss of Muslim support through the election period was best seen—despite Nitish Kumar’s efforts—when Akhtarul Iman, its candidate for Muslim-dominated Kishanganj, withdrew his candidacy to help the Congress’ Maulana Asrarul Haque Mohammad. Iman called it a “sacrifice for the larger cause”. It was a sign of which way the poll winds were blowing.

In Yadav-dominated Madhepura to the east, Lalu Prasad—convicted last year of Bihar’s multi-crore fodder scam—is not contesting the election. But his protege and controversial ex-MP Rajiv Ranjan (alias Pappu Yadav) takes on JD-U President Sharad Yadav. This battle is billed as a 70-mm potboiler. The BJP has fielded Vijay Kumar Singh. In 1999, splitting Yadav voters asunder for the first time, Sharad beat Lalu here. In 2004, Lalu wrested the seat back, but in caste-hued Bihar, the current contest is being watched for who emerges as the state’s flagbearer of socialist politics: Lalu, with his social justice and anti-communal stance, or Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav, with their development pitch.

The Madhepura battle is also expected to yield key readings on the broader popularity of the party led by Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav. Despite being the JD-U chief, the latter may find it hard to retain the seat. Earlier, speculation was rife that he would shift to a safer seat such as Nalanda. A polarisation between pro and anti-Modi votes could well scrunch the JD-U stalwart between the RJD and the BJP. The polarisation of Muslim voters away from the BJP and towards the RJD (rather than JD-U) is a scenario being replicated in many parts of Bihar.

With the BJP seemingly set to rake in vast electoral riches in the state and Muslims mostly deserting the JD-U, Sharad Yadav’s predicament in Madhepura is another indicator of the drastic diminishment of Nitish Kumar’s electoral project.

The tectonic political movements in caste-riven Bihar this election season point to the fragility of Nitish Kumar’s calculations on which he based his decision to snap his party’s alliance with the BJP after 17 years. This happened after the BJP announced Modi as its PM candidate, and came in the thick of an anticipatory post-BJP plan set in motion by the JD-U stalwart. It meant re-working the expansion of the party base among Muslims, Backward Classes and Dalits. With his Kurmi subcaste accounting for a mere 3.5 per cent of the state’s population, the CM was aware that gains could be made among voter segments that the BJP and RJD were not actively wooing.

Perhaps his most astute move was to extend 20 per cent reservation in panchayats to ‘extremely backward’ castes (EBCs). While Yadavs and Kurmis had made the most of Mandal politics, EBCs tasted grassroots-level power for the first time only under Nitish Kumar’s leadership. EBCs constitute a third of the state’s population, and—even if splintered into dozens of subcastes—could have been a significant source of support for the JD-U.

There have been other forces at work as well. The CM’s move for land reforms (under the Bataidari law), however, turned Bihar’s ‘upper’ castes restive. Two years ago, a clutch of landowners and ‘upper’ caste leaders launched a ‘kisan mahapanchayat’, warning the government against any move to disenfranchise them, as they saw it. But the CM was able to contain the resentment since his government had the BJP as a partner, and those who’d revolted saw Lalu’s RJD as a worse alternative.

By now, BJP-JD-U ties had begun to fray. Bihar’s CM needed to do something. In a bid to attract Dalits and insulate the JD-U against a potential BJP surge, Nitish Kumar worked to a plan that would club all Dalit subcaste groups except Paswans (supporters of the Ram Vilas Paswan-led LJP, currently a BJP ally) together as ‘Mahadalits’.

Having thus set the stage for wooing EBCs and Mahadalits, Bihar’s CM now needed to wean Muslims—who form 17 per cent of the state’s population—away from the RJD. Some, he’d already won over soon after taking office in 2005; he had riot-related cases reopened that the police had closed on lack of evidence (39 cases have been reopened since 2006 and are back in court). He paid special attention to Pasmanda Muslims (the most ‘backward’ among them). In 2013, he doubled the monthly pension paid to the 384 families affected by the Bhagalpur riots to Rs 5,000. Ignoring charges of appeasement, his government built boundary walls around Muslim graveyards, accorded government recognition to 2,400 madrassas, and appointed an Urdu teacher in each of Bihar’s schools. However, Muslims do not always vote as a monolithic bloc. They too are divided along caste lines.

Nitish Kumar’s calculations rested on the belief that his decision to snap ties with the BJP over Modi would make him Bihar’s sole beneficiary of Muslim goodwill. Along with EBCs and Mahadalits, they would form an unbeatable social coalition. And this, coupled with an earnest pursuit of developmental goals, would assure him victory. But electoral arithmetic that appears sound on paper need not be valid on the ground. While identity politics had begun to sway EBCs and Mahadalits, whether they would vote en bloc was far from certain. As the Lok Sabha polls approached, the CM was confounded by the BJP’s appeal to ‘Backward Classes’ that one of their own—Modi being of a ‘Most Backward Class’ background— ought to be India’s next PM. Notably, in rally after rally, Modi has suggested that those opposed to the uplift of MBCs and EBCs are keen on thwarting his leap to the PM’s chair.

Making matters worse for Nitish Kumar, his lack of a core vote base appears to have turned Muslims suspicious of his ability to defeat the BJP. Lalu Prasad, in contrast, can count on Yadavs—who account for 14 per cent of the electorate—as a bulwark against a possible Hindu consolidation in the BJP’s favour. The irony is that this latter possibility is strengthened by the collapse of Nitish Kumar’s social coalition strategy; BJP managers are confident that they can mop up a large share of the popular vote by appealing to ‘upper’ castes, non-Yadav OBCs, MBCs and even Dalits (thanks to its alliance with the LJP).

The trajectory of development politics in Bihar and its electoral dividends may be seen as a study in contrast between Nitish Kumar and the rest. The CM’s problems were compounded when he let himself get trapped by the Congress promise of ‘special status’ for his state. It may or may not have done Bihar much good, but it would have buffered him against the charge of betrayal by the BJP and helped him forge a caste-plus constituency. Unlike Narendra Modi, however, Nitish Kumar has been unable to hone this issue into one of state prestige that should transcend caste dynamics.

Despite the extensive infrastructural and social development work done by Nitish Kumar’s government, its benefits appear to have little political traction in this casteist cesspool, at least for the time being. The persistence of identity politics has made it impossible for him to bank on his performance alone to deliver votes, and so, despite his complex back- up plan to reinforce the JD-U’s hold over the state’s electorate. One powerful indicator of significant socio-economic change is the gradual stemming of outward migration over the past decade. Bihari labourers countrywide have been returning home to find their brethren healthier, better-schooled and better- paid—and living with noticeably better infrastructure and other public amenities. Economic activity is up and crime down—a far cry from the state’s days when Lalu Yadav was at the helm, marked by an acute lack of rural healthcare and a crumbling education system.

The transformation, it seems, has not been enough to see Nitish Kumar through. In contrast, CMs of other states who performed well on the development and governance fronts—such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh and Raman Singh of Chhattisgarh—have been rewarded well in state elections. Interestingly, several poll projections have shown that both these CMs could have added a large number of Lok Sabha seats (in their states) on their own to the BJP’s tally even without Modi’s campaigning there.

Bihar was once said to be a law unto itself— law of the jungle. Nitish Kumar changed that, but it is still the primordial pull of caste and not the modern promise of growth that wins Bihar. And Nitish Kumar is not winning.

BiharNarendra ModiNitish Kumar