Fatal Attrition

ON JANUARY 29, 2024, a day after Bihar Chief Minister and key ally Nitish Kumar snapped ties with the Indian National Devel­opmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.)—the much-hyped opposition alliance pitched as a counterweight to the formidable ruling front at the Centre—and realigned once again with the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Nyay Yatra entered the eastern state. A ragtag bunch of children and youth surrounded his vehicle. The aim of the spin­meisters in Gandhi Jr’s camp was to project resounding youth support for the Yatra. On that day, in Delhi, Modi addressed hun­dreds of schoolchildren at his Pariksha pe Charcha event. An esti­mated 2.26 crore registrations happened on the MyGov portal, highlighting widespread enthusiasm among students. The event was held in a town-hall format at Delhi’s Bharat Mandapam.

From the Yatra in Bihar, Congress lawmaker Jairam Ramesh was prompted to post on X (formerly Twitter): “Bihar roars with passion.” He lashed out at Kumar as a “girgit” (chameleon) and a selfish politician. Barely able to explain to the public what his Yatra was all about, being held in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election, Gandhi said, “Many people asked me what is the purpose of this Yatra. So we told them that the ideology of RSS-BJP has spread hatred. One religion is fight­ing with another religion… That’s why we opened a shop of love in the market of hatred… This Yatra had a significant impact on the politics of the country. We have given a new vision, an ideology and that is Mohabbat [love].”

It was a tired speech template Gan­dhi has stuck to since the first phase of his Yatra. On the eve of his cavalcade en­tering Bihar, Nitish Kumar was sworn in as chief minister for the ninth time, with the full support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), leaving both Congress and former ally, the Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in shock. Besides, their last-ditch bid to placate Kumar and wean away Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), which has joined the new government, didn’t work.

The Bihar debacle was not the first to jinx Gandhi’s star-crossed Yatra, the first leg of which began as the Bharat Jodo Yatra in September 2022 with the intent of ending what he described as the “divisive politics of BJP”. It ended after 150 days in January 2023. In early December, despite all the hoopla surrounding the Yatra, Congress lost Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and BJP retained Madhya Pradesh with a bigger margin in the state polls.

The Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra began from Manipur’s Thoubal, hoping to cover over 6,700km across 110 districts, finally ending in Mumbai. It was ostensibly aimed at rallying public support for Congress and the I.N.D.I.A. bloc in the General Election, despite senior party leaders advising against such a move close to the polls. They wanted the party to focus on the polls, not the Yatra. It was described alternately as “an exercise in futility” and “a loss of precious time”. The decision has, in fact, forced even Congress leaders to ask if Gandhi was running the party as an NGO rather than a political outfit. Apart from Ramesh, a political lightweight, another constant at the Yatra, accompanying Rahul Gandhi, was former psephologist Yogendra Yadav, perhaps proof of how little traction it was getting on the ground.

On the day the Nyay Yatra started, a key party leader from Mum­bai, Milind Deora—his father Murli Deora was a veteran Congress­man crucial to funding and strategising for the party—finally quit Congress. This was not restricted to Mumbai. In the northeastern region too, where the Nyay Yatra started, there were desertions from the party. As many as 150 Congress and All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) workers joined BJP in Guwahati on January 28. They included former minister Bismita Gogoi, daughter of former As­sembly Speaker Jiba Kanta Gogoi; Ang­kita Dutta, daughter of former Assam Pradesh Congress Committee president Anjan Dutta; and former AASU president Dipanka Kumar Nath.

Taking potshots at Congress, Assam Minister Pijush Hazarika told reporters in Guwahati: “I have to admit Rahul Gan­dhi’s Bharat Bus Nyay Yatra has created a huge impact in Assam. Over 150 leaders from Congress and AASU are joining BJP.”

In West Bengal, the biggest state in the east, there were clear signs of in­tense friction between the I.N.D.I.A. bloc members, with Trinamool Congress leaders and state Chief Minis­ter Mamata Banerjee denying any seat-sharing arrangement with Congress. She also alleged that she was not invited to join or address the Yatra. Although Rahul Gandhi’s Yatra passed through the state for just a day, the organisers were denied a ground to address a rally or even have food at the government circuit house in Malda. “I told the Congress that you don’t have a single MLA in the Assembly. We will give you two parliamentary seats and we will make sure your candidate wins. But they wanted more seats. So I told them that I won’t give them a single seat until they left the company of the Left.” Banerjee said at a rally in Malda.

Following Banerjee’s footsteps, Punjab Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Bhagwant Mann also de­clared that his party would contest all the seats in the state and there would be no seat-sharing and strategic alignment with other parties in the alliance. These two developments ex­posed major political faultlines within the I.N.D.I.A. bloc. In Maharashtra, the vertical split in both the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) left the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), which includes Congress, in disarray. In Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav showed Congress its place by announcing seat adjustments with Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). On January 30, SP announced its candi­dates for 16 seats, thumbing its nose at Congress even as talks were ongoing. The seats SP announced included Farrukhabad, Lakhim­pur Kheri, Dhaurahara, and Lucknow—four seats Congress was keen on contesting. Soon, UP Congress in-charge Avinash Pande was forced to complain that SP was not following the alliance dhar­ma. “SP is making one-sided announcements in the alliance. The list released also included many seats on which the Congress Party had a claim. What the Samajwadi Party is doing is very dangerous and Congress itself is not getting information about it. Congress follows the coalition dharma well and wherever Congress makes an alliance, it follows its coalition dharma,” Pande rued.

Currently, another key ally in Jharkhand, the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), is in the thick of a crisis. Chief Minister Hemant Soren is embroiled in an illegal mining and coal scam probe by the Directorate of Enforcement (ED), putting his position in jeopardy. While Congress was busy rebranding Rahul Gandhi, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati, too, announced her plans to go it alone in UP, and BJP tied up with the Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S), in Karnataka and solidified its alliance with the Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar in Maharashtra.

With the I.N.D.I.A. bloc teetering on the edge before its ap­parent falling apart, Congress is left with no one but its original United Progressive Allies (UPA) allies to work with, ahead of the General Election a few months away.

The biggest wrecking ball on the I.N.D.I.A. bloc so far, though, has been Nitish Kumar and his exit. Both its timing and its political weight are likely to have an immense bearing on the credibility and consequent performance of I.N.D.I.A. in the 2024 elections. Bihar is at the core of BJP’s calculations to secure the Lok Sabha seat tally as close to 400 as possible across India. With Uttar Pradesh secured, Bi­har, along with West Bengal and Maharashtra, play a key role in this calculation. It was this that I.N.D.I.A. hoped desperately to stymie.

In West Bengal, BJP bagged 18 seats in 2019 compared to only two in 2014, and posted a vote share of almost 41 per cent, a rise of 23 per cent. The Left Front collapsed with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, winning no seat and losing almost 17 per cent vote share from 2014. BJP is in a comfortable place in the state where it, apparently, can only improve its tally in both vote share and seats. In Maharashtra, BJP won 23 seats and the Shiv Sena 18 in the 2019 polls. With Uddhav Thackeray aligning with Congress and NCP, BJP was looking at a dismal tally in 2024, both in terms of seats and votes. But with both Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar faction of NCP splitting later and joining hands with BJP, NDA is looking at a comfortable tally of around 45 seats in the Lok Sabha polls.

But Nitish Kumar’s departure has delivered a body blow to these hopes. New disclosures confirm that most I.N.D.I.A. partners were, in the first place, averse to entering any seat-sharing pact with Con­gress. JD(U) leader Sanjay Kumar Jha recalls that while Kumar was with the opposition alliance, he was advised by top partners against any pre-poll alliance with Congress. “All chief ministers [includ­ing Arvind Kejriwal and others] said [to Nitish Kumar] to form an alliance without the Congress. But when no work was done for six months, a conspiracy was being made, and no one was serious about the alliance, all these things led to this [alliance with NDA]… till the end, he [Kumar] tried his 100 percent… Congress has already given up, they are preparing for the 2029 elections. They have al­ready accepted defeat for 2024…” Jha posted on X.

As the architect of I.N.D.I.A., Nitish Kumar’s switch to NDA has dented the credibility of the anti-Modi coalition across states so close to the 2024 polls, not just in Bihar’s 40 seats. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, NDA had won 39 seats. BJP, JD(U), and the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) contested the polls together. BJP and JD(U) contested 17 seats each while LJP contested six. Ram Vilas Paswan died in 2020 and Nitish Kumar went with RJD subsequently. With Nitish Kumar back in the fold, NDA is looking to secure the 39 seats of Bihar’s 40 it had won in 2019. Some analysts maintain that NDA would sweep with or without the help of Nitish Kumar and JD(U), but that’s a risk BJP was keen to avoid, at least in 2024. In all three key states of Bihar, Maharashtra, and West Bengal, BJP and NDA are now in a good place while in the first two, they are in the saddle.

THE RED FLAGS went up weeks before. On December 29, a whole month before he dumped the opposition alli­ance and was sworn in with BJP support as chief minister in what the opposition called the saga of the ‘Paltiputra’ (chang­ing son), Nitish Kumar took over as JD(U) national president after forcing Rajeev Ranjan alias Lalan Singh out of his job. Singh was increasingly seen as growing close to RJD. On the face of it, he quit so he could focus on his Munger seat in the 2024 election. Kumar’s party leaders hailed him as the ‘convenor’ and the man behind the I.N.D.I.A. bloc idea. But there was speculation for days that Singh was attempting to break the party. This, in the thick of Kumar’s increasing jitteriness over the RJD leadership’s reported plans to take over the chief ministerial seat and checkmate him, precipitated matters.

Although Kumar was the architect of the Alliance, including even AAP, it was Congress that proposed the name I.N.D.I.A. after consulting Mamata Banerjee. Kumar said at that meeting that the name would have little or no traction on the ground. Ironically, there was consensus on Nitish Kumar as the convenor before the Mumbai meeting of the alliance, held on September 1, 2023. As many as 63 representatives from 28 political parties attended that meeting. This was the third meeting of the opposition bloc, hosted by the MVA. At the last virtual meeting of the alliance, one that Mamata Banerjee chose to skip, Sonia Gandhi proposed that Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress chief, be made president and Nitish Kumar convenor. Rahul Gandhi interjected, however, to maintain that the official announcement could be made after the West Bengal chief minister’s endorsement. Kumar left the meet­ing soon after. Later, CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, conveyed to Kumar’s close advisors that it was Mamata Banerjee who had stymied the proposal.

It was time for the Bihar chief minister to unleash the sequence of Plan B events to protect his own interests. Especially, in the wake of some crucial developments which signalled clearly that NDA and Narendra Modi have the undeniable upper hand in 2024. This included the grand spectacle of the Ram Mandir consecration on January 22, the public announcements by both Mamata Banerjee and Bhagwant Mann that they would go it alone in Bengal and Pun­jab, respectively. The conferring of the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour, posthumously on socialist stalwart and former Bihar Chief Minister Karpoori Thakur also influenced his decision.

For BJP, the craving to deal a stunning blow to the grand op­position alliance when it was already in a bad spot was a major consideration and it used the opportunities to the hilt. The ruling party has been systematically hammering away at the cracks and fissures even before the formation of I.N.D.I.A., beginning with the split in the Shiv Sena and then Sharad Pawar’s NCP. The well-timed psychological blow to the credibility of the bloc so close to polls is seen as worth its weight—well beyond even the mathematical and political calculations—not just in Bihar but also nationally for BJP and NDA. The deployment of Kumar as a political weapon against the opposition bloc is expected to bring crucial gains to NDA.

With Nitish Kumar back in the NDA fold, the I.N.D.I.A. bloc is now practically reduced to a Muslim-Yadav combination, a big handicap for RJD and Tejashwi Yadav, who was positioning him­self as a potential chief minister by securing a base well beyond RJD’s traditional vote bank. NDA is now formidable with a vast combination of non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBCs), upper castes, MBCs, Paswans, Musahars, and other Dalit communities backing it. While Nitish Kumar created and nurtured Mahadalits as a community excluding Paswans originally, he later included all the Scheduled Castes (SC) in the category. These gains would accrue collectively to NDA in the 2024 polls, ensuring maximum seats would be mopped up by it in Bihar. Meanwhile, it hemmed in Nitish Kumar’s powers with Samrat Chaudhury and Vijay Sinha, two of his most trenchant critics, a move aimed at making the de­velopments more palatable to its constituency. Sinha was cited as one of the reasons Nitish Kumar quit NDA and joined hands with RJD two years ago. This time, though, Kumar has no manoeuvring room and is constrained by his flip-flops, closing his options for good before the 2025 Assembly polls. The political epitaph of Bihar’s longest-serving chief minister who never won a majority of his own may well have been written finally.

For close to seven decades, an alliance of Yadavs, Kurmis, and Koeris had thrived in Bihar’s politics. The Triveni Sangh, as it was named when floated in 1933, became the driving force for rebel­lion against the state’s upper-caste domination. This pressure group, led by Sardar Jagdeo Singh Yadav, Chaudhari Yadunana­dan Prasad Mehta, and Shivpujan Singh, had social engineering as its aim. All that changed in 2005 when, determined to end the Yadav dominance under Lalu Prasad, the alliance that Nitish Kumar forged with BJP assumed power in Patna. The arrogance of Lalu Prasad and his dominant community led to the breakup.

Although Kumar is a ghost of his earlier self now, the political constituency he has carved by clubbing together several Dalit castes and his move to cement an MBC constituency could only fortify BJP’s efforts to repeat the last election tally in Bihar and the Hindi belt, and in key states in the rest of the country. BJP is now secure for 2024, expecting nothing short of a landslide.

2024: CountdownGeneral election 2024Mamata BanerjeeNarendra ModiNitish KumarRahul Gandhi