Partners in Adversity

Faced with the prospect of political doom, Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad seek refuge in each other’s arms

Just how impossible it is to take caste out of the Indian political DNA has been never more apparent than in the coming together of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav. It was only till about a year ago, until he made the politically disastrous decision of separating from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that Nitish stood for everything that Lalu had not been. He looked into the future where development was the priority whereas Lalu as Chief Minister was settling past scores and reworking the social order to get OBCs a stake in power. Nitish stood for law and order, and Lalu’s 15 years of rule had turned Bihar into a state where people couldn’t step out at night. There was no taint of corruption against Nitish, while prison was a familiar place for Lalu due to his alleged involvement in the fodder scam. Nitish kept his family away from politics, while Lalu’s family and extended family members all jumped in with him in ruling and destroying the state. All of these stark disparities were why the people of Bihar kept voting Nitish back to power over the past decade. Having seen what the state had been under Lalu, they had found in him the antithesis of that was good.

And yet there was Lalu and Nitish this week, at the former’s iftaar party—skull caps adorning both their heads, arms entwined with each other’s in a half hug, pleasant grins celebrating the new grand alliance for the bypolls to counter a repeat of the BJP general election sweep. It was as if two decades of bitter opposition had somehow been reduced to an insignificant misunderstanding.

Over two decades ago, when they had indeed been a team, there had been no doubt as to who the senior partner was. Lalu was the man at the head of the table, the precocious politician who became an MP at the age of 29 and then, in a state where the caste matrix was almost written in stone, overturned it until OBCs gained dominance. Nitish was a leader of Kurmis, a important OBC sub-caste, but Lalu was a leader of Yadavs, the most powerful. He became Chief Minister, but after experiencing a few years of Lalu rule, Nitish had enough and broke away to form his own Samata Party along with other socialists like George Fernandes. For years they couldn’t upstage Lalu in Bihar even as the state continued to descend into chaos. An alliance with the BJP led Nitish into the NDA fold and gave him sanctuary in Delhi, but it was always Bihar that he coveted. And then came the moment when the people of Bihar told Lalu that they had had enough. All his social engineering meant little when there was no promise of life or security. Nitish won power and suddenly Bihar was a place that was livable again.

It is not surprising that Nitish and Lalu should ally. There is nothing as important to a politician as power, or the loss of it. Ideologically, the two have more affinities than differences, even though their personalities, temperament and character might be poles apart. Nitish has been uncomfortable with the BJP’s ideology but as long as it served his purpose of coming to power and retaining, it he was okay adjusting. The reason he broke the alliance was probably a false belief that the state’s citizens would appreciate what he had done for Bihar and, like Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, give him a majority on his own. And he probably deserved it. But after a decade of his chief ministership, the gratitude was spent and the Bihar’s dark days are a distant memory. Some of that remembrance is bound to come back when its voters see him holding hands with Lalu, but will they vote for him?

BiharLalu Prasad YadavNitish Kumar