Nitish wave

The Bihar results point to a social, political and economic paradigm shift in the State in the past five years.

in Patna

AN oft-repeated statement by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar during the early stages of the Bihar Assembly elections went like this: My friends Lalu ji and Paswan ji are still clinging to the old political and electoral syllabus, which is based entirely on caste permutations and combinations. This election will make them understand that these paradigms have changed and that development has become the key factor. Indeed, they will be brought to this realisation with a thud. But it was not just Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad and Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) leader Ram Vilas Paswan, about whom Nitish made this reference, who held on to old beliefs. Significantly, many in his own Janata Dal (United) and in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), partner in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition, were sceptical about the scope and depth of the shift. According to close associates of Nitish Kumar, even the Chief Minister did not have a clear assessment of the import of this change. But the election results, which came out on November 24, asserted emphatically the radical change in Bihar's political syllabus.

The JD(U)-BJP combine literally swept the elections, winning as many as 206 of the 243 seats. Of this, the JD(U) accounted for 115 seats and the BJP 91. The coalition's electoral juggernaut ground to dust all its adversaries, including the principal opposition RJD-LJP combine and the Congress. The Left combination comprising the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), too, suffered an ignominious defeat. When the RJD-LJP alliance won 25 seats (22 RJD, 3 LJP), the Congress won in four constituencies; the CPI won just a seat. Independents and others accounted for six seats.

The Chief Minister made no secret of the fact that the colossal victory had taken him too by surprise though he had consistently maintained that there was a social, political and economic paradigm shift in the State in the last five years under him. Addressing the media, Nitish Kumar said that what he had got was not a mere mandate to come back to power but also a huge responsibility and the additional burden of tremendous expectations of the people. The victory is theirs, and what I have got from now on is a tough job, he said.

Magnitude of the victory

Three simple statistics explain the magnitude of this victory. One, it is the biggest electoral victory in the history of Bihar in terms of seats; the vote percentage of the winning combine is approximately 42 per cent, a huge jump from the 36 per cent it had five years ago. Two, the average victory margin of JD(U)-BJP candidates is as high as 16,500 votes. Three, both the JD(U) and the BJP registered remarkable percentage wins vis-a-vis the number of seats they contested. The JD(U) won 82 per cent of the seats it contested and the BJP, a phenomenal 90 per cent.

Significantly, the increase in the vote share, cutting across caste, religious and gender lines, was spread across almost all regions. The regions where the ruling alliance's vote share surged include the Muslim-dominated Seemanchal, the areas bordering Nepal, and other districts such as Purnea, Katihar, East Champaran, West Champaran, Araria, Darbhanga, Siwan and Bhagalpur with a high concentration of Muslims. The people of the flood-ravaged Kosi region reposed the same confidence they had placed in the JD(U)-BJP combine in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. The Saran region, where once the Muslim-Yadav combination held sway, voted for the combine this time. According to several Muslim leaders of Sonepur and Darbhanga, they voted for the BJP to show their support to Nitish babu.

The reasons for this overwhelming support even from non-traditional voters were not far to seek. They are directly linked to the changes that the Nitish Kumar government brought in four key areas of administration: the restoration of a functional law and order machinery after a gap of nearly 10 years; the building of infrastructure facilities, particularly roads; the vast improvement in the public health sector; and the improvement in the primary and secondary education sector. Proactive legislation to empower the Extremely Backward Caste (EBC) communities, who are placed socially between Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Dalits, added to their impact. There were also special schemes to empower Maha Dalit communities, considered to be the Dalitest' of Dalits.

However, what helped the most to boost the support for Nitish Kumar and his political combination were measures such as providing 50 per cent reservation for women in the local bodies and financial grant for girl students scoring more than 60 per cent marks. As senior JD(U) leader Shivanand Tiwari pointed out to Frontline during the campaign, these measures virtually led to the creation of a new caste and vote bank favouring the JD(U).

Constructive social engineering

According to Professor Nil Rattan of the Patna-based A.N. Sinha Institute of Political Studies, this victory of the JD(U)-BJP coalition and the massive defeat of the opposition hold big lessons for Bihar and the nation. The primary lesson it holds for Bihar is that the State's troublesome and volatile history of casteism and communalism can be circumvented with creative political and administrative manoeuvrings that combine a vision of development and some constructive social engineering.

As many observers point out, the gains made by Nitish Kumar were not merely the product of a sincere pursuit of a development agenda but also that of a carefully crafted empowerment of EBC communities, Maha Dalits and women. This combination of development and social engineering played a major part in this victory. Clearly, the caste empowerment history of Bihar's past two decades was given a new thrust with these manoeuvres, and this was further strengthened by the overarching measures for overall development, Nil Rattan pointed out. He said that the message for the RJD-LJP combine was that it could no longer resort to the sheer propagation of caste politics that it had been doing so far but needed to think of a caste-plus paradigm, which involved development and progress.

It may be tempting to write off Lalu Prasad and Paswan and carve their political obituaries, but a combination that has got about 25 per cent of the popular vote even in its worst defeat, and has deep support bases in the powerful Yadav OBC community [to which Lalu Prasad belongs] and the Dussadh Dalit community [of Paswan's], cannot be brushed aside. However, much will depend on how these two parties, wedded to caste politics, evolve their caste-plus politics and bring overall development to their agenda, he pointed out.

Shocker to the Congress

The biggest shocker of this election, however, was to the nation's biggest and oldest party, the Congress. Barely a year and a half after its return to power at the Centre through the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, with a vastly improved performance in Uttar Pradesh in the Hindi heartland, the party was hoping to improve its position in neighbouring Bihar this time. The idea of contesting alone, as it did during the Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, was strongly advanced by Rahul Gandhi, general secretary of the party and son of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Naturally, this was accepted without questions.

The party did pump in considerable financial resources into the campaign. But at the end of the day, all it received was its worst-ever drubbing in Bihar. For a party that was reeling under a spate of corruption charges spread across the country, the result was indeed badly timed. At the level of individual leadership, too, Rahul Gandhi's capabilities have been brought into question though not many in the party will discuss this openly. The tattered state of affairs in the party was succinctly described by Sonia Gandhi: the Congress needs to start from scratch in Bihar.

BJP's gain

The most significant victor of this election is the BJP. According to early assessments, the saffron party achieved the 90 per cent success rate essentially on account of some nuanced voting by upper-caste communities such as the Brahmins and the Bhumihars. These communities were opposed to the proposed land reform initiatives that Nitish Kumar had sought to advance. The Chief Minister retracted the proposal, ostensibly as a tactical move, because of opposition from these communities. Still, they were not sure how Nitish Kumar would act on returning to power and did some tactical voting favouring BJP candidates and against select JD(U) candidates. The objective was to make Nitish Kumar more dependent on the BJP. However, the overwhelming support Nitish Kumar and JD(U) candidates got from Muslim voters neutralised the impact of this tactical voting and brought the JD(U) tally to 115, just seven seats short of a single-party majority in the Assembly.

In this context, the BJP leadership has realised that leveraging its 90 per cent strike rate in Bihar needs to be more broad-based. A prominent stream of opinion in the party is that the Bihar gains should be used to strengthen the NDA at the national level. An indication of this was available when Arun Jaitley, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, said the results proved that the only alternative to a Congress-led coalition was the NDA. Our Bihar coalition government ran smoothly for five years. We have run other coalition governments too. The NDA's strength should increase. These elections can be the launching pad, he said.

The idea, according to a Bihar-based leader, is to use the Bihar success as the launching pad to woo back former friends such as the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD). Currently, these parties are technically with the CPI(M)-led Third Front.

The BJP is convinced, the leader pointed out, that it can break this association especially in the context of the forthcoming elections in West Bengal and Kerala where the Left is expected to suffer setbacks. However, this would require the saffron party to adjust to the terms and conditions spelt out by its existing and potential allies, and once again push its pet ideological issues such as the construction of a Ram mandir in Ayodhya and an aggressive line on Kashmir to the background. It would also mean that aggressive proponents of Hindutva, such as Narendra Modi, are kept at bay, as was done during the Bihar campaign. By all indications, the saffron party is gearing up to accept this reality and push forward with this line in order to regain its place of importance in national politics.

Left and Third Front

As for the Left and the Third Front, the results came as a big disappointment. They were literally crushed despite three mainstream Left parties joining hands. Certain observers of the Left as well as of other non-Congress, non-BJP parties such as the Samajwadi Party (S.P.) feel that Nitish Kumar may do a Naveen Patnaik before the next Lok Sabha elections, possibly as a potential prime ministerial candidate. But there are too many ifs and buts about such a possibility coming true. In any case, Nitish Kumar has actively discouraged such a suggestion in his interactions with the media after the election results.

In a nutshell, the Bihar election results have indeed proclaimed a paradigm shift in Bihar and do point towards some regrouping at the national level, which may ultimately strengthen the opposition to the ruling Congress and the United Progressive Alliance. However, what exactly the final ideological contours of such regrouping would be is, at present, in the realm of conjecture.