Decoding Bihar CM Nitish Kumar’s art of managing contradictions

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has mastered the art of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. While he has repeatedly been backing the move to demonetise ₹500 and ₹1,000 currency notes, the party he leads, the Janata Dal (United), is among the 13 parties which have taken a very strong stand against it in Parliament. If the former party president Sharad Yadav has been consistently saying from November 8 that the sudden announcement would hit the farmers and common people in this season of marriages, harvesting and sowing, Nitish welcomed the crackdown against black-money owners. He even called for strong action against those having ‘benami’ property. However, he cautioned the Centre that the common people should not face hardship.

But when Nitish called on ailing RJD leader Lalu Prasad after his morning walk on November 21, it was felt in political circles in Patna that there was something more than met the eyes. Yet the same afternoon he once again made it clear that he backed demonetisation. On the same day came the news that the Janata Dal (United) would contest the 2017 UP Assembly election in alliance with Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal and Bahujan Samaj Swabhiman Sangharsh Samiti (BS-4), and not Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal. The alliance, it was claimed, has been formed to keep the Bhartiya Janata Party away from power.

This is not the first instance of Nitish’s doublespeak. This strategy has paid rich political dividends to him in the past. When in alliance with the BJP he would deliberately allow contradictory voices to grow louder. It was generally felt that Nitish then used the services of the party’s spokesman Shivanand Tiwari to target the BJP. Nitish wants to keep the alliance partners RJD and Congress on tenterhooks, as well as keep the BJP confused.

But 17 years of association with him has helped the saffron party understand him better. Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September last roped in Nitish Kumar in 149-member panel constituted to commemorate the birth centenary celebration of BJP ideologue and founder of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, Deendayal Upadhyay. The other two prominent non-BJP leaders include former PM HD Deve Gowda of Janata Dal (Secular) and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sharad Pawar. None from the Congress and RJD figure in it. True, it would be a government-sponsored celebration, yet it was also a ploy of the BJP to distance Nitish from his partners in Bihar.

To understand his strategy further, one needs to go back to June 12, 2010 when he suddenly cancelled the dinner for all the BJP top brass, who were in Patna to attend the National Executive of the party. He was upset over the publication of a Gujarat government advertisement in newspapers of Bihar. Incidentally, two of the top BJP leaders, Lal Krishna Advani and the then Gujarat CM, Narendra Modi, who was then in the eye of a storm, were putting up at the State Guest House and not the hotel where the National Executive was taking place. This was followed by slanging match between some BJP loose cannons and JD(U) leaders. A week later, on June 19 Nitish returned ₹5 crore donated by the Gujarat government after the Kosi deluge of August 2008. But Nitish, who revels in the politics of brinkmanship, did not allow the alliance to collapse. Four months later he contested the Assembly election with the same BJP and swept it. The NDA won 206 out of 243 seats, with JD(U) the major gainer. Thus in spite of being with the BJP, which in all practical purposes projected Modi as its leader in June itself, JD(U) managed to secure a sizeable percentage of Muslim votes.

Today Nitish knows that he is surviving on the solid support of his bade bhai Lalu. Yet he also knows that a sizeable section of those who voted for him in 2015 Assembly election threw their lot behind the NDA in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll. As this class of people are till now supporting demonetisation, why not keep them––as well as some old friends in the BJP––in good humour ?

The JD(U) President knows that if discontent grows among this class of people he would soon say that the party was very clear in its stand, that is, the fault lies not in scrapping of currencies as such but in its implementation. But if things went on well Nitish would be quick to say that he backed it even when other leaders of his party were against it. Anyway Nitish has succeeded in one thing: one way or the other he has managed to get more media attention than the otherwise garrulous Lalu Prasad.

Soroor Ahmed is a senior journalist based in Patna