Why Bihar may give Modi and Nitish Kumar a nightmare

There is widespread surprise at the Grand Alliance denying a chance for youth leader and former JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar to contest from Begusarai.

While conventional explanation is that Lalu Prasad Yadav does not want any youth leader to emerge to challenge his son Tejashwi Yadav, RJD sources say that Tanvir Hasan of RJD had come second in 2014 and has worked hard in the constituency during the last five years. Hence it would have been unfair to deny him the chance of contesting again.

While the seat, it seems, is still up for grabs and hectic negotiations continue, observers concede that this is the first time that RJD has made so many concessions to various caste groups.

Indeed the Grand Alliance has also left a seat, Arrah, for the CPI (ML). With the announcement on March 22 RJD is all set to contest 19 seats, leaving 9 for the Congress, five for Rashtriya Lok Samata Party of Upendra Kushwaha, three each to Hindustani awam Morcha and Vikassheel Insaf Party. The remaining seat has been left for Sharad Yadav.

CPI sources in Bihar say it would have been happy with just the Begusarai seat and are disappointed at being ignored. If the CPI fields more candidates and cuts into anti-BJP votes, the alliance, they claim, might also lose a few seats.

But in the absence of a Modi wave as in 2014 and with definite disenchantment with Nitish Kumar, the Grand Alliance still appears to have an edge. There is more clarity and cohesion in the opposition than in the NDA, observers point out.

Nitish Kumar, who had pitted JD(U) against the BJP in 2014, had managed to bag only two of the 40 seats and JD(U) had polled just 16 per cent of the votes. While Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and Naveen Patnaik in Odisha had stopped the Modi juggernaut then, Nitish Kumar had come a cropper.

With law and order in the state worsening, industrialisation having failed to take off and Prohibition giving rise to a black market, corruption and having put behind the bars over a lakh of men belonging to poorer sections of the people, there is brewing resentment against the chief minister. Names of some NDA leaders still involved in the Liquor trade have not gone unnoticed.

People also remember that Nitish Kumar had hailed Demonetisation, which rendered lakhs of Biharis unemployed and droves of them were forced to return to the state. The GST also hurt the small businesses in the state. And of course the state has neither got the status of a special category state nor the ₹1.25 lakh Crore promised by Narendra Modi in 2015.

When Nitish Kumar finally engineered a homecoming to NDA in 2017, NDA leaders boasted of a double-engine train (Modi and Nitish) for the state. But while the state has little to show after two years of double-engine running, it has been rocked instead by one scandal after another, the Fund Transfer scam from the treasury ( Srijan) and the sex scandal in a Muzaffarpur Shelter Home and close nexus of the accused with NDA leaders threaten to become poll issues. The latter led to the resignation and arrest of Nitish’s minister Manju Verma and her husband.

Political analysts are unanimous that this time Yadavs are strongly behind Lalu Prasad. if Lalu Yadav can be convicted for fodder scam, why are people involved in Srijan Scam and Shelter Home Scandal still not behind bars, they wonder aloud.

Thus, despite the disappointment and scepticism, it is the NDA which is on the back foot in Bihar.