The maiden Bihar elections blog post after what has been an otherwise uninspiring election campaign in Bihar. Two phases have gone by and the public debate has mostly centered around three individuals neither of who is on the ballot in Bihar – Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and of course Nitish Kumar. Some would say the election is about Nitish Kumar’s governance, but at the end of the day the fact remains he sat out of this election, choosing the easier and more predictable path of the Legislative Council.
The more interesting political moves in the Bihar election however center around the other two individuals and have to do with political outcomes that go far beyond Bihar. If Sushma Swaraj’s remarks on Narendra Modi’s ”magic” signalled that the beginning of the race for 2014, Sharad Yadav’s remarks on Rahul Gandhi had not so obvious political calculations.
Therein lies the central dilemma for both the BJP and Nitish Kumar’s own grassrootless partymen in this election.
They both want to win in Bihar but they dont want Nitish Kumar to win at their expense. If they have their way, they would much rather look forward to a Nitish Kumar cut down to size with a little fewer seats, a lot less swagger and far less independence.
Part of the blame for this ambivalence from his best friends has to go to his spin doctors in the Delhi based media who have blown the Nitish Kumar phenomenon out of proportion. End of the day he is still a regional leader of a regional party who can at best command the loyalty of not more than 25 Members of Parliament.
A serious reality check is in order to those who have been attempting to fashion Nitish Kumar as a VP Singh who would be acceptable enough to lead a rainbow coalition of sorts. They forget that the Indian voter has no appetite for the “tail wagging the dog” scenarios. The era of nominating Prime Ministers from a party with double digit representation in the Lok Sabha is over.
There is however one aspect in which Nitish Kumar stands out as a protege of V.P. Singh, perhaps even his true successor. It is in the degree to which Nitish Kumar has pursued the logic of Mandal politics, taking it to its logical extreme with the targeting of sub-castes and sub-sects within the Muslim vote bank in Bihar.
Nitish has entered into another innovative ‘social engineering’. Muslims are not only divided along caste lines, they are divided along sub-sectarian lines also.
The Barelvi-Deobandi divide among the Sunni Muslims, sharply polarised, is being wooed by Nitish by showing favourable overtures to the Idara-e-Sharia.
The most popular step Nitish took was reserving seats for lower backward castes in the rural and urban local body elections (Panchayati Raj Institutions) of 2006, which spent huge amounts on the social sector and infrastructure development.
As many as 27 castes of Muslims (Ajlaf and Arzal) fall in the category of lower backward (which is known as Annexure-I, since 1978, when Karpoori Thakur was the socialist, non-Congress chief minister of Bihar. And the reservation benefit was only confined to provincial government jobs).
We must wait till the 24th of November to know how much independence Nitish Kumar has earned from his best friends or to learn how much the voters of Bihar have indulged them in their ambivalence towards him.
But one thing is certain Bihar is no Gujarat where Muslims have started to vote on the logic of their pocketbooks. It perhaps is too early to think of socio-economic engineering in Bihar for Social Engineering in Bihar has not run its full course. Nitish Kumar’s lasting political legacy in Bihar will likely be the micro-mandalization of the monolithic Muslim vote bank.
Filed under: bihar elections 2010 
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