Nitish Kumar has switched sides again, for the second time in two years, his fifth crossover in a little over a decade, preceding his ninth time as chief minister. What he said against the BJP, after he left it again to join hands once more with Lalu Yadav in 2022, his statements against Yadav-led RJD after he broke, in 2017, the JD(U)-RJD Mahagathbandhan that swept to power in Bihar in 2015, his public disagreement with the NDA’s decision to anoint then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi its prime ministerial candidate, which led to his exit in 2013 from a 17-year-old alliance with the BJP — these are not the point. As eye-catching a figure as Nitish is, it may be more useful in this moment to look beyond him. For all his dramatic somersaults, Nitish is not the hero of this story whose central theme, and question, is this: In the face of a dominant Hindutva, and a Mandir politics that is aggressively Mandalising itself, what does the politics of social justice mean, what is its USP? What happens, going ahead, to the erstwhile flag-bearers of Mandal? Nitish’s political promiscuity in Bihar underlines the vulnerability of Mandal forces in Bihar and elsewhere, if they are not able to add layers to their core pitch, if they continue to rely only on bare-knuckled caste math, if they don’t join it to vocabularies of governance.
Because Nitish’s nth switch in Bihar points, most of all, to an RJD that, despite the seminal political achievements of Lalu Yadav, is looking unprepared for the future. It was the charismatic Yadav, who, almost singlehandedly, upended the caste-driven politics in a state of raging inequalities in the 1990s, and ensured that the more numerous backward castes would no more be denied their due share of political representation and power. Yadav’s political mobilisations rewrote the power game in his state. And yet, as his rivals and opponents adopted his lexicon and appropriated it, and as Nitish joined backward caste politics with an agenda of governance, Yadav himself became more and more mired in corruption cases while his family took over his party. His son Tejashwi has promised a make-over — in the last assembly election, he spoke of economic justice alongside social justice, and of the RJD becoming an A-to-Z, not just an M-Y, party — but it is a work in progress, much remains to be done. For now, Nitish, with a shrinking party of his own, is able to remain chief minister by re-joining a BJP that is casting its net wide in Bihar, and both can hold aloft a promise of “good governance” that the RJD is not seen to credibly make, shored up by a social coalition which includes backward castes and is broader than the RJD’s.
The loneliness of the RJD in Bihar and the BJP’s steady and sure progress towards emerging as the strong second pole in the state bears a larger message ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. The bid by the INDIA platform — which has also taken a body blow with Nitish’s flip-flop — to resurrect “social justice” as a plank needs to take into account the BJP’s inroads into that domain as well. It is no longer Mandal vs Mandir. It is also Mandal vs Mandal, and Mandir plus Mandal. And, both real and projected, good governance.
