By For on the brink of fifteen years, he dominated politically volatile Bihar with a self-contradictory cocktail of stubborn ideology and pragmatic resilience, creating friends with foes and foes with friends at can.
Nitish Kumar’s uncommon talent for recognizing friends has ensured a fourth straight term for him in workplace despite the forceful slump in his electoral fortune that relegated his JD (U) to the third position within the state assembly with simply forty three seats, down from seventy one it had won in 2015.
The most atypical of politicians owing their rise to post-Mandal politics, Nitish Kumar stood out for his ability to deal with the governance deficit, not like a majority of the breed reared within the socialist stable, however was typically defendant of following politics of self-seeking.
Call it political self-seeking or sagacity, his moves, in effect, prevented the Hindutva forces from holding sway over Bihar, wherever a neighborhood of the BJP feels mortified over not having its own chief minister until date despite enjoying a close to hegemonic standing nationwide.
Known for deliberation his choices fastidiously before creating any move, Kumar, upon a better look, comes across as a gambler World Health Organization has not shied faraway from going against the tide.
An engineer by coaching World Health Organization had taken a lively half within the JP movement, Kumar rejected employment provide from the state electricity department and determined to require the political gamble, associate oddity among educated youth in Bihar for whom the lure of “sarkaari naukri” remains unrelieved.
Unlike Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan, his co- travellers throughout the movement junction rectifier by Jayaprakash Narayan, electoral success eluded Kumar for long.
He got the primary style of triumph once 3 defeats within the 1985 assembly polls once he won from Harnaut as a candidate of the Lok dekaliter although the Congress sweptwing the elections riding the air current generated by the assassination of Indira Gandhi the previous year.
Four years later he entered the Lok Sabha from Barh when fellow MP from thermoplastic Lalu Prasad shifted to Bihar, usurping because the chief minister and scripting a spectacular success story that altered the state’s political landscape.
Kumar, one in every of the foremost articulate leaders of the Janata dekaliter, had totally backed Lalu within the keenly fought internal contest for chief ministership.
The next decade-and-a-half saw Prasad’s rise together of the foremost powerful however disputed figures of his time World Health Organization dominated the state by proxy, obtaining his modest married woman woman Rabri Devi electoral as his successor, once a day book in fodder scam forced him to step down because the chief minister.
During a similar amount, Kumar burnt his bridges with Prasad, floated the Samata Party with George Fernandes, and designed his own political building brick by brick.
The Samata Party joined forces with the BJP and Kumar created a mark for himself as an impressive parliamentarian and was reckoned among the foremost competent ministers within the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cupboard.
After a rift between Sharad Yadav, the then Janata dekaliter president, and Lalu Prasad, the latter poor away and fashioned the RJD. The Samata Party integrated with Sharad Yadav’s Janata dekaliter, that was rechristened as JD(U), whereas continued its alliance with the BJP.
After the NDA lost power in 2004, a triumph in Bihar control out the promise of a degree of redemption for the BJP-led alliance.
Attempts to seize power from the RJD-Congress mix, then in power at the Centre yet, once the NDA fell wanting majority within the assembly polls of Gregorian calendar month, 2005, were stymied by Governor Buta Singh’s disputed move to dissolve the assembly, while not it having even been brought about, within the face of alleged horse commerce.
This, however, proved a blessing in disguise for Kumar World Health Organization was projected because the chief ministerial candidate within the elections that befell 9 months later and therefore the JD(U)-BJP mix got a cushty majority, transportation the questionable “Lalu era” to associate finish.
Kumar’s initial 5 years as chief minister ar recalled with admiration even by critics, marked as these were by large improvement in law and order, although the new dispensation had no dearth of individuals with criminal background among its rank and file.
Realising totally well that not like Lalu, he didn’t have the advantage of happiness to a inhabited caste cluster, Kumar created sub-quotas among OBCs and Dalits World Health Organization were referred to as “Ati Pichhda” (EBC) and “Mahadalits”, that was resented by the dominant Yadavs and Dusadhs, Paswan’s fellow castemen.
He additionally brought in measures like free bicycles and faculty uniforms for school-going women, that won him a lot of flattery and therefore the exuberant public mood saw him come to power in 2010, leading the JD(U)-BJP coalition to a landslide triumph within the assembly polls.
The period, however, additionally saw the top of “Atal-Advani era” within the BJP and Kumar, World Health Organization couldn’t fathom the potential of his then Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi, barred horns with him over the post-Godhra riots within the western state.
\Flaunting his lay ideology, Kumar had succeeded in preventing Modi, seen as a polarising figure on account of the Gujarat riots, from political campaign for the BJP Bihar within the 2009 Lok Sabha polls and therefore the assembly elections a year later, one thing that also riles Hindutva hardliners.
He ultimately snapped his party’s 17-year-old ties with the BJP in 2013 once Modi was anointed the BJP’s campaign committee chief for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
After parting ways in which with the BJP, he won a trust vote with the support of the Congress, however stepped down in 2014, owning ethical responsibility for the JD(U)’s drubbing within the Lok Sabha elections, once the party came with a dismal tally of simply 2.
In but a year, he was back because the chief minister, jostling out his rebellious protg Jitan Ram Manjhi with support from the RJD and therefore the Congress, and came to be seen nationwide as a possible rival to Modi.
The Grand Alliance that came into being with the JD (U), Congress and therefore the RJD returning along, won the 2017 assembly polls handsomely however came apart in only 2 years, once Kumar insisted that Lalu’s son and deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav, whose name had cropped up in an exceedingly concealing case associated with the time once RJD big shot was the railway minister, “come clear” on the problem.
He dead resigned because the chief minister once RJD refused to budge, solely to be back in workplace in but twenty four hours with BJP’s support.
Those who saw a “secular alternative” in Kumar felt defeated and cried betrayal of “public mandate”.
But Nitish Kumar, typically spoken because the modern-day ‘Chanakya’ of Bihar once the suave authority to Mauryan emperor Chandragupta, had unbroken a logic ready: “I won’t compromise on corruption”. PTI
