Terms of Trade | Onwards to the 2025 Bihar contest
The Opposition’s SIR obsession is likely irrelevant to the coming assembly elections, and perhaps even counter-productive to its own prospects.
The Bihar assembly elections will perhaps be announced in a month or so. In 2020, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the schedule on September 25. On Monday, September 1, the opposition alliance of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Congress and other smaller parties will hold a rally in Patna to protest against ECI’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in the state. The rally will mark the culmination of a campaign across 20 districts in the state by the opposition, including the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi. The fact that the Opposition has invested so much behind the SIR issue suggests that it will be central to its campaign against the now two-decade-old Nitish Kumar regime – he has changed coalitions but retained chief minister-ship barring a brief self-imposed interlude post-2014 – in the state. This edition of the column will make an argument that the Opposition’s SIR obsession is likely irrelevant to the coming assembly elections, and perhaps even counter-productive to its own prospects.
Unless things change between now and the elections, Nitish Kumar will be the chief ministerial candidate of the incumbent National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Bihar. At 74, Nitish Kumar is not really old for a politician, but anybody who has followed his public appearances will agree that he has been keeping indifferent health for some time now. This makes it possible that even in the event of an NDA victory, he will either not be appointed as the chief minister after the results or will be replaced by someone else, not necessarily from the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U), sooner rather than later.
Nitish Kumar’s departure from Bihar’s political landscape is more than a watershed event. Even if one were to set aside the debate over his achievements in his two decades as the chief minister, his political acumen in building seemingly impossible social coalitions must be acknowledged. Nitish’s alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has often been referred to as the “coalition of extremes”, which brought otherwise mutually opposed social and religious groups, such as upper castes and lower castes, and even Hindus and Muslims together. The peak of his political jugglery was seen in the 2010 assembly elections, where the BJP and the JD(U) won 91 and 115 assembly constituencies (ACs) each in an assembly of 243. The NDA actually had more Muslim MLAs (seven from JD(U) and one from BJP) in the assembly than the RJD’s six in 2010.
Will the BJP or post-Nitish leadership of the JD(U) be able to keep this social coalition intact? Will the JD(U) even survive in Nitish’s absence? Will it finally embrace the plan of all regional parties becoming family-based parties with Nitish’s (as of now politically inactive) son taking it over?
Muslims have mostly already deserted the JD(U) after Nitish bought his peace with a Narendra Modi-led BJP. To be sure, the detente allowed Nitish to keep power. It remains to be seen whether Bihar reverts to the “court each caste” competition, which translated into individual caste groups organising show-of-strength rallies every week or month in the state capital in the 1990s. That Bihar in recent years has seen a proliferation of small caste parties such as Vikassheel Insan Party (VIP) led by a Nishad, Hindustan Awami Morcha (HAM) by Jitan Ram Manjhi (from the scheduled caste group of Mushar) and Rashtriya Lok Morcha (RLM) by Upendra Kushwaha, a Kushwaha leader, suggests that such competition has already begun. Almost all of these parties are anything but ideologically committed when it comes to the choice of a senior alliance partner.
Can the RJD, in alliance with the Congress, Left parties (of whom the CPI ML Liberation is the strongest in the state) and the VIP, wean away a section of Nitish’s backwards coalition to recapture power after 25 years? The 2025 elections could well be Lalu Prasad Yadav’s last assembly contest – he is already 77 years old and has serious ailments – in Bihar, even though it is his son who is in the saddle now. The only way the RJD-led alliance can pull it off is by winning back part of the subaltern vote it lost to Nitish when he broke ranks with Lalu.
The contradiction remains unchanged, as it was three decades ago when Nitish and Lalu parted ways. Non-Yadav OBCs want more than a rhetorical stake in the RJD’s social justice project. To give them a bigger share of the pie will require diluting the dominance of Yadavs, who are the vanguard of RJD’s political project. It was this prioritising of the vanguardist claim that perhaps led to the RJD-led alliance doing badly in the 2024 Lok Sabha election in Bihar. The Samajwadi Party (SP) led alliance in Uttar Pradesh, as we had shown in these pages, did much better because of its decision to field candidates with a more diverse OBC background than just Yadavs. If the RJD can pull off a grand bargain within its ranks which convinces Yadavs to share a larger part of the political spoils with other castes, it could very well be a case of a political party reinventing itself after a long period of political exile because of its own sectarianism.
Is the entire SIR controversy a manoeuvre to prevent the 2025 contest from becoming one about Nitish’s future or lack of it in Bihar? The BJP has tried winning Bihar on its own and failed. Is the RJD deliberately playing along to lay claim to Nitish’s legacy (against it being appropriated by the BJP) once he has hung his boots. Will Bihar see a resurrection of sorts for the two national parties once the two competing patriarchs --Lalu for the RJD and Nitish for the JD(U) -- fade away? Will Bihar open up space for a political startup such as Prashant Kishore’s Jan Suraj Party or is he a prop-up to strategically eat into RJD’s alliance votes, which is what he did in the last by-poll cycle in the state? Will the Left, especially CPI ML Liberation be able to maintain its upward march it has shown in the 2020 assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha elections? Has migration and atrophying of agrarian violence began a process of making caste the secondary contradiction in Bihar’s politics, also making welfare or even an aspirational rhetoric the more important one?
Bihar’s political pot has been too turbulent in the past decade-and-a-half to read the tea leaves right as far as 2025 is concerned. In 2020, Chirag Paswan (perhaps nudged by the BJP) actively sabotaged the JD(U)’s chances, making it a distant number three and the RJD the single largest party, even though the NDA retained power. 2015 was the coming together of the social justice patriarchs Nitish and Lalu, leading to a landslide victory. 2010 was the pinnacle of the electoral efficacy of Nitish’s coalition of extremes. None of these are perhaps likely in 2025. However, what is even more unlikely is the 2025 Bihar election turning into some sort of a referendum on SIR. The ‘rent-a-issue’ commentariat will, of course, disagree with this.
(Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa.)
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