Is Bihar politics up for another turn?

In line with intriguing twists and turns in NDA Bihar, Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP on Friday slammed Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s key plank of “Saat Nischay” programme as the den of corruption and expressed confidence that the next government of Bihar will implement LJP’s ‘Bihar First, Bihari First Vision Document’.

The categorical assertion by the LJP that it does not approve of the “Saat Nischay" (Seven Decisions) plank of Kumar and the claim that Bihar has hopes from Chirag Paswan's vision, comes a day after the later had a meeting with BJP chief JP Nadda and Home Minister Amit Shah after which the BJP said that there is no difference between the two parties and LJP flagged its “strained” relationship with JDU.

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With Ram Vilas Paswan in hospital, his son Chirag is taking all decisions related to Bihar polls and has been repeatedly asserting that his party would contest on 143 of 243 seats. A final call on this will be taken in a meeting of the party tomorrow.

The sudden display of strain in last few months is not in sync with the bonhomie shown by Paswan to Nitish Kumar at the time of 2019 Lok Sabha polls that had created a buzz of both regional leaders cosying up to create a pressure group within the Bihar NDA to checkmate the BJP in seat sharing and in other matters as well when at some state BJP leaders had gone aggressive on hard-line Hindutva.

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This sudden sullenness of LJP towards JDU also forced Nitish Kumar to woo back former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi into NDA from the Opposition alliance, who later trained guns on LJP for targeting Kumar

The fight between the two allies has given the BJP an opportunity to play a truce-maker but political watchers see a larger pattern behind the whole row. BJP, despite being the bigger party of the alliance had allowed Nitish Kumar to become Chief Minister.

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BJP is fed up of playing the second fiddle to Kumar for the last 15 years since they formed government in October 2005. There is a growing demand within the BJP to have its own Chief Minister in the state, which has kept rising from time to time. For now, the BJP realising that time is not ripe for it to go to polls without JDU in Bihar has declared that Kumar will be the face of the alliance.

But this election BJP has not banked solely on Nitish's persona and is centring the election campaign around the theme of development and highlighting the persona of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Earlier there was an attempt to sew an umbrella alliance of JDU, RJD and Congress in a replay of 2015 assembly polls but that flopped as Tejashwi Yadav of RJD was opposed to repeating arrangement of Nitish Kumar leading such an alliance.

Many, however, believe that politics in Bihar this time is more about post-poll than pre-poll and could see many turn arounds. Former Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha who after walking out of NDA was cosying up with the RJD-led Opposition, has to finally form a new alliance with BSP after being snubbed by both the Opposition and NDA alliances. He has now been projecting both Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad as two sides of the same coin but has warmed up to LJP. He may make another somersault after the polls. In the midst of such conflicting interests, Bihar polls promise to be one of the most dramatic events as the campaign picks up.