'Aya Kumar, Gaya Kumar, Nitish Kumar'

With a proven ability to tilt scales towards the side he decides to align, Nitish continues to be the third pole in Bihar politics.

If politics was synonymous with gymnastics, there would hardly be any all-round performer who could beat Nitish Kumar in hopping, skipping, jumping, and somersaulting across the ideological fence with such an elan and aplomb without further ado. 

In a public life spanning more than three decades, Nitish has emerged as the finest exponent of political gymnastics, as events currently unfolding in Bihar show.

Late last month, the national council of Nitish's party, Janata Dal (United), passed a resolution accusing the BJP of playing with ‘SANATAN to undermine the contributions of Baba Saheb Ambedkar.’ At the time, party general secretary KC Tyagi hailed Nitish as the "convenor and the prime minister of the idea of the I.N.D.I.A alliance".

A month later, the same Mr. Tyagi is singing dirge to the premature demise of the very idea of opposition unity mooted by Nitish in September last year.

That’s quintessential Nitish Kumar. Irrespective of whether he stays with the I.N.D.I.A bloc or rejoins the NDA now, Nitish, as always, is keeping the political pundits guessing. Such is the mistrust around his politics that the BJP, the ally in waiting, has imposed gag orders on its leaders till Nitish drives down to the Raj Bhawan to resign. Parties and individuals who have worked with him closely at various points are wary of his next move.

"Will he remain with us till the time elections are called?” was the curt response of an RJD leader when Nitish’s name was being floated as the convenor of the I.N.D.I.A bloc. 

Nitish entered politics at the peak of the JP movement during the Emergency. His arrival on the national stage coincided with Lalu Yadav’s ascension in Bihar politics in 1989.

"The two were close but Nitish carefully cultivated a qualitatively different image from Lalu. The latter embraced rustic mannerism in his political communication while Nitish projected himself as an intellectual no-nonsense administrator," says a senior journalist who has covered the two leaders in Patna.

After the fall of the VP Singh government in 1990, and with Lalu appropriating the social justice space in the state, Kumar along with George Fernandez branched out to form the Samata Party and contested the 1995 polls in alliance with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) but lost.

He then turned toward the BJP. After a couple of false starts, this social experiment clicked on the ground. The saffron party brought in the upper castes on board which dovetailed with Nitish’s following among non-Yadav OBCs.

By the time the social combination ripened on the ground to bear political dividends, Nitish had fallen foul of Fernandez who was by then pushing for the nomination of fellow socialist Digvijay Singh as the CM candidate of the NDA alliance. Backed by L K Advani and Arun Jaitley, Nitish became the CM of Bihar in 2005 ending 15 years of Lalu-Rabri Raj.

Saddled on the seat of power, Nitish moved quickly to consolidate his position and carve out a niche vote-base for himself by subdividing OBC reservations between haves and have-nots. He reserved seats for women and Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) in the three-tier panchayat bodies and launched special schemes for Maha-dalits or the most backward classes among the Scheduled Caste.

At the end of his first full term in office, Nitish had appropriated 15 to 20 percent vote share in Bihar politics.

This arrangement worked to Nitish’s satisfaction till the arrival of Narendra Modi in Delhi as the BJP’s PM candidate.

“Nitish even canceled an invite to BJP leaders in Patna during the party’s national executive ahead of the 2014 polls. He refused monetary help offered during a national calamity when Modi was the Gujarat CM,” recalls former JD(U) MP Shivanand Tiwari.

JD(U) went alone in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls but lost in a triangular fight. Within one year, Nitish had stitched a pre-poll deal with his bete noire Lalu Yadav for the 2015 Assembly polls.

Since then, the Bihar CM has vacillated like a pendulum from one end of the political spectrum to another, clinging to power on one pretext or another. He is the third pole in Bihar politics with a proven ability to tilt scales towards the side he decides to align.

In the last Bihar Assembly elections in 2020, BJP tried to cut Nitish to size as Chirag Paswan, one of the NDA constituents, tactically fielded candidates to drag the JD(U) tally down to 40 odd seats in the House of 243. BJP made him CM but on its own terms.

Within two years, Nitish pirouetted another U-turn and dumped the saffron party to join hands with the RJD. Here too, even as he went through the motions of organising a grand opposition unity, Nitish also looked for political life after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls as it was expected that his dominant partner Lalu would sooner or later claim the chief ministership for his son Tejaswi.

In 1967, Gaya Lal, an MLA in Haryana switched sides three times in a day to invent the tag of ‘Aya Ram, Gaya Ram’ for party hopper. Nitish Kumar has set a new benchmark- wherever he goes, he takes the party and CM’s chair along.