24 June,2010

Bihar on the brink
Bihar is the cradle of Indian civilisation. Pataliputra – the modern Patna – was the capital of the Mauryan empire, created by Chandragupta Maurya around 300 BC – the first unifier of India and its first genuine emperor. No Indian empire since was as large as the Mauryan empire under his grandson Ashoka the Great, till that of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, nearly 2,000 years later, around 1700 AD.
The architect of Chandragupta’s rise to power was Chanakya, a teacher in the Taksasila university. The author of the ancient Indian political treatise ‘Arthasastra’, Chanakya is called the Indian Machiavelli, though his work predates Machiavelli’s by about 1,800 years. So, Bihar is also the birthplace of Indian politics.
Little wonder that Bihar’s politics tends to be devious. It is now at its most complex, with Bihar’s Janata Dal (United) Chief Minister Nitish Kumar keeping his coalition ally the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) guessing whether, like Orissa CM Naveen Patnaik, he will choose to ditch the party just before the upcoming Bihar assembly polls later this year.
In many ways, Nitish is an unlikely ally for the BJP. A lifelong socialist by conviction, his drawback has been Bihar’s chronically caste-ridden politics; Nitish belongs to a numerically smaller community, the Koeris. Still, he is a formidable practitioner of value-based politics, and was the mastermind behind Lalu Yadav’s rise to power. Once in power though, the disciple soon dispensed with the services of his guru.
But Nitish forged his own coalition with the BJP and came to power after the fall of the Lalu raj. He has turned the state around. Concentrating mainly on roads, electricity supply, and law & order, he has virtually removed the ‘basket case’ tag from Bihar. In his four-and-a-half years in power, over 600 bridges have been built. The condition of roads has dramatically improved. Law and order is much better, and the state’s cottage industry – kidnapping – has been nearly shut down. Villages that had never, ever, seen a working electric light now get a few hours of power each day. Bihar now has a growth rate of 11 per cent. The state still has a long, long way to go, but Nitish at least holds out hope.
Relations between the BJP’s Bihar state unit and Nitish have by and large been good, thanks to Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi (no relation of his Gujarat namesake), who is the public face of the BJP in Bihar. Sushil Modi is widely seen as broadly ‘secular’. In fact, he is married to Jessie George, a Malayali Christian woman, who still practices her own religion.
In came Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for the BJP National Executive meeting in Patna, heralded by full-page advertisements in the Patna newspapers, one showing a photograph of Nitish and Narendra Modi hand in hand at a Punjab rally during the 2009 Lok Sabha election, and another trumpeting the aid given by Gujarat to Bihar during the 2008 Kosi floods, and all hell broke loose. The BJP top brass knew Nitish’s allergy to Narendra Modi; he had forbidden Modi from campaigning in Bihar during the Lok Sabha election. They ought to have reined in their poster boy. But they didn’t. And they might have to pay the price.
Now, all talk is about whether Nitish will emulate Naveen Patnaik, break the alliance with the BJP, and go it alone in the coming Bihar elections. The last is highly unlikely, as Nitish knows his party cannot single-handedly win the poll, thanks to its narrow caste appeal. However, he may opt to switch alliances, and the Congress has been making overtures to the Bihar CM right since the 2009 Lok Sabha poll.
But Nitish is well-versed in the science of Chanakya. He will not reveal his hand right now. The BJP may huff and puff, as it is doing right now, but it will not dare to blow the alliance down. Nitish, on the other hand, has all the options.