Nitish Kumar

Patna, June 13: Narendra Modi told the people of Bihar today that it was time they junked “vote-bank politics” and embraced “development politics”.

“If the politics of development is adopted, any state can come out of adversities,” the Gujarat chief minister said.

This was the closest Modi came to cutting down the chief minister, Nitish Kumar, in his speech at a BJP rally at Gandhi Maidan this evening.

“Vote-bank politics” was an allusion to Nitish’s strategy of cultivating electoral blocks (the Maha-Dalits, the extremely backward classes, women and Muslims) through development schemes and freebies.

Nitish had publicly put down Modi for releasing ads that were condescending towards Bihar and his government and extolled Gujarat as a “model state” in regional newspapers before the BJP national executive meeting.

Senior leader L.K. Advani reached out to Nitish without letting down Modi. He recalled that the NDA was built in 1995 when Nitish, then in George Fernandes’s Samata Party, agreed to become a BJP ally and hoped he would continue as one.

In an address that was neither confrontational nor conciliatory towards Nitish, Modi underlined the contrast between a “gleaming” Gujarat and a Bihar that just about peeked out of the “pothole”, in which it was submerged by successive dispensations. When he deemed it appropriate to praise Bihar, he singled out the BJP’s deputy chief minister, Sushil Modi, rather than Nitish for it.

“Bihar is a gaping hole. Sushil and his friends have just managed to fill the hole. As the finance minister, he left no stone unturned to fund deserving projects,” he said.

Modi indicated his response to the rebuff was not particularly Gandhian even if it was not quintessentially Modi.

As for Gujarat, it seemed as though the chief minister would run out of epithets to list his “credits”. “No village is without 24-hour electricity,” he claimed before people more used to being without power.

“You are blessed with Ma Ganga. In Gujarat, excepting the Narmada, there are no perennial rivers. I am cursed with registhan (a desert) and Pakistan as my neighbour. But thanks to public pressure, I have done rain-harvesting, built check dams, terrace lakes and what not.

“The result is that in five years agricultural production increased from Rs 19,000 crore to Rs 50,000 crore. I have no coalmines. I buy coal from Bihar and Jharkhand. Yet I have surplus power to lend to other states. The point is if you toil, you can overcome the most adverse circumstances,” said Modi.

He rubbed in the fact that this was his first visit after 2001. “Therefore, my first duty is to thank the people for the massive help they rendered during the earthquake when Gujarat was enveloped in a blanket of grief. You wiped our tears,” he said, as people shouted “Modi zindabad”.

Modi at the BJP rally in Patna on Sunday. (PTI)

The earthquake allusion was a palliative to undo the effect that an ad, trumpeting the Gujarat government’s help for the Kosi floods, had on Nitish. The Bihar CM had described it as “uncultured”.

Yesterday while virtually announcing that Modi was unwanted in Bihar, Nitish said he would return the Rs 5 crore that Gujarat had given as aid during floods in his state.

The other speakers, who included BJP chief ministers Ramesh Pokhriyal, B.S. Yeddyurappa and Prem Kumar Dhumal, and senior leaders Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, ignored Nitish.