On the eve of the assembly elections, the chief minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, is jittery. He will certainly deny this, but nothing else can explain his unseemly reaction to a newspaper advertisement showing him along with his Gujarat counterpart, Narendra Modi. So nervous was Kumar about how Muslims would react to the advertisement that he even cancelled a dinner he was to host for delegates to the national executive meeting of his coalition partner. This was a new Nitish Kumar who is otherwise known to be a suave person. The developments in Bihar will not wreck the alliance but they will expose its tottering nature, much to the glee of Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan. Kumar could have avoided such a situation but his nerves got the better of him.

Is the much talked of administration then not enough to make the electorate stand by Kumar? He himself is not communal, Muslims should know this, so why worry about an advertisement? The obvious answer is that he is not too sure of the extent to which the fruits of his government’s performance have reached the people. That being the case, he cannot afford to have a fair portion of the Muslims sticking to his rival, Lalu Prasad. He knew it would need a lot of coaxing to convince the minorities that his partnership with the Bharatiya Janata Party was just to keep Prasad out, that he had not compromised with secularism. For the last five years, he had kept the BJP under control, and it goes to the credit of that party that it appreciated his compulsions and went along with him. Then came the advertisement which he should have ignored by pointing out that neither he nor his party had ever approved of Modi.

A question may be raised as to how could Nitish Kumar have spent so many years with the BJP, one of the leading lights of which is Narendra Modi? If communalism is anathema to Kumar, then he should have severed links with the saffron brigade immediately after Godhra. If he had wanted to make a distinction between the BJP and Modi, he should have seen how leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani had hailed Modi on his electoral success in Gujarat after Godhra.

Rough crossing

Did he and his party colleagues keep their eyes shut because the National Democratic Alliance was then in power in New Delhi? Life with the BJP means life with it as a whole and not just a part of it. Does Kumar not know that if development is a component of the BJP’s agenda, so is Hindutva, and Modi is its poster boy on both counts?

In the midst of this, Kumar has emerged as a nervous and arrogant man. He threw common courtesy to the winds and asked the BJP to keep Modi out of Patna or at least out of the public meeting. The BJP did not oblige; no self-respecting party could have. Boorish also was the return of the money his government had received from Gujarat for flood-affected people. What extreme steps to take to keep the Muslims happy! Can the BJP be blamed if it points out that this also amounts to communalism?

The entire episode smacked of hypocrisy. Kumar knew he was playing to the minority gallery, he needed the BJP and its upper-caste voters to keep the Lalu-Paswan group at bay. Unfortunately, he has never acknowledged this. Neither has he admitted that if his ministry has delivered the goods, then the coalition partner also has a role to play in it. The partner did not always like this, but the quiet nature of the deputy chief minister, Sushil Kumar Modi, saw to it that the alliance was not disrupted. But now Kumar may have created conditions under which the sailing may become that much rougher, particularly if he insists that Modi should not campaign in the state. In the national context, the BJP is a much larger force. How long will it agree to being lorded over?