Nitish Kumar stepping down as Bihar’s longest-serving chief minister brings the curtains down on a generation of politicians from the state who emerged out of the movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan. Ram Vilas Paswan is dead; Lalu Prasad appears to be a spent force politically; and, now, Mr Kumar has moved on, handing the baton to his deputy, a man who, ironically, started out in the socialist stable but shifted loyalties within before joining the saffron brigade. In that, Samrat Choudhary — Bihar’s new chief minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party — has much in common with Mr Kumar who has been an ace political acrobat. And, like his boss, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mr Choudhary is fairly Teflon-coated — he weathered the controversy over his age that had forced him to step down from his first ministerial stint in 1999. A dynast, he brings administrative experience, having worked in governments led by the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal(United) before his meteoric rise in the National Democratic Alliance dispensation. In going with him, the BJP has clearly opted not to upset the applecart not just in governance but also the ‘Luv-Kush’ Kurmi-Koeri caste coalition, which Mr Kumar anchored his politics in to carve out a constituency for himself within the other backward classes to counter the formidable Muslim-Yadav combination of the RJD. Projected as a team player, Mr Choudhary’s challenge will lie in dealing with the Hindutva forces that may be inclined to assert themselves now that the BJP has a chief minister in Bihar in the same manner as they are flexing their muscles in Odisha after the party got its own government there.
Outwardly smooth though this change of guard has been at 1 Aney Marg, it suggests the repetition of the cautionary tale about the BJP as an alliance partner. Though a way better practitioner of coalition dharma than the Congress in sharing the spoils of office, the saffron party has invariably managed to weaken its allies and grow on their turf; Maharashtra being a case in point where the Shiv Sena has split and become a junior partner. In Bihar, too, over the years, the BJP, despite
Mr Kumar’s continuity as chief minister, managed to deepen its electoral footprints and waited patiently to ease him out. That moment has now arrived, leaving the grapevine to chatter about the future of the JD(U).