back to back: Nitish Kumar with his back turned on Narendra Modi at the chief ministers’ conference in New Delhi on Wednesday. The two leaders did not exchange greetings even though they walked past each other. (PTI)

New Delhi, June 5: An electoral jolt and a strategic setback. The lakh-plus deficit drubbing in Maharajganj is a double whammy whose implications portend trouble for chief minister Nitish Kumar locally and nationally.

Arch adversary Lalu Prasad is on a booster shot of tonic. Estranged ally BJP is quietly chuffed the reverse will weaken Nitish and render him more pliable. It didn’t help the knots on Nitish’s brow that news of defeat at home came ribbon-wrapped with resounding endorsement for bete noire Narendra Modi by the Gujarat electorate.

Today’s results have set Modi on firmer stride towards the BJP’s centre stage; Nitish has been compelled closer to a choice he has deferred making. What he does will depend substantively on how he chooses to interpret the causes and consequences of the Maharajganj defeat.

“We must await details of the result to analyse it in depth,” a close political aide of Nitish told The Telegraph. “Byelections are localised affairs but because of its timing, the implications of this one could go far beyond one constituency.”

What he meant, but was shy of specifying, was this: the defeat is either going to scare Nitish into clinging on to the BJP at any cost, or it will hurry him towards showdown and separation. Either way, the risks are his to cope with, and the rewards uncertain.

Resigning to conjugal compromise with the BJP — and consequently to Modi’s national leadership — will most certainly mean losing the goodwill constituency Nitish has laboured to build among Muslims. In the long run, it will also mean ideological emaciation and submission to the Sangh’s worldview, even though that might suffocate the socialist in Nitish. It will probably ensure him a longer run in power in Bihar, but will curtail his leverage in the alliance and cost a few blows to his “secular” image. Rivals like Lalu Prasad stand to benefit hugely from Nitish vacating his appeal among minorities.

A defiant plunge against Modi — and the BJP — will, on the other hand, open him to the risk of losing out on substantial sections of the upper caste vote which have come his way these past years courtesy the BJP.

Breaking the alliance will help the image Nitish wants to keep, leave him in sole command of his ideological direction and probably earn him more votaries among the minorities. But nobody can be sure — and Nitish himself isn’t — that any of that will compensate for the loss of upper caste votes, or, in the current case, any charged pro-Modi vote that may be eddying beneath the surface and might defy traditional voting behaviour in Bihar.

The current analysis being put on the Maharajganj defeat by JD(U) spokespersons is pat and conveniently hinged on hindsight, as if they always expected to lose: that the Maharajganj-Chhapra belt is Lalu’s pocketborough where the JD(U) has never done well, even during the landslide Assembly victory of 2010; that Prabhunath Singh, the RJD winner, is an entrenched local toughie with three previous terms in the Lok Sabha; that the JD(U) loser and Bihar education minister, P. K. Shahi, is an “apolitical” outsider with no roots in the region; that the poll management was tardy, perhaps even complacent.

Many of the reasons being trotted out are sound, but Nitish, who draws special pride in wresting byelections as endorsement of his governance record, went into battle aware of how the odds on the ground were loaded in a Prabhunath versus P.K. Shahi battle.

It would have required a war-effort to worst Prabhunath on homeground, especially since he had Lalu Prasad to back him. A section of JD(U)’s poll managers was always quietly pessimistic about Shahi’s prospects, but even that section is left stunned by the scale of Shahi’s defeat. “We never expected the margin to be so wide, this is a resounding blow and it could ripple beyond just one constituency, it is a wake-up call to us,” one of them said.

But which side of him Nitish will choose to hear the alarm go off is still moot. His analysts are already telling him the minorities did not vote for the JD(U) the way Nitish expected them to, perhaps already haunted by the spectre of Modi. They are also telling him the BJP pulled its punches, if only to send a signal to Nitish he is dependent on them for electoral success. “Nitish should draw the only lesson to be drawn from this,” a BJP leader chuckled as Shahi’s defeat became apparent this morning. “The minorities are not with him, he is pushing the BJP away to run after a mirage, he will fall between two stools.”

A senior JD(U) leader, clearly averse to accepting Narendra Modi, echoed an opposite sentiment: “The consequence of giving in to the BJP at this stage can only be one for us — strengthening Lalu Prasad by throwing all the Muslim vote towards him and reducing ourselves to weaker allies in the NDA.”

Much contrary analysis and advice will come Nitish’s way in the days to come, as he watches Narendra Modi amplify his claims to the BJP’s forefront and ponders his choice. It’s not something he can run away from for long after the Maharajganj debacle.

In the second half of his first term, Nitish had received a rude by-election reminder, losing 13 of 19 Assembly seats. He resorted to quick course-correction, banishing speculation on radical land reform, opening the purse-strings on welfare measures. Maharajganj is a similar reminder in the latter half of his second term. But this one will not be neutralised by policy, it’s a political choice he must make on risks and rewards.