Acting chairman of Bihar Legislative Council Salim Parwez presents a bouquet to Nitish Kumar after the chief minister took oath as a member of the House on Monday. Picture by Nagendra Kumar Singh

New Delhi, May 7: Call it the shake that never fails to stir.

One chief minister taking another’s hand in greeting is so much more water down the Ganges; nobody stops to notice. But when one of those men is called Narendra Modi and the other Nitish Kumar, it’s never just a handshake, it constitutes a political tremor, if only a passing one. A clamour of attention erupts, flashbulbs pop, ears flap, tongues begin to wag: have the NDA’s Cain and Abel buried the hatchet, is this clasp the axis on which national politics will turn?

Since Modi and Nitish were clicked reaching out across the Vigyan Bhawan aisles at Saturday’s NCTC meet, speculation, most of it lazy and uninformed, has swirled about the “meaning” of the moment. An open gesture of acceptance, some ventured, “clean chits” from the courts have finally wiped out Nitish’s misgivings about Modi, else why would he shake his hands? The advent of a new politics, said others, both realise they need to be together to defeat the discredited UPA, this is the triumph of the politics of development over the politics of identity.

Lalu Prasad waded into the cloud of conjecture brandishing his own bluster: “This is the final unmasking of Nitish’s real face,” he blazed. “Everybody knows now who his real friends are, how long can he fool the people?”

Nitish has not thought it fit to meet Lalu’s invective with more than a crusty dismissal — “He is being sarcastic, being sarcastic is all he can do now” — but the prospect of being thrust into physical proximity with Narendra Modi, a man the Bihar chief minister considers a political untouchable, continues to haunt him.

Twice over the last three years Nitish has been subjected to Modi’s hand-grab. Twice he has been left helplessly wringing his hands in anger. During the campaign of 2009, Nitish was cajoled into joining an NDA rally in Ludhiana even though he had a battle on his hands in Bihar. As he climbed on stage, he saw Modi marching purposefully towards him from the other end. Before he could grasp what was up, Modi had taken his hand and raised it aloft for the bay of photographers. The picture became a campaign poster Nitish would have proscribed if he had his way.

During the Patna national executive session of the BJP in 2010, Modi had the same photograph published as a full-page backdrop to an advertisement in local dailies hailing flood-relief aid Gujarat had sent to Bihar. Provoked and offended, Nitish summarily scrapped his dinner invitation to the gathered BJP brass and nearly broke the alliance.

Nitish is probably the only BJP ally to have secured an incremental constituency among Muslims and considers Modi’s image not merely unpalatable but a threat to his politics. He swore after Ludhiana never to share a stage with his Gujarat counterpart, and has not to date. In fact, the unwritten bold-point pact between him and the BJP is that Bihar is out of bounds for Narendra Modi as a campaign destination.

Last Saturday, the NCTC conference in Vigyan Bhawan became the setting for Hand-Grab II. Nitish was as irate with what followed as he was following the Ludhiana episode.

“This is complete bankruptcy of thinking and analysis,” sources close to Nitish told The Telegraph in response to the “friends-now” inferences the photograph has sparked. “It is ridiculous to even think politics and ideology can change with a casual handshake in a public place, it is not as if they were meeting secretly. It was a gathering of chief ministers, what was Nitish to do, run away as he saw Modi approaching him? The Prime Minister and home minister also shake hands with Modi, does that mean they have become his friends? These are surface courtesies and should be understood as that, nothing more.”

The sources recalled last month’s meeting of chief ministers in New Delhi and pointed to Nitish’s absence from consultations Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa held with non-Congress counterparts. “He knew Narendra Modi was going to be part of those meetings, he consciously did not go, he is not looking for photo-ops with Modi, probably the Gujarat chief minister is,” a piqued Nitish aide argued. He underlined that the reasons for the Bihar chief minister’s adversarial attitude to Modi “remain alive, as does our complete and uncompromising opposition to any occasion for Modi conducting political activity in Bihar….Government or no government, alliance or no alliance, we remain firm about keeping (Narendra) Modi out of the state…”

That said, the Nitish camp remains rattled — and rankled — by the propaganda victories Modi has scored over him with astutely-timed photo-ops. Nitish’s “untouchable” has succeeded in touching him, and touching off unfavourable chatter, all to easily, all too often.