Pratap Bhanu Mehta on the lessons of Bihar
There is an irony in
trying to interpret Nitish’s break with Lalu as some kind of watershed moment
in Indian politics. Does it represent the death of secularism? Does it
represent the death of regional parties? But the blunt truth is that this
moment is not a watershed, but merely a reminder of the eternal realities of Indian
democracy: Indian democracy is politics all the way down. Any attempts to frame
its realities in terms of encrusted master narratives is largely wishful
thinking. None of the protagonists in this drama can bear the load of any
deeper meaning.
Nitish Kumar has
always been a politician’s politician. This has manifested itself in many ways.
His first instinct has always been survival. He now has an enviable track
record of managing to remain an indispensable figure in Bihar politics. His
second instinct, like many politicians in India, is to ensure a relatively weak
internal party organisation that ensures he is never challenged from the
inside. He has combined that with a personal outreach, recognition, popular
touch and a relative absence of personal thuggery to remain an important
figure. In Bihar, electoral secularism was a wise thing to hold onto, which he
did. But he never had any qualms about the NDA. He has also managed to
paradoxically combine both dependence on allies with his own indispensability.
Third, he has always played within its limitations. There has been immense
clamour for him to take a national role. But he has seldom overreached. He has
been ambitious, but without any illusions about his ability to play a larger
national role. And his instinct was probably right: Without an organisation of
your own, without a pan Indian ideology, without years of national outreach,
any national ambition is tantamount to making yourself vulnerable rather than
strong.
Indian politics is littered with state leaders who thought they could easily
become national figures. The expectation that he would position himself as an
opposition figure was, therefore, extremely odd. As a good politician, he believed
in social engineering. But unlike many politicians of the Mandal era who remain
trapped in their social base, Nitish has continually improvised. He engineered
the “coalition of extremes” in his last incarnation with the BJP. The main
achievement of his stint as chief minister after 2005 was to give Bihar a
government with a broad social base that allowed a modicum of governance to be
restored. But the keen eye for a fluidity of social bases will always make
ideological niceties harder to hold onto… read more:
