They say that even a cat has only nine lives. When Nitish Kumar took over as the Chief Minister in November last year, he was crossing the tenth milestone of his life as the Chief Minister of Bihar. Turns out it was just a nine point thing. With Nitish filing his nomination for the Rajya Sabha, also known as the house of elders in political parlance, on Thursday, it is the curtain on his political career that dominated Bihar for the last two decades.
What awaits Bihar in terms of Nitish’s successor is still unclear. The rumor in Patna – where thanks to Nitish, only politics reigns supreme, not things made from grapes or grains or jaggery – is that the new chief minister will likely be someone from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). From the point of view of pure arithmetic this is not completely unreasonable. The BJP is the senior partner in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition in the state. It was senior by a great distance even after the 2020 elections – when it allowed (some would say encouraged) another ally in the group to exit and take on the Janata Dal (United) – but it allowed Nitish to become chief minister.
Whoever is appointed as chief minister is unlikely to meet the popularity and power ceiling that the state has set for its rulers over the last three and a half decades, an era when Sankarshan Thakur famously nicknamed the Bihari brothers, referring to the duo of Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar. We are more likely to see a lightweight who is more loyal to Delhi than someone revered in the state of over 130 million people. This is what the BJP has done in most, though not all, of the states it has won since 2014. And this is what Indira Gandhi did to Congress Chief Ministers when she had complete control over the Congress Party in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nitish and his cronies turned enemies – there have been many iterations of this cycle – Lalu Yadav was the product of a revolt against the Congress’s hegemonic position in Bihar, a place where the party had begun to dismantle itself soon after independence. He was an extraordinary supporter of a movement that placed caste, not class, at the forefront of the struggle against Congress dominance to rebel and ultimately overthrew the power of the upper castes and, by extension, the Congress. His gurus like Karpoori Thakur fought this battle when the odds were high, the reaction was strong, perhaps even fatal (the ghost of Jagdev Prasad would agree) and success was short-lived and uncertain. Between the first Chief Minister of Bihar, Shri Krishna Singh, who died in office in 1961, and Lalu Yadav, who assumed office in 1990, no Chief Minister completed his full term. Since then, politics in the state has become remarkably stable: Lalu and his family and Nitish with a small choreographed cameo for Jitan Ram Manjhi.
Certainly, it is as important to single out the Bihari brothers as it is to see them as twin disciples of the broader social justice movement in the state. Lalu’s flamboyance in politics and his Robin Hood-seeking image were aimed at keeping his (numerically and increasingly economically) dominant caste base of Yadavs in control of the maximum spoils of power, while garnering the support of the larger subaltern crowd. If Lalu was a Machiavellian lion, using muscle and brute force to defeat his opponents, Nitish was the proverbial fox, drawing from shrewdly calculated politics the lessons that he could not due to lack of numbers. But he was not the fox who would give up after failures and walk away saying that the grapes were sour. After breaking away from Lalu, he made his first move in the mid-1990s by forging an alliance with the ultra-left ML Liberation, which at that time was more a party of underground Naxalites than of mainstream communists. The failure of this experiment led Nitish, with the help of socialist gurus like George Fernandes, to take an ideological U-turn and align himself with the Hindutva bandwagon that was willing to negotiate on its core politics in exchange for some parliamentary strength.
This marriage was successful in Bihar and was also convenient for Nitish. By the time he won Bihar in 2005, BJP had lost power at the Centre. The disparity became wider after the 2010 assembly elections in the state. Nitish got a landslide victory while BJP was buried under the debris of defeat in the 2009 national elections.
Bihar, especially Nitish’s ideological cheerleaders, enjoyed temporary ideological glory and declared that the socialists had defeated the saffronists in state politics. This was the best possible solution because the anti-regime socialists (Lalu) were exiled. But all good things must come to an end.
For Nitish, the end came in 2013 when the BJP, in a coup in its own palace, decided to declare Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 elections. Stunned by the success of his self-proclaimed ideological victory, Nitish, who had only analyzed the Hindutva project and observed it in its moment of weakness, branded the newly appointed BJP leader an untouchable and walked away from the NDA. Modi’s BJP became the first party in 40 years to win majority on its own in 2014. Nitish, who went to the polls with the more revisionist Communist Party of India (CPI) this time, managed to win just two Lok Sabha seats against the BJP’s 22 and the NDA’s 31 out of 40 seats in the state. Motivated by political survival, Nitish decided to join hands with his former colleague Lalu Yadav and change ideological track where the socialists needed to once again take on the saffronists.
The sequel to Samajwadi was a blockbuster in the 2015 elections and saw the BJP and its allies turn the tables compared to their comfortable victory in 2014. Managing democracy on a day-to-day basis proved far more difficult for the Bihari brothers than winning elections. Nitish’s ten years in power depended as much on Boon Governo – he was called Sushasan Babu (patron saint of good governance) – as it did on the condemnation of Lalu’s style of politics and the optics associated with it. The latter preferred the surname of Saheb (almost like imagining a neo-feudal lord). The creative destruction that Nitish needed to make the marriage successful was something Lalu’s party RJD could never do. They parted ways after the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections, reestablishing that the BJP’s 2014 victory was not a fluke and that Modi was not going anywhere anytime soon.
But Nitish’s astute politicians themselves probably believed that pragmatism need not lead to slavery. He also, in what might perhaps be called a fair act of electoral empiricism, concluded that it was he and his party that held the keys to power in Bihar. The aspiration of the former, coupled with the confidence of the latter, led Nitish to switch sides between the BJP and the RJD twice before finally settling with the BJP in the 2024 and 2025 elections. By that time, his mind had erupted in public servility towards Narendra Modi, a man he had once challenged, despised and wrongly declared a political untouchable.
As Nitish moves from Patna to Delhi in what can only be described as a state of political hospice, should anyone feel sorry for him or his party? JD(U) was largely a club of vested but capable local level politicians who revolved around a leader who brought them to power. Most regional parties in India are not much different, but what makes this especially true for the JD(U) is the fact that its own caste-base (Kurmis) is not even 5% of the state’s population. Ideological sovereignty is the last thing on the minds of such people. Certainly, Nitish also had more confidence in his bureaucrats than his political lieutenants.
Nitish’s own legacy will remain insignificant in the state. He saved and stabilized a dying feudal system through the labor of social justice rebellion against it. Bihar is still one of the poorest states in the country and has all the hallmarks of underdevelopment, but it is not a place where things are getting worse. The biggest reason for this is Nitish and the people of the state will always be grateful to him for doing this. As far as his personal and political defeat at the hands of BJP is concerned, it raises a question which should not be asked at a larger level than just Nitish or JD(U). If the purpose of post-independence socialist politics was simply to engineer caste dynamics to run the first-past-the-post system, has the BJP not done a better job by adding the sweetness of populist handouts to the masses while the patrons fight for crumbs of power in Caesar’s court?
“Despite poverty, Bihar politics has always been richer in history and society than many of its better-off peers. From 2025 onwards, this may no longer be the case,” this author wrote in one of his columns during the 2025 elections. Bihar has taken its first step towards becoming political in line with the governance in Delhi. This would be one of the most famous coups in the political history of the BJP, which was nearly three decades in the making.
When Nitish was the Railway Minister, he started a train between Patna and Delhi on the call of Jayaprakash Narayan before the Emergency and named it Sampoorna Kranti Express. In a way, the train also celebrated the political fundamentalism of Bihar. Today it would be a good idea to rename the train as Sampoorna Shanti Express.
Bihar is no longer a political rebel.
