India - Bihar: With Allies Like These, Nitish Kumar Needs No Enemies

The Wire - 31/MAR/2018

With Allies Like These, Nitish Kumar Needs No Enemies

Political observers are of the view that the JD(U) leader has made a huge miscalculation as this time he has had to deal with a much stronger BJP.

by Soroor Ahmed

Organising sword-wielding processions on the occasion of Ram Navami was till recently not a common practice in the plains of Bihar and West Bengal. These religious processions were confined to the Chhotanagpur plateau of Bihar which, on November 15, 2000, became part of a separate state called Jharkhand.

The infamous riots of Jamshedpur in 1979 and Hazaribagh a decade later were two big communal incidents that rocked Bihar. Armed with traditional weapons, such as bows and arrows, people, mostly tribals, enjoying the Sangh Parivar’s patronage, would carry out processions causing communal tension/violence.

While this year Jharkhand was largely peaceful during Ram Navami, in Bihar at least 10 districts and about four places in Bengal witnessed clashes.

The nature and scale of these riots are different from the one that rocked Bhagalpur during the Durga Puja procession in 1989 or the two riots in Jamshedpur and Hazaribagh mentioned above.

Since 1989, Bihar has largely remained peaceful, with some communal incidents in Patna in October-November 1990 (after the arrest of BJP veteran Lal Krishan Advani in Samastipur when his ‘Rath Yatra’ was on its way to Ayodhya from Somnath in Gujarat), and Sitamarhi in October 1992, two months before the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

The credit for the state remaining largely free of communal violence went to then chief minister Lalu Prasad, who ran the government in Bihar for 15 years, followed by his wife Rabri Devi’s tenure after the Rashtriya Janata Dal leader got embroiled in a fodder scam case.

Prasad’s successor Nitish Kumar, who led the first National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government between November 24, 2005 and June 16, 2013, followed a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ towards communal forces. As the Bharatiya Janata Party, Kumar’s alliance partner, was then a weak force, he was able to dictate terms and law and order was totally in the chief minister’s control.

However, things started changing after Kumar snapped ties with BJP in 2013. This coincided with the resurgence of BJP under Narendra Modi.

The saffron party rank and file started flexing muscles and sporadic communal incidents were reported between 2013 and 2015. Meanwhile, Nitish Kumar handed over the baton of chief ministership to his party colleague Jitan Ram Manjhi for nine months.

However, once he was in full control again, he sacked Manjhi and won the November 2015 assembly election in alliance with RJD and Congress. The political comeback of Kumar – that too in alliance with RJD – helped him tackle the communal situation, even though attempts were made to foment trouble in Saran district in August 2016.

In July 2017, the collapse of Grand Alliance government marked the homecoming of Kumar to the BJP-led NDA’s fold.

Political observers are of the view that Kumar made a huge miscalculation as this time he had to deal with a stronger BJP in power at the Centre. As a result, in the changed scenario in Bihar, the BJP is in now control and the chief minister seems to be playing second fiddle to it.

The communal violence in Bhagalpur on March 17, on the eve of the Hindu New Year Day, followed by tension and clashes in several places in the state on the occasion of Ram Navami on March 25-26, was not the first such case of defiance by the BJP.

When the Patna district administration last September issued an order calling for the immersion of all the idols of Durga Puja within the stipulated time as Muharram was to follow a day later, none else but the Union minister of state Giriraj Singh publicly flayed the Nitish Kumar government. The administration withdrew its order.

Union ministers Ashwini Choubey and Giriraj Singh are loyal to prime minister Modi and in a position to prevail upon chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has lost all his bargaining power. Credit: PTI/Election

The involvement of Arjit Shashwat, the son of another Union minister, Ashwini Choubey, in the Bhagalpur violence is another case in point. On March 18, Shashwat was booked for leading an unauthorised procession a day earlier. His father reacted sharply and termed the FIR as a piece of garbage or radddi ka tukra lodged by corrupt officials of Bhagalpur.

Though it was unexpected for a Union minister to openly defy the government, the state machinery remained a mute spectator. Shashwat shifted to Patna to lead another Ram Navami procession on March 25.

It was on March 27 that Janata Dal (United) national general secretary K.C Tyagi issued a statement criticising the utterances made by the Union minister. Nitish Kumar, too, said he would make no compromise on the issue of communalism.

The chief minister may have said so but the fact is that Shashwat was still at large 12 days after the Bhagalpur violence. In these 12 days, riots broke out in many other places across the state, such as Aurangabad, Nalanda, Munger, Arrah, Samastipur and Nawada.

Singh and Choubey were ministers in the Nitish Kumar’s cabinet in the previous NDA government. Both had the image of right wing hardliners then, too.

Today, both these leaders are Union ministers loyal to prime minister Narendra Modi and are in a position to prevail upon Nitish Kumar, who has lost all his bargaining power.

As the BJP wants to keep the communal pot boiling till at least next year’s general elections, such riots suit the saffron party’s political objective. Thus, the party is fully exploiting the situation in Bihar, while a ‘helpless’ Nitish Kumar is reduced to being a bystander.

Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.