Delhi Diary/By A K B Krishnan/Gulf Times Correspondent
Nitish Kumar is chief minister and all is - or should be - well with Bihar. Biharis who overwhelmingly voted for Kumar’s Grand Alliance must be full of hope that the good work their chief minister had piloted over the past ten years would only get better now that the government has an absolute mandate.
Basic necessities like drinking water, power, roads, health and sanitation had already been prioritised by Kumar during his previous stint at the helm and, therefore, they are a given. But prioritising is one thing, getting them on ground is another. Hence one finds these basics once again among the seven major promises that Nitish made to his electorate in the run-up to the latest polls.
Reports say that although electricity connection has reached most villages, its availability is still a matter of luck, some of them having to make do with under 10 hours of power on a daily basis. Nitish’s programme to bring uninterrupted power, piped drinking water and build at least one toilet in every household is estimated to cost $41bn over the next five years.
And there is more that Kumar has promised. Some of these include a monthly allowance of Rs1,000 to every educated unemployed youth (26% as per a survey done in September this year), up to Rs400,000 to students through a special credit card, new medical and nursing colleges and free Wi-Fi in every educational institution campus. The chief minister also wants 35% of government jobs reserved exclusively for women.
All very noble intentions, anyone will concede. It is not as if Nitish Kumar has suddenly discovered nobility in his objectives. He had been pursuing them for a long time, especially in the last ten years when, except for a brief ten months, he had been heading the state government. The problem, as mentioned earlier, is in implementation.
Take education for instance. The chief minister had been keen to make sure that every child goes to school. Apart from totally free education throughout the schooling years, there are programmes for mid-day meals in schools, free cycle for the girl child and free books. Despite all this, the level of education in Bihar is abysmal. A survey conducted by a Hindi television channel a few months ago revealed that many teachers in government-aided schools could not spell their own names in English. Okay, English may be too difficult. Perhaps even unnecessary in Bihar’s scheme of things. But what about basic general knowledge? When asked who the chief minister of Bihar was, many of them promptly answered: Lalu Prasad Yadav!
And that is the name Nitish Kumar will be most cautious and wary about in the weeks and months to come as he embarks on his latest stint of chief ministership. For, there is no doubt that having become the senior partner in the government coalition, Lalu will extract the maximum mileage out of the power that he so dearly and desperately sought over the last decade. And for Lalu Prasad power is only a means to an end, almost all of it self-aggrandising.
As the Grand Alliance took shape, Lalu Prasad had said Nitish Kumar will be its leader and eventual chief minister. There was no question of his interference in the governance because Nitish “is my younger brother”, Lalu had declared.
Even as the results came in and his Rashtriya Janata Dal began to take the lead, Lalu continued to maintain that he would leave everything from ministry-making to day-to-day governance in the safe hands of Nitish. Kumar is too clever a person to have taken the words of his ‘elder brother’ at face value. He must have surely known what was coming, but was in no way equipped to sidestep or defend it. His one and only aim was to defeat Narendra Modi and he was ready to make any compromise towards that end.
And see the result! If Kumar thinks that Biharis, or for that matter Indians in general, believe that Tejashwi Prasad Yadav and Tej Pratap Yadav are in his cabinet - the former as deputy chief minister, no less - because he willed it so, he has another think coming. Lalu Prasad ruled Bihar by proxy for five years through his wife Rabri Devi. Now he has signalled in no uncertain terms that he will rule Bihar through his two sons - one a ninth grade dropout and the other a 12th grader - and a host of other hangars-on and all Nitish Kumar can do is grin and bear it.
Even the distribution of portfolios shows how Lalu has wielded his power in the best possible manner for his own advantage. His two sons are in charge of infrastructure departments like road-building and health where huge sums of money will be involved. Lalu also saw to it that there won’t be any issue with allocation of that money by getting his own man, Abdul Bari Siddiqui, as finance minister.
“I will work as an understudy to ‘Chacha’ (Uncle) Nitish,” says the new deputy chief Minister. “Please do not judge a book by its cover,” he adds for good measure to justify that school dropouts too can make good administrators. But should Bihar be the testing ground for such an experiment? Of course everyone in the cabinet will have to work as understudies to a chief minister. But this particular understudy comes with strings attached to someone who is used to lording over everything in Bihar. And the signs are clear that he is going to pull those strings every which way he chooses.
Nitish Kumar is too proud and intelligent a person to let things come to such a pass. Remember he resigned as chief minister just because people of Bihar rejected his party in the last parliamentary elections. But now that they have reiterated their faith in him, it will be betrayal of the worst kind if he lets Lalu Prasad hijack his agenda for Bihar.
Will 2019 polls see anti-BJP front?
How times have changed! Arvind Kejriwal and Lalu Prasad Yadav hugging each other and raising their clasped hands - that’s probably the abiding image of the ceremony at which Nitish Kumar and his 27-member cabinet was sworn in in Patna last week.
Sharing space with Kejriwal and Lalu on the dais were a host of chief ministers from Congress-ruled states as well as Mamata Bannerjee of West Bengal. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar, Farooq Abdullah of National Conference, CPM’s Sitaram Yechuri and H D Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal (Secular) made up some of the other notables on the stage. (The BJP, Akali Dal and the Shiv Sena were also represented, but that is beside the point here.)
With such an array of big-wig politicos at one venue, speculation is rife that an anti-BJP front is sure to take shape in time for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and it would give Narendra Modi a run for his money. At one time Kejriwal was supposed to champion the cause of such a front, but with such a resounding victory under his belt, Nitish Kumar seems to have put paid to the Delhi chief minister’s ambitions for the time being. Anyway, Kejriwal’s USP till date had been his uncompromising stand against political corruption, but his rubbing shoulders with Lalu Prasad has dimmed that halo around his muffler.
Be that as it may, any talk of a ‘grand alliance’ a la Bihar in the Lok Sabha elections may not only be premature but also almost impractical. It is next to impossible for Mamata Bannerjee and the CPM to mount a joint fight, however loathsome the common enemy might be. Similarly, the DMK’s presence in the form of Stalin had kept the AIADMK out of Patna and a similar scenario will repeat in 2019. The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party of Uttar Pradesh did not turn up for Nitish’s swearing-in and thereby hangs another tale. Sharad Pawar and the Congress are not in the best of relations and Pawar can shift positions any time he chooses. Even Kejriwal will not be in a position to align with the Congress Party considering that his main support lies in Delhi and, to some extent, in Punjab where the two parties do not see eye to eye.
Many permutations and combinations are likely in the next three-plus years because politics, after all, is the art of the possible. The Congress is a spent force in much of India and it can only play second fiddle to regional parties in most elections from now on. Whether any such combination will be powerful enough to take on Modi at a pan-India level only time will tell. A fractured mandate in 2019 could lead to all possible scenarios, none of them holding out much promise.
