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IT was a kind of political symbolism that was highlighted at the Patna airport in the afternoon on November 23. Nitish Kumar, leader of the Janata Dal (United)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which had been elected to power in Bihar the previous day, alighted from the plane that arrived from New Delhi and headed straight for the Raj Bhavan to stake his claim to form the government, and Lalu Prasad, whose Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) was defeated after its 15-year stint in government, took the return flight out of Patna to New Delhi.
In many ways, the events of that afternoon provided a fitting finale to one of the longest Assembly election processes in the history of the State. In the final analysis, the four-phase poll process spread over two months was dominated by two individuals - Nitish Kumar and Election Commission adviser K.J. Rao. NDA supporters hailed K.J. Rao, who was credited with conducting comparatively free and fair polls, by raising slogans such as "K.J. Rao zindabad".
At the political level, the single most important factor in this election was the personality of Nitish Kumar and the messages it conveyed. In fact, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders openly acknowledge this. The party willingly played second fiddle to the Janata Dal (United). According to BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar, the difference for the NDA between the February Assembly elections and the October-November elections was the bridging of the chasm between expectations and achievement and the factor that helped them in this was Nitish Kumar.
Political analysts and activists generally agree with this perception. It is a widely accepted fact in the political circles of Bihar and outside that it was the action of projecting Nitish Kumar as the chief ministerial candidate that helped the NDA surpass all expectations and garner a majority in the Assembly. The projection, as well as the political initiatives that came along with it, many NDA insiders say, set off a chain reaction.
The effect of the choice of Nitish Kumar was evident right from the setting of the NDA's agenda for the elections. The BJP was asked to put its Hindutva agenda in the deep-freezer and concentrate on projecting Nitish Kumar's development slogan as well as his stature as the leader of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). (Nitish Kumar belongs to the OBC Kurmi caste.) The development slogan helped channel the disgruntlement among different communities with the RJD regime into a single stream. But it was the projection of Nitish Kumar as somebody who can give OBC politics a new fillip that had the most telling effect.
To begin with, it assured the numerically superior OBCs and Extremely Backward Castes (EBC), who account for more than 55 per cent of the State's population, that the leadership of the State would remain within their ilk and not return to the upper castes, even though the upper-caste-oriented BJP was a major partner of the NDA.
For large sections of the upper castes, who realised that the State cannot return to the days of upper-caste domination in the near future, Nitish Kumar was the most acceptable OBC leader. When the Kurmi leader started getting support from these segments of society, a section of the Muslim minorities also gravitated towards him. A small chunk of Yadavs, who had got disillusioned with the domination of familial politics in the RJD, also joined this flow. In short, the Nitish Kumar-led NDA became a sort of acceptable refuge for all segments of the population that were unhappy with the RJD and its leadership.
It was the cumulative effect of all these that finally helped the NDA reach the figure of 143 seats in the 243-member Assembly and reduce the opposing forces, such as the RJD-led coalition - comprising the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP ) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - to 65 seats, and the Ramvilas Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party-Communist Party of India combine to 13 seats.
Interestingly, the flow of electorate to the NDA was not directly related to a depletion of forces among the opposing parties. A closer look at the vote share of the various players makes it clear that the NDA had essentially attracted a new segment of voters. While doing this, both NDA components recorded a whopping rise in their vote share. The Janata Dal (United)'s vote percentage went up from 14.59 per cent in the February polls to 20.32 per cent this time, while the BJP registered an increase from 10.96 per cent to 15.49 per cent.
Even so, the loss for the RJD was a marginal 1.8 per cent. The party's individual vote share was 25.04 per cent in the February polls. This time round it decreased to 23.24 per cent. More significantly, its alliance lost only 0.84 per cent of the 31.67 per cent vote share it had in February. It is notable that despite suffering its worst loss in 15 years, the RJD continues to be the party with the largest individual share of votes (23.24 per cent as compared to the Janata Dal (United)'s 20.32). Its peak performance was in the 1995 Assembly polls, when it got 39 per cent.
The Congress and the CPI(M) have cited these figures to emphasise that the lack of unity among secular forces helped the NDA win. This argument has some merit because the LJP more or less retained its core strength in terms of vote share. The party's loss was threefold in terms of the number of seats won. It was reduced to 10 from 29, but its vote share dropped only by 1.74 per cent; from 12.58 per cent in February to 10.84 per cent in the recent elections.
Another interesting fact available from the vote share analysis is that the combined percentage of the votes polled by the RJD- and the LJP-led coalitions is 45.83. This figure is more or less the same as the vote share of 46.32 per cent that the secular combine polled in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. The NDA's share was 37.08 per cent at that time.
All this underlines the point that the NDA's victory can be attributed to a variety of factors, including a split in the anti-NDA votes and the consolidation of social forces opposed to the politics of the RJD alliance. This consolidation was part of a churning process in terms of caste affinities at the micro-level. It is this consolidation at the micro level that led to the RJD's defeat in its traditional Yadav strongholds in the Kosi and Saran regions, which include the Madhepura and Chapra Lok Sabha seats. The RJD had won both the seats in 2004, but did not win even a single Assembly seat in these parliamentary segments this time. In Madhepura, the RJD polled 8 per cent fewer votes than the Janata Dal (United).
These micro-trends also affirm the fact that the RJD leadership has not been able to reverse the process of the cracking up of the Muslim-Yadav combine, which was once considered to be the life-breath of secular and Mandal politics of the State. The cracking up was most visible in the February polls, and the RJD leadership had deduced that it was caused by the disappointment of local leaders such as Pappu Yadav, Sadhu Yadav and Shahabuddin with Lalu Prasad. These leaders were mollified this time, but it did not help in a decisive way. Obviously, the RJD leadership needs to do more than mollify local leaders to recapture its lost strength.
In an interesting reaction to the results, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said the message of the polls had to be studied objectively and it had to be perceived as something that opened avenues for the future. Obviously, Sonia Gandhi's equanimity is motivated by the realisation that the Bihar results do not pose a threat to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre though the defeat in Bihar is a blow to the coalition.
The NDA's rise in Bihar has come as a shot in the arm for the BJP, besieged as it is by struggles within the party and the Sangh Parivar. Beyond acting as a morale-booster, the Bihar victory cannot bring any gains for the BJP at the Centre. Nitish Kumar has, in the first few days of his chief ministership, made it clear to the BJP that its cannot treat the Bihar results as a permit to revive its politics of Hindutva. To drive home this point, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was virtually prevented from making a trip to Patna for the swearing-in ceremony.
But the real challenges before the new Chief Minister are daunting. Particularly trying would be the task of meeting the aspirations of the divergent caste and social groups that supported him and controlling the possible emergence of social tensions on account of clashes between caste-based private armies and the ultra-Left Maoists. And, of course, he has to live up to his pet theme of development that would cut across caste and class barriers.
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