Challengers to the throne

It is late in the evening but the crowd outside 10 Circular Road shows no signs of thinning. Khadi-clad politicos and vendors who trade peanuts and roasted chana discuss the respective prospects of their leader in the big house and the rival BJP, which has shown an intimidating resoluteness through the campaign.

As we walk in — the guards barely bother to check the invasion — the atmosphere suddenly becomes lighter. Lalu Prasad Yadav stands in the middle of his courtyard in a white dhoti hitched up to his knees and a trademark sleeveless undershirt. After a punishing day of campaign, eight public rallies and countless interactions, Lalu is still not finished. He spots us standing in a corner and gestures, recognising a colleague, “Aa gayee dobara jhagda karne (you’re here again to fight with me).”

The hangers-on are dismissed for some time and we sit down for a chat with the ageing Yadav chieftain who has, together with his comrade Nitish Kumar, turned a provincial election into a war of nerves with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Whichever way Bihar turns this weekend, it will be remembered as an inflection point. For the rather grandly christened Mahagathbandhan, it is not just a comeback trail for the scam-tainted Lalu, the ambitious Nitish Kumar and the battle-scarred Congress. A victory in Bihar translates into revival of hope for the secular camp on the national front. It will see a new challenger for the throne of Delhi in 2019 in the form of another three-term Chief Minister — Nitish Kumar. The fact that socialists of all hues and the Congress are coming together shows that the opposition is becoming stronger in arguably the most politically-savvy province in the Hindi heartland. For Modi and the BJP, success in Bihar is just the kind of ammunition that is needed to counter what they largely view as elitist/left/liberal propaganda against them. BJP President Amit Shah has contemptuously dismissed the rising chorus against intolerance, beef ban, threat to India’s syncretic culture as a needless campaign confined to the rarefied precincts of the Lutyen’s zone in Delhi.

A poll win in Bihar will prove that the masses are still behind the leader they elected in 2014 and ‘religious intolerance’ is just the carping of a few pathologically anti-BJP intellectuals. It will strengthen the ruling party’s efforts to push legislative business in Parliament and improve on their strength in the biennial elections for the Upper House next year. A side effect of this victory is Shah’s certain re-election as BJP President this winter. He is serving the residual term of Rajnath Singh as the ruling party President and a setback in Bihar will give a handle to his detractors to start lobbying with the RSS to deny him a fresh term.

Sipping oversweet tea with Lalu, these abstract situations become tangible. Cynical as most hardened mainstream politicians are, Lalu has still not lost his instinct for political mobilisation and invoking sentiment. He knows what connections to make and what memories to evoke; for the benefit of his rustic supporters as well as a group of English-speaking journalists from Delhi. He has seized on RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat’s comments about reservation to counter what he believes is the BJP’s time-tested strategy to create a Hindu-Muslim divide during elections.

“Bahut badmas hai yeh BJP wala. Sab Hindu-Muslim karne ka kosis kar rahe hain (The BJP is very cunning. They are trying to divide Hindus and Muslims),” he tells us, as he describes how Nitish and he are countering efforts to communally polarise their voters. Muslims are lined up behind them but they have been warned against wearing burqas and skull caps when they go out to vote. The Mahagathbandhan’s effort has been to trounce the BJP’s alleged endeavour to polarise the Hindus as one and diminish caste identities. Although the BJP is simultaneously wooing different caste groups through the individual appeal of its allies Jitan Ram Manjhi, Ram Vilas Paswan and Upendra Kushwaha, its core vote is still the upper-caste voters.

Lalu stands with the bulwark of his electoral support behind him — about 16 per cent Muslims and over 15 per cent Yadavs. Not many among his voters deserted him even during the Lok Sabha elections last year when the Modi wave swept Bihar; Lalu retained 20.46 per cent of his voters even if it translated into only four Lok Sabha seats. He is, as the Grand Alliance’s lead strategist, Prashant Kishore, describes, the “cake” for Nitish Kumar’s “icing” in Bihar. Nitish could retain only 16.04 per cent of his backward/most backward and Dalit constituency in the Lok Sabha elections, which is the main reason for him bridging the gap and aligning with Lalu to trounce the Modi-led BJP.

Accordingly, Nitish does the ‘icing’ job in the campaign, doling out data, statistics and never straying from his elevated perch to resort to invective. It is a clever strategy marked by two different types of campaigns by the two allies — the rabble-rousing has been left to Lalu, who has come up with the ‘Narbhakshi’ (cannibal) title for Amit Shah, while Nitish mouths the more sober spiel on development and his vision for Bihar. They have set up Twitter/Facebook accounts and dish out smarter repartee online than the entire BJP apparatus can muster. Lalu, the convicted scamster who has not won a significant election in the last 10 years, presents Nitish as the face of the campaign, the dulha (bridegroom) of a baraat (marriage procession) populated by Muslims and Yadavs. With a staggering 242 rallies that covered all constituencies but one in Bihar, Lalu has notched up more miles and crowds than anyone else, in the busiest election since the Lok Sabha polls last year. He is clearly the most sought-out and entertaining campaigner in Bihar, thinking up impromptu one-liners and doling out locally flavoured invective.

“Dhan ka roti tawa mein, Modi ud gaya hawa mein (Modi has been swept off the Bihar campaign)… Hamara baraat ka dulha hai Nitish Kumar. Inka kaun hai (Nitish is the bridegroom in our marriage party. Who is the BJP fielding?” he asks, in rally after rally. Sample the challenge, delivered in quintessential Lalu style: “Jab tabla bajega dhin dhin, to ek pe padega teen teen (For each of their voters, we have three),” he says, to the approval of the crowds.

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The BJP has countered this blitzkrieg by the PM’s powerhouse performances in a series of rallies where he has shifted gears from the promise of big development to invoking fears of the ‘Return to Jungle Raj’ in Bihar, mocking the rival coalition as a congregation of ‘three idiots’ and, finally, making barely concealed efforts to polarise the voters by accusing the Mahagathbandhan of directing quota benefits to Muslims. Amit Shah’s accusation that “crackers will burst in Pakistan” if the BJP loses is an episode in this series.

Regardless of the outcome of the respective campaigns, what has struck me throughout the Bihar elections is how hard each battle has been fought. The shrewd strategist in Amit Shah has found himself pitted against an equally crafty adversary in the Lalu-Nitish collective. The organisational behemoth of the RSS/BJP is matched in fervour by the native cunning of the Bihari socialists.

It has been sound bite for sound bite — an Asaram Bapu-Narendra Modi video for a Nitish Kumar-Tantrik visual, a Twitter reply for a Twitter barb and a masterful Lalu mimicry of Modi’s announcement regarding a mega-package for Bihar worth thousands of crores.

The exception is the Congress, the only political entity impervious to the rigours of the Bihar campaign. The Grand Old Party remains true to its defeatist self with Rahul Gandhi absenting himself from much of the campaign; taking time out instead for a padyatra in Karnataka and writing letters to the PM demanding special category status for Andhra Pradesh. All this while Lalu and Nitish addressed between seven to 10 rallies a day, in their own areas of strength as well as in constituencies crucial for their allies. Nitish Kumar, for instance, campaigned for Lalu’s sons Tej Pratap and Tejaswi immediately prior to polling in their respective constituencies.

Nitish’s aides are aghast at the Congress’s nonchalance, an indecipherable indifference to what is arguably the most talked about election since the Lok Sabha polls. But as one walks up to his residence in the quiet, leafy lane in Lalu’s neighbourhood, the sense and strategy in the Bihar Chief Minister’s campaign becomes apparent. He is accommodating the Congress, allocating as many as 41 seats to a party that barely managed to win four in the last assembly elections, because it is a critical ally at the national level.

From the time Nitish parted ways from a Modi-led BJP after 17 years of a largely peaceful coalition, he has resurrected his secular image, made peace with Lalu and hunted down the Congress to create a platform that could well turn out to be the principal opposition against the BJP in the future. I have watched Nitish gain in confidence since the start of the campaign when he was asking all, including Arvind Kejriwal, to join him. Like Modi, Nitish has a point to prove in Bihar. The former Chief Minister of Gujarat humiliated him in the Lok Sabha polls and Nitish has been licking his wounds ever since. He has to prove that he was right in disinviting Modi for that now famous dinner in the summer of 2010, just as he was right in dumping the BJP when they projected Modi as PM candidate.

He snatched Modi’s poll strategist, Prashant Kishore, and installed him in his own house. He ran a personalised campaign, staking all to emerge as the BJP’s alternative in Bihar. Lalu has aided him for his own benefit and his son’s future. With the Congress as junior partner, India’s shrewdest politicians have put their best foot forward to trounce the BJP.

If this is not enough then it is difficult to fathom what will be.

(This article was published on November 6, 2015)

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