Why Nitish Kumar snapped ties with the BJP can be summed up in two high points -- one was BJP’s bid to place its own CM and show JD(U) exit doors ahead of the 2025 Assembly polls and second is Kumar’s own national ambitions and his long-pending dream of prime ministership.
The second reason seems to have overtopped the first, owing to the fact that the move by Kumar eventually pitches him as a prime ministerial candidate for the 2024 elections.
But positioning himself against Narendra Modi in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls will not be a cakewalk for Kumar, een if he manages to bring anti-BJP opposition parties under one umbrella. Reasons are many, but above all of them, Kumar is seen by a majority of the opposition with suspicion owing to his his numerous ‘U-turns’.
While the RJD has “embraced” Kumar with Tejashwi saying that the JD(U) has always national interests over and above everything, how much Lalu’s party or Tejashwi Yadav trusts him still remains a question.
The reason is not just the numerous flip-flops for power by Kumar, but also the 2017 episode when he walked out of the RJD-JD(U)-Congress grand alliance amid corruption charges against Lalu, and his son and the then deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav.
“Nitish Kumar is the Paltu Ram of Bihar politics. He has again proved that he can do anything for power. He has neither principles nor ideology but only greed for power,” Lalu Prasad Yadav had said back in 2017 when Nitish Kumar had walked out of the Mahagathbandhan in 2017. Lalu’s five-year-old remark is what seems to be the BJP’s emotion today.
By joining hands with the Mahagathbandhan, Kumar seems to have got the calculations right for now.
The RJD's Muslim-Yadav base, JD(U)'s support among Kurmis, MBCs and Mahadalits and the pockets of influence of Congress and CPI-ML, make it a formidable alliance, one that could inflict losses on the NDA.
Political commentator Amitabh Tiwari opines that JD(U) moving out of the NDA will incur the latter a loss of around 10-15 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in Bihar, where the alliance had bagged a whopping 39 out of 40 seats in 2019.
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On the contrary, political expert Dr Suvrokamal Dutta opines that Kumar is not someone with a pan-India image who can become a consensus candidate of the opposition. “There are many more aspirants more mavericks than him; don't forget the old horse Sharad Pawar . The younger PM aspirants like KCR, Mamata, Akhilesh, Stalin will dump him out from the opposition boat even before he takes a seat in it.”
The JD(U), on its part, remains hopeful that if the alliance with the Mahagathbandhan does well in 2024, Nitish could emerge as a nucleus of the anti-BJP opposition, which currently lacks credible faces, prominent enough to compete Modi’s charisma.
The only obstacles in his path could then be West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, who has her own national ambitions but will be unacceptable to the Left and the Congress as well.
For the BJP, Kumar’s exit doesn’t seem to have come as any surprise and the party was apparently aware of his ‘plan’, and did not try any damage control exercise to placate the old ally.
Experts believe that placing Kumar as CM despite winning almost double the seats than JD(U) was already a tough decision for the BJP, since the party lacked any prominent face who could match the stature of Kumar in Bihar.
With Kumar out of the fold, the BJP will now corner Kumar on corruption, law and order and abuse of the public mandate in the 2020 state elections, in its bid to take away his vote bank. The BJP was well aware of the fact that it would not grow under Kumar’s helm, and can now contest on all 243 seats.
