MUSICAL CHAIRS

THE MANY BETRAYALS OF NITISH KUMAR

- SAGAR

NITISH KUMAR FACED a moral dilemma in the summer of 2013.

He had been chief minister of Bihar for almost eight years, making a name for himself as an able administrator in a state once considered synonymous with lawlessness. There was talk about him being a future prime minister. In the previous assembly election, his Janata Dal (United) had won almost enough seats to form a government without requiring the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party, with which the JD(U) and its precursor, the Samata Party, had been aligned for the past seventeen years. The BJP and the JD(U) had both emerged from the fragments of the Janata Party, which ended three decades of Congress rule, in 1977, before collapsing under the weight of its ideological contradictions. In 1980, the Janata Party’s national executive voted to expel members affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, leading to the formation of the BJP, which had a meteoric rise through its campaign to demolish the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and establish a Ram temple at the site. After the Congress failed to retain its majority in the 1989 general election, the BJP supported a minority government led by the Janata Dal. It brought down the government, a year later, when the chief minister of Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, halted LK Advani’s procession to build national support for the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign—which was accompanied by communal violence that killed over five hundred people—and had the BJP president arrested.