NITISH PLAYS UNIFIER

The Bihar chief minister has set himself the task of aligning opposition parties against the BJP for the 2024 general election. Not only does it mean bringing diverse regional forces together, but also getting the Congress to scale down its ambitions wherever needed

- AMITABH SRIVASTAVA

ASK NITISH KUMAR, THE CHIEF MINISTER OF BIHAR AND JANATA DAL (UNITED) SUPREMO, how much sugar he wants in his cup of tea, and he will likely tell you, just a quarter spoon, not a pinch more. Any more, he thinks, will ruin his cuppa. That same attention to detail and the willingness to achieve a perfect balance could perhaps come in handy as, a year ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, he sets out to fix a different, much bigger, boiling pot: of an implosive, perpetually sizzling national opposition.

On April 12, Nitish, accompanied by his deputy CM and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav, was in New Delhi for a closed-door meeting with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi. Their goal: to forge the “broadest possible” opposition unity in the run-up to the general election in order to oust the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

That’s a mammoth task considering not all parties are on the same page. The work, thus, has been divided. While Kharge, having already started with his outreach to Uddhav Thackeray of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) and Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, will try to bring like-minded parties together, Nitish has been entrusted with much of the heavy-lifting—bringing on board parties that are not comfortable joining hands with the Congress.