THE POWER SHUFFLE

In politics, words can be weapons, but silence is often the sharpest blade. Barely a day after swearing in seven new ministers, all from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bihar chief minister and Janata Dal (United) president Nitish Kumar made an appearance at a public gathering organised by another alliance partner—Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular)—at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan on February 28. What followed was an enactment of brevity.

- Amitabh Srivastava

The man who once spoke uninterrupted for 172 minutes during the fevered campaign leading up to the 2020 assembly election wrapped up his remarks in an astonishingly short 30 seconds—a hollow congratulation to the gathered crowd before he stepped away from the podium. To seasoned political observers, this was a deliberate act of disengagement from an alliance already marred by unease.

Politics in Bihar is rarely a sedate affair, and as the state hurtles towards election later this year, the latest cabinet expansion—widely interpreted as a blunt reaffirmation of saffron dominance within the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA)—is as much about optics and leverage as it is about governance. With the cabinet now at its full constitutional strength of 36 ministers, Nitish has effectively shut the door on his own party’s aspirants. If power-sharing were a poker game, he seems to have just gone all in, but with a weaker hand.

The BJP, however, is playing a different game altogether. The 2020 assembly election results still loom large in its political calculus: the JD(U), which contested 115 seats, won only 43, while the BJP, contesting 110 seats, surged ahead with 74—an emphatic assertion of its growing dominance. But even as the bigger party, the BJP grudgingly upheld its end of the bargain, backing Nitish for CM’s post—a tactical necessity to prevent the JD(U)’s realignment with Lalu and Tejaswi Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).