THE KUSHWAHA CAPER

The week after Valentine's Day came the news of a breakup in Bihar. Upendra Kushwaha, self-appointed younger brother of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, quit the primary membership of the Janata Dal (United)-which he had joined only in March 2021-to float his own Rashtriya Lok Janata Dal (RLJD) and is dropping broad hints on the possibility of joining hands with the BJP-led NDA, which Nitish had left in August 2022.

- Amitabh Srivastava

Though the Lok Sabha election is more than a year away, this marks one more turning point in Bihar's intense political flux. Given ambitious movers and shakers like Nitish and Kushwaha, the pre-electoral cauldron has already started bubbling in the state.

If Nitish on February 18 urged the Congress to immediately initiate dialogue with potential partners for a proposed anti-BJP political front, Kushwaha switched gears two days later to leave the JD(U). While he himself did not reveal all his cards at his press conference in Patna, the Bihar BJP let the cat out of the bag, when its spokesman Nikhil Anand tweeted within hours of Kushwaha's presser to declare “Upendraji a socialist with greater ideological-moral values”. Ironical words those, for the parting of ways leaves a jarring note in the long history of socialist politics of Bihar. If Nitish is seen as the tallest leader of Bihar’s Luv-Kush bloc--the numerically significant Kurmis and Koeris (Kushwahas) in the state—Kushwaha, too, has laid claim to the same base, with less success.

When Nitish overturned 15 years of Lalu raj by decisively defeating the Rashtriya Janata Dal in 2005, much of his electoral success then was attributed to his seemingly unshakable base of Kurmi-Koeri voters with the Extremely Backward Castes grafted on top.