THE POWER OF NITISH

HIS ENDURING EQUITY AMONG WOMEN AND EBCS MAKES THE BIHAR CM AN INDISPENSABLE FIGURE ON THE STATE'S ELECTORAL CHESSBOARD

- AMITABH SRIVASTAVA

THE GREY SKIES LOOKED OMINOUS, but Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar was still on the road on November 1, addressing four election meetings on the day.

One of them was in Jandaha in Mahnar constituency, Vaishali district, from where Umesh Kushwaha, the state president of his Janata Dal (United), is contesting.

Dressed in an immaculate white kurta, Nitish, 74, showed none of the portentous stiffness his opponents ascribe to the 'tired septuagenarian'. On the dais, he accepted garlands with an affable smile and took in the audience, a sea of female faces, with a smattering of old allies and earnest young men. "Aap toh jaante hi hain (You all know by now)," he begins, in a voice weathered by two decades in office and the many more running such campaigns. He soon gets down to it, listing the many works his government has done—the roads paved, the schools opened, electric poles erected across sleepy villages—summoning in the same breath the possibility that things could regress: the spectre of 'jungle raj' rising on the horizon. He called out the frictions that scarred the state under Lalu Yadav's rule back in the early noughties and then, with gentle insistence, asked not just for another term but for time: another chapter to complete the project he began two decades ago.

Having planted the seeds of doubt about the Opposition, Nitish turned to a theme that has come to define much of his political identity: women's empowerment. Reminders about reservations in police and government posts aside, it'll be the 'dashazari yojana’—the Rs 10,000 Mukhya Mantri Mahila Rozgar scheme announced just before the election, money handed out to 12.1 million eligible women (one per household) to start small businesses—that should ensure the support of this relatively caste-neutral constituency.