Bihar Election: Is The Cha Cutting Enough?

Modi plays the Bihar game with seasoned politicians, and finds his tactics backfiring.

- Uttam Sengupta

Even one of Delhi’s best known political scientists, a lanky, learned man loaded with numbers, theories and history, is wary of sticking his neck out on which way the Bihar wind is blowing. “We can all be right or we can all be wrong,” he says, a la Yogi Berra. But this much he is willing to concede, off-the record: after the first three phases, the unlikely combo of Nitish Kumar and Laloo Prasad Yadav is way ahead. As you head for the door, he says his driver, a Bihari, thinks just the opposite. The man, he says, has already bet Rs 55,000 on a BJP victory because his sources in the satta bazaar have told him Narendra Modi-Amit Shah are way ahead.

This wasn’t how the BJP projected this to be. This was supposed to have gone just one way, their way. But as the dirt-track race veers into the last laps, the buzz is increasingly getting louder. Could 2015, which started for the BJP with a resounding rout in Indraprastha, end with a double-drubbing in Pataliputra? The ‘bhakts’ have started looking a wee bit anxious, gone is the cockiness of an imminent, overwhelming and certain victory. In its place is a grim, grudging acknowledgement that the “regressive 18th century forces”, as the prime minister described the opposition, may just be about to do what Arvind Kejriwal did, minus the muffler.

It ain’t over till it’s over, of course, and many BJP leaders still put up a brave face.