Paltu Chacha's 'Last' Battle?

Nitish Kumar risks losing his flock at every sharp turn

- Rajesh Chakrabarti

IT is too early to write an epitaph for Nitish Kumar's electoral career: after five years, the jury is still out on his 2020 “last election” comment.

One thing is clear, however: most of the first-time voters in the upcoming polls would have been born during his reign. Others sometimes wonder though if the “sushasan babu” (Mr. Good Governance) of yesteryear is the same man as today’s “paltu chacha” (Uncle Turncoat).

Nitish assumed office in one of Bihar’s lowest points in history: following an era of what The Economist termed “chronic misrule that has allowed infrastructure to crumble, the education and health systems to collapse, and law and order to evaporate...” His reversal of that trajectory has cemented forever his sushasan aura: head and shoulders above the competition.

His first term distanced the administration from a mafia-politician nexus and halted an economic rout. From 1985 to 2005, Bihar’s per capita income, as a fraction of the national average, had nosedived from 60 per cent to 26 per cent. Today, it hovers around 30 per cent.

A decade and a half since then, however, all this seems like the miasma of a half-forgotten dream. Four somersaults later, it is the wily politician in Nitish that has eclipsed the gritty administrator.

What has changed? Mighty little, actually, I dare say.

“Circumstances don’t make a man,” the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus held, “they only reveal him...”. In Nitish’s case, the germs of what followed were all there in his wildly successful first term.