The Importance Of Being Nitish

Nitish Kumar is charting his own course, steering clear of the BJP and not always toeing the opposition line

- Barkha Dutt

There is an idiom in Hindi—uske daant pet mein hain [his teeth are in his stomach],” quipped a senior BJP leader when asked about what Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s next move might be. Nitish, he said, likes to keep people guessing and, in the maze-like House of Cards that Indian politics is, almost never reveals his hand, till it is time.

In a week when charges of corruption—financial irregularities in the awarding of contracts for Railways’ hotels as well as accusations of benami properties have besieged Lalu Prasad and his son, Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav—there was anticipation that the famous Bihar mahagatbandhan that brought the two friends-turned-foes-turned-friends-again together in 2015 might collapse. Especially after Lalu Prasad’s party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, defiantly declared that Tejashwi would not resign.

The unlikely alliance has already been cracked and fractured by growing differences, and the FIR that the CBI filed against the Yadav family for corruption has dragged it to break point. Like always, Nitish Kumar’s first response—to the dismay of his ally who may have been looking for public support—was a deliberate and measured silence. When he finally spoke his mind, it was only at a closed meeting of legislators and workers of the Janata Dal (United). Sources said he made it clear that Tejashwi would have to come clean or quit. The charges made him “very uncomfortable”, said one party source. That he would much prefer a resignation was obvious in the examples he invoked, according to party sources—his own resignation from the Vajpayee government in 1999 on moral grounds after a train accident or L.K. Advani’s resignation from the Lok Sabha in 1996 during the Jain Hawala case.