Bihar Assembly elections 2025 | Nitish Kumar, like a phoenix, rises from the ashes

Patna: Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) is projected to win 85 seats, according to Election Commission leads, of the 101 seats it contested in the Bihar Assembly elections. This is a distinction of sorts for the man who is ridiculed by his opponents and media as ‘Paltu Ram’, a derogatory term used for his frequent somersaults.

But the longest-serving Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish, who will turn 75 on March 1, 2026, on Friday also proved why his supporters call him ‘Sushashan Babu’, a term used to admire his 'su-shashan' (good governance) and the one who put Bihar back on the fast track of development while enforcing the rule of law in a once lawless State.

Swimming against the time

Very few people know that Nitish Kumar, who is an electrical engineer from Bihar College of Engineering (now called NIT, Patna) loves to swim against the tide.

Sample this: During the 1977 election, the one held post the Emergency and amid anti-Indira Gandhi wave, all the Socialist friends of Nitish, be it Lalu Prasad or Ram Vilas Paswan, won the polls. However, Nitish lost it.

Post-Indira Gandhi assassination, when the Assembly elections were held in Bihar in 1985, Nitish won his first election from Harnaut when many of the Janata Party stalwarts had to bite the dust in the Indira Gandhi-sympathy wave following her assassination.

“He has an amazing quality of resilience. When he formed the Samata Party, along with George Fernandes, after severing ties with Lalu, his outfit contested the 1995 election but won merely seven seats out of 324 constituencies in the undivided Bihar. Almost everyone wrote Nitish off, arguing that he is no patch on Lalu, who, in 1995, got his biggest and clear mandate. Ten years down the line, Nitish pipped the same Lalu and became Bihar Chief Minister in 2005 and has remained irreplaceable for two decades,” averred a senior IAS officer who has worked with him closely.

No write-off

History shows Nitish has bounced back every time his critics have tried to write him off. Prior to the 2010 Assembly election, Nitish had cancelled the dinner event for the BJP following his objection to Narendra Modi’s advertisement (for relief during Kosi floods). Modi was then Gujarat Chief Minister, while Nitish ruled Bihar in alliance with the BJP.

Many political commentators wrote that Nitish has committed a political harakiri by cancelling a dinner out of jealousy for Modi and he will pay the price in the ensuing Assembly polls. However, when the results poured-in in November 2010, the NDA won 206 seats out of 243 constituencies, a rare four-fifths majority in the Bihar Assembly.

Similar was the case prior to the 2025 polls when leaders like Prashant Kishor, who earlier worked with Nitish and was once the JD(U) national vice-president, said that Nitish would not ever become the Bihar Chief Minister again. “If he wins more than 25 seats, I will quit politics,” Kishor had said.

Today, Kishor has been left with eggs on his face. Nitish, true to his characteristic, has shown amazing resilience and won his fifth consecutive term, a record of sorts in the annals of Bihar history.

If the streets of Patna are splashed with the posters of Nitish as ‘Tiger Zinda Hai’, it has reasons to be. Nitish may not be the Salman Khan of Bollywood. But he remains the undisputed superstar of Bihar polity.