The never-out man of Bihar politics: The importance of being Nitish Kumar

JD(U) leader remains a vote magnet no alliance can afford to ignore.

New Delhi: Despite repeated flip-flops, his own allies can’t afford to completely ignore him during pre-polls, parleys and seat distribution. His opponents tend to choose their words with extreme caution while criticising him. Love him or hate him, but you can't ignore Nitish Kumar in Bihar politics, even as he enters the autumn of his political career.

It was the BJP, in its quest for a non-Yadav OBC leader who could challenge Lalu Yadav’s undisputed sway over the weaker sections after the Mandal surge in the early nineties, that first grasped the importance of being Nitish Kumar in Bihar.

After a few false starts, the saffron outfit understood beyond doubt that it would have to concede the leadership position to the JD(U) leader if it were to effectively oust Lalu in Bihar.

While former Defence Minister George Fernandez rooted for his close aide Digvijay Singh (MoS in the Vajpayee government), BJP leader Arun Jaitley, in the run-up to the 2005 Assembly polls, called up LK Advani one fine morning to press for Nitish's case. Given a go-ahead, the BJP unilaterally announced Nitish as the CM face of the NDA for the 2005 Bihar polls, and the rest is history.

Nitish Kumar belongs to the OBC Kurmi community. The social dynamics of the coalition he built rested on the demands of numerically smaller and economically weaker castes for decentralisation and effective power-sharing with dominant caste groups like Yadavs within the Mandal bloc. Nitish mopped up castes and communities who felt that the benefits of Social Justice had not reached their doorsteps and were being appropriated by a few. 

Dovetailing this constituency with the BJP’s upper caste support base, Nitish finally got the better of Lalu Yadav, whose catchment area shrunk primarily to Muslims and Yadavs. In his first term, Nitish made a concerted effort to add new constituencies to his existing ensemble, rolling out special plans for Mahadalits, the most backward among Dalits, and was perhaps the first CM to carve a separate constituency of women voters through a combination of welfare programmes and reservations in local bodies for women from marginalised sections.

BJP’s alliance with Nitish Kumar was based on an unwritten understanding with all its NDA partners: being the national party, the BJP would get a better bargain in seat-sharing for Lok Sabha polls in lieu of conceding the lead position to the regional ally in Assembly elections.

The 15-20% votebank that Nitish built in his first term in office stood him in good stead since. In 2015, a year after the BJP's emphatic victory in the LS polls, he joined hands with Lalu to pulverise the BJP in the state, demonstrating unequivocally his ability to wean away a decisive vote share from the NDA if he were to walk out of the alliance.

It is not surprising that both the I.N.D.I.A bloc and the NDA have had to accommodate Nitish on multiple occasions as the JD(U) oscillated from one end of the political spectrum to another in the last 10 years.

In 2020, with Chirag Paswan undercutting the JD(U), the BJP, for the first time, emerged as the single-largest party in the NDA. And yet, it had to concede the chief ministership to Nitish.

Now that the BJP has drawn a parity with Nitish in seat-sharing for the 2025 polls, its state leaders continue to remind Nitish voters that the NDA is fighting the elections under the JD(U) chief’s leadership. For, to win Bihar, the BJP still needs 15% votes aligned with Nitish.

On the other hand, the I.N.D.I.A bloc leaders, attempting to engineer a larger backward-dalit mobilisation, have sought to call the NDA seat-sharing deal a “conspiracy to finish” Nitish. The target audience for this political spin is again the non-Yadav OBC and Maha-Dalit communities, who have voted for the JD(U) or the alliance that he is in.

Everyone, it seems, wants Nitish Kumar’s votes.

Earlier, the JD(U) could successfully leverage this unique position in Bihar politics to seek government leadership. Will it be able to do the same once the results are declared in November 2025? Irrespective of the outcome, even if it were his last hurrah, Nitish Kumar continues to occupy the centre stage.