The suitability of candidate Nitish Kumar

Of all the names doing the rounds as potential prime ministerial candidates from the Opposition camp, I take the initiatives of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar the most seriously. There are multiple reasons for this, the first being that his party, the JD(U), in alliance with the RJD led by Lalu Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav, has formidable caste arithmetic that has the potential to take the state away from the BJP in the 2024 poll. Bihar is one of the Big Four with the largest numbers of Lok Sabha seats, which include Uttar Pradesh (80 seats), Maharashtra (48), and West Bengal (42), followed by Bihar (40).

Simultaneously, Nitish Kumar is both big and small enough to be acceptable to potential coalition allies. To explain, he has had seven terms as chief minister in his state only through alliances and knows the skill of emerging at the top in conjunction with other parties. He is not the sort of figure who would numerically dominate any potential coalition but would depend on the arithmetic of others also holding up.

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Therefore, it is interesting to note that last week after Nitish Kumar began his outreach to other opposition leaders during a trip to Delhi, Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said the following publicly. "I, Nitish Kumar, Hemant Soren (Jharkhand CM) and many others will come together in 2024. All Opposition parties will join hands to defeat the
BJP. All of us will be on one side and the BJP on the other. The BJP's arrogance of 300 seats will be its nemesis. The BJP should remember that Rajiv Gandhi got 400 seats but lost the next election."

After her 2021 victory over the BJP in a pitched state election, Mamata Banerjee had energetically put out the idea of opposition unity but would retreat like a wounded Royal Bengal tigress following a disastrous showing in the Goa state elections. She would subsequently send mixed signals vis a vis a joint opposition strategy during the presidential and vice presidential polls. Yet she carries a big state with her from where the BJP surprised by getting 18 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, and her current endeavour is to root out the party from the state even as her nephew and now number two in the Trinamool Congress, Abhishek Banerjee, is among the TMC figures that face Enforcement Directorate (ED) inquiries.

But there is an eastern flank that can fight against the BJP in the conjunction of Bihar, Bengal and Jharkhand, where Chief Minister Hemant Soren just won a trust vote after an attempt to rock his government by the opposition BJP. His JMM is in alliance with the Congress, and the state gives 14 MPs to the Lok Sabha. In 2019 BJP won 11 of these seats.

But beyond the East, Nitish Kumar can have a card to play in Uttar Pradesh as well, from where the BJP has been getting the largest chunk of MPs since the national advent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Nitish Kumar belongs to the Kurmi OBC caste, which is numerically small in Bihar, estimated to be only 3.5 per cent of the population, although concentrated in some districts. But there are larger numbers of Kurmis in Uttar Pradesh, and according to some estimates can amount to 9 per cent of the state population as Patels, Katiyars and Gangwars of the state can be identified as Kurmis.

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Without a detailed caste census outside of SCs and STs, exact figures are not known for OBCs, but there are districts in eastern Uttar Pradesh bordering Bihar where Kurmis are a dominant agricultural community and found in the west and central UP as well. In the assembly elections earlier this year, their votes were divided. During his recent visit to Delhi, Nitish Kumar also met SP chief Akhilesh Yadav. If the younger leader were to be on board fully, Nitish Kumar could certainly play a hand in parts of Uttar Pradesh as well.

As for Akhilesh, a former chief minister from 2012 to 2017, it may be recalled that he has at different times tried allying with all the available parties from the Congress to the BSP and recently with smaller caste-based parties of the state. His vote share in the recent state elections reached its highest ever but could not breach the wall of the BJP. At this stage, the best strategy for a national election would be to have an understanding with the leader from Bihar.

There are a few themes that Nitish Kumar should have a natural understanding of. As a Bihar politician, he would know poverty, migration, joblessness and helplessness and would stand at the opposite pole of the idea of India that Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents. Besides the RJD, the CPI (ML) is also part of the alliance in Bihar. These are forces that believe they are fighting “fascism”, landlordism and crony capitalism and are ideologically committed to do their best against the BJP. It can be one of the ironies of the age that an individual who was one of the strongest allies of the BJP should today also begin to emerge as crucial to the anti-BJP fightback.

Linked to this is also Nitish Kumar's profound understanding of caste. During his multiple reigns in Bihar, he created subcategories among OBCs and Dalits to extend influence to those who did not belong to the dominant sub-castes from these social blocs. The fact that Nitish Kumar is a Hindi speaker is also advantageous in the largest linguistic swathe of India. Besides, the Kurmis of Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and UP have their counterparts in Gujarat and Maharashtra as well.

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The Congress would have a role in any cohesive opposition front. First, it marks a presence in South India, where Nitish Kumar would have limited traction. As it happens, the Congress is part of the ruling alliance in Bihar, and Rahul Gandhi was the first leader Nitish Kumar met during his Delhi visit last week. Since Rahul Gandhi has publicly stated an aversion to holding office, perhaps the national party could also be open to the idea of giving regional leaders a greater say in whatever fight is to be fought against the BJP. All the data shows that the chances of defeating the BJP increase when a regional party is an opponent, while it is dismal in a one-to-one standoff with the Congress. Things are fluid at the moment but moves have begun in the opposition camp, often contradictory but nevertheless a sign of life.

When he first became chief minister, I had done a detailed profile on Nitish Kumar titled 'Method Man' for the publication where I then worked. He is not a flamboyant figure but a methodical individual who can spend hours pondering details, be it in a government policy or a political strategy. If he is stepping out to create an opposition front, it would be because he has calculated that it is in the realm of possibility. He is just a little younger than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will become 72 years old on September 17. Nitish Kumar became 71 years old on March 1 this year. Both are solitary figures who have shown a single-minded dedication to politics.

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)