Nitish has insulted Bihar's mandate

My friend from Bihar’s “grand alliance” days Pavan K. Varma — in his inimitable style — has tried to justify the unparalleled and unfortunate robbery of the mandate of the poor and downtrodden by Nitish Kumar (Nitish rejoining BJP is not a betrayal, July 30). The event dubbed by Mr Varma as “tectonic changes” in Bihar shocked many all over India. This includes even those who have never appreciated the politics of Lalu Prasad Yadav and the RJD, who believe that what happened in Bihar in a span of “33 minutes” was a well-rehearsed drama based on the script of the top leadership of the BJP and RSS. The “dramatis personae” are coming out into the open to claim the role they played in robbing the character of the mandate which was decisively against the Narendra Modi brand of politics and policies. This is one issue that shall haunt Mr Kumar for the remaining part of his public life. Opposition unity is a crucial and, by definition, a collective matter. You cannot simply blame the Congress, as Mr Kumar has done, for not doing enough and get away with this feeble argument. I have said earlier on behalf of my party that politics is a serious vocation, and in the time of right-wing authoritarianism it has to be all the more earnest. This required that our engagement with the people and the issues affecting their lives cannot be a sporadic phenomenon, going into active mode only after the declaration of poll dates by the Election Commission.

We are all witness to the threats over core ideas of India — freedom, liberty, social and economic justice and secularism — by dangerous outfits with explicit approval and sanction of the government in Delhi. Did the Indian National Congress stop us from converting these concerns into a massive movement to convey the peoples’ anger? When Rohith Vemula, a dalit student, committed suicide, did we do anything substantial, apart from symbolic marches, and that too organised by civil society or student bodies, and not by us? When the police fired on farmers in Mandsaur (Madhya Pradesh), resulting in the killing of six, was it the Congress that told us not to mobilise people against such callous insensitivity? These questions need to have been pondered over by Nitishji and his party before he declared that not enough was being done for Opposition unity. The challenge before political parties is to be attentive to issues and concerns of the masses and then become a dynamic medium to convey the message to the right quarters. The failure to do so cannot perpetually be attributed to the Congress. Nitishji’s self-righteous claims that he called for Opposition unity again and again, and ruing that it did not “materialise”, appear contrived in light of his conferral of invincibility upon Narendra Modi in 2019. This is nothing but an admission that “invincibility” matters to him above everything else in political alliances.

We all are aware how and why this grand alliance was stitched, the beginning of which could be traced to the Rajya Sabha elections when the RJD went on to support the candidates of the JD(U), whereby Mr Varma and Gulam Hussain Barelvi were elected to the Upper House. The RJD, keen to cement a larger Opposition narrative, also extended support to Nitishji after the fiasco of Jeetan Ram Manjhi. If Mr Lalu Yadav had chosen to be the prisoner of his bitter experience with Nitishji in the past and acted accordingly, Sushashan Babu would have been history by now. It was Lalu Prasad Yadav who decided to set aside everything that Nitishji and his trusted team had done against him for the last 20 years and went on to become the fulcrum of the grand alliance. The RJD and the Congress also extended crucial support to Nitishji when he parted ways with the BJP and, in spite of his offer, declined to join the government because both the parties felt that the mandate of 2010 was not to be part of the government. This is how people’s mandate is respected unlike the BJP, that has been inducted into the government through the backdoor. Somebody has rightly said that the Modiji-Amit Shah-led BJP forms governments where it wins the mandate, but also forms governments in states where the mandate is not in its favour.

Coming back to Nitishji’s somersault, can he deny that the Bihar Assembly election 2015 mandate had a distinct subaltern fervour, wherein the people and the communities on the margins strongly spoke against the RSS’ bunch of thoughts? The mandate was also against the views of Mr Mohan Bhagwat, who had openly declared that reservations in jobs be done away with. It was one of the first mandates of its kind in the last 20 years wherein the dalits-mahadalits, backward and extremely backward, minorities and progressive sections of the upper castes joined hands to write a new script for Bihar at a time when a large section of the media was going ga ga over the “Modi magic” and the PM’s invincibility. Did Mr Nitish Kumar have the right to play a fraud on the nature and character of such a mandate? As for the so-called avalanche of information about alleged benami properties of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his family, we tried to convey to Nitishji and others to understand that whenever the political churning for Opposition unity gains momentum, the BJP machinery asks its “new alliance partners”, viz. CBI/IT/ED, to virulently chase the leaders of Opposition parties and malign them.  The story of Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee, P. Chidambaram, Mayawati together with Laluji tells you that this is the newest strategy developed by the BJP in dealing with strong political Opposition.

We urged the then chief minister of the grand alliance not to trust the narrative of 11, Ashoka Road, which is nothing but a new avatar of politics of vendetta that does not bode well for our democratic political culture. During this entire “scripted phase” of discomfiture about an FIR on Tejashwi Yadav, the deputy CM, Nitishji has himself admitted that he never sought his resignation. When the deputy CM met the CM shortly before the infamous somersault, the CM was resounding in saying that he should not resign simply to justify the BJP’s agenda run with a section of the media. If Nitishji honestly listens to his “antaratma ki awaz (the call of conscience)”, he would know that the investigations going on against several leaders of the Opposition are largely based on false and malicious accusations, and imagined quid pro quo and are not likely to stand in the subsequent judicial process. But that was not the part of the script Nitishji was keen to read and act upon because he was probably working on the “mysterious deal” to dent efforts for larger Opposition unity. For Nitishji and his brand of political opportunism, I can only quote Mark Antony in Julius Caeser “This was the most unkindest cut of all.”