What Nitish Kumar Left Behind

When Narendra Modi first became a state legislator in Gujarat, in 2002, Nitish Kumar had already been a member of the Bihar legislative assembly for four years, a parliamentarian for almost a decade, thrice held the position of union minister and once been appointed the chief minister of Bihar for a week. Since 2005, during Nitish’s two-decade tenure as chief minister, no political party or alliance was able to get past the majority mark in the state assembly without his support. 

After the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the centre, Modi and Amit Shah’s leadership may have ensured the party’s wins elsewhere, but in Bihar, their success depended on having Nitish in their corner. Modi suffered his worst electoral defeat in the Hindi belt in the 2015 Bihar assembly election, when Nitish contested against him. It is also popularly accepted—and, as a native of Bihar, I share this sentiment—that, even when he shared power with the BJP, Nitish’s secular platform kept communal politics in check in the state. I have written at length about Nitish’s many betrayals for the November 2025 cover story for this magazine. Over the last decade and a half, however, his idea of a grand alliance of opposition parties emerged as the only model with the potential to defeat the Hindu nationalist government in New Delhi.

On 5 March, Nitish posted on X that he would be stepping down from his post, merely three months after he had taken the oath of office for a tenth time. He wrote that it was his “dream” to achieve membership of all houses of the state and central legislature, and that he was going to file a nomination to the Rajya Sabha, the only one he was yet to enter. In an earlier article, I described this as a Shakespearean end for a politician of his stature—despite his many shifting alliances and turnabouts over the years, he was known to emerge on top in every deal he made and had himself sent rivals down the Rajya Sabha route. Speculation has been rife that he stepped down because his cognitive health is declining, or that he wanted to make way for his son, but few in the state are buying these explanations. The most enduring impression, in Bihar and beyond, is that Nitish was ousted in a political coup by the BJP. Nitish’s opponents and his party colleagues had accused his coterie of confidantes—who were seen as BJP agents—of “hijacking” the Janata Dal (United), of betraying the party by persuading Nitish to acquiesce to the BJP’s demands and of forcing him to step down. 

In what appeared to be damage control after his X post, Nitish proceeded on a Samriddhi Yatra, a series of rallies to reassure his supporters, who turned out in droves. He told them that the development projects proposed by his government would continue uninterrupted and that BJP leaders would take them forward. While downplaying Nitish’s implication that the BJP would take leadership, Khalid Anwar, a JD(U) member of the state’s legislative council, told me that the yatra was “pre-scheduled.” Khalid offered vague defences, arguing that Nitish “has taken a solid step for Bihar’s politics,” before adding that he “must have a vision for his decision in his mind, which we don’t know at the moment. But it will be clear in the future.” Madan Mohan Jha, a Congress member of the legislative council, was among the few politicians who believed that, through the yatra, Nitish was trying to send a message to the BJP that the people were still with him. “There is no certainty in politics,” Jha told me, suggesting that Nitish might still have some game left in him.