How Nitish Kumar Transformed the Idea of Bihar as Its Chief Minister

By 8 November 2015, in a little more than a month from now, Bihar, that has been serving as the front for what is touted to be the biggest political battle this year, would have elected a new state government. The elections, which will be held in five phases, are primarily being fought between the two major coalitions in the state: the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance and the Grand Alliance comprising Janata Dal [United], the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal. In this excerpt from The Brothers Bihari, a revised and updated version of his earlier books, Sankarshan Thakur revisits the trajectory of Nitish Kumar, the present chief minister of Bihar and that of his predecessor Lalu Prasad Yadav. Thakur sheds light on the changing landscape of the state and explores the significance of the upcoming elections for these two leaders, calling them “two of the most engaging political figures to emerge on the national scene over the last quarter century.”

Bihar was never at a loss for those who set out to build it. In the narrow firmament of Bihari consciousness, they make a clotted constellation of visionaries and builders, reformists and revolutionaries, Samaritans and messiahs. Srikrishna Sinha and Anugrah Narayan Sinha, JP and Karpoori Thakur, Ram Lakhan Yadav and Jagannath Mishra. They have either been forgotten, some mercifully, or live on in dust-ridden memorial halls and rent-a-crowd commemorations. Or in disregarded town squares as busts routinely shat upon by birds. For all the retrospective reputation they have come to acquire, the gifts of Bihar’s league of legends don’t add up to much.

Eighty per cent of Biharis have no access to toilets. A mere 16 and a few decimal percent receive electricity at home when supply flows. Forty-three percent of rural Bihar is still not connected to roads. Less than 10 percent are able to use modern banking, and the Internet barely a percent. A mere 7 percent live in concrete homes. Sixty percent possess mobile phones. That is how lopsided the lurch of development is. We could be talking about Haiti where, in 2012, only 10 percent had a bank account and 80 percent used cell telephony.

The depth of the poverty of these indices is best sensed by comparison to how they read till just a few years ago. These are vastly improved figures, buoyed by consistent double-digit growth under Nitish. Bihar topped national gross domestic product (GDP) ratings in 2011-12 at 11.3 per cent and yet it had a glancing acquaintance with subsistence. But Nitish’s decision to break with the BJP resulted in a setback to the process of building; politicking returned centrestage to Bihar after the summer of 2013, governance took a back seat. At the pronouncement of the twelfth Five-Year Plan in December 2012, the state topped all Indian states with a growth rate of 10.9 per cent, a stellar achievement considering it was buried at 2.6 per cent in 2005. But even with lead ratings, Bihar struggled to match up; Nitish’s predecessors had accumulated Himalayan deficits over the decades.

Of them, only Laloo Yadav endures. Laloo is probably the most charismatic leader Bihar has seen; and at the peak of his power in the mid-1990s, he seemed invincible. But like many a political giant heady on power, he let his hunger and arrogance get the better of him. He came pregnant with a magical promise and delivered hell. The unmaking of Bihar was not Laloo Yadav’s single-handed achievement, though. At that a whole gallery of rogues and duds had taken turns before him. But if Laloo inherited a mess in 1990, he contributed chaos to it, like a tornado visiting the ravages of a quake and mangling the remains. If history will judge him as singularly destructive, it will perhaps also be because he was so long at the job. Fifteen years. Not enough time to build Rome, but sufficient to devastate an already fragile masonry. Personally, he indulged in misdemeanour so rampantly he eventually had to be excised from elections and public office. Even so, he remains a force to reckon with, a man who can still bugle the support of a substantial following. Laloo too debuted as saviour-messiah, remember? All through the early 1990s hope surged around him, until he took fright and leave of his obligations and caged himself in his palace of power, the very 1 Aney Marg which he started to believe was his for keeps.

There is a fragment of personal history to this two-storey faux Tudor bungalow set in a five-acre estate that gets its name from Bihar’s second governor, Madhav Shrihari Aney. My grandfather, Pushkar Thakur, was its last occupant before Srikrishna Sinha, Bihar’s first chief minister, moved in in 1949 and appointed the premises the official residence of the state’s chief executive. Pushkar Thakur was then welfare secretary of the state and lived on the ground floor. Justice Abhay Pada Mukherjee of the Patna High Court was on the first. Sepia prints of that time in the family albums show flowerbeds and rattan chairs set in rolling lawns. When I first went into 1 Aney Marg in 1992, quite unaware my ancestry had been part of it, Laloo had banished the flowerbeds and erected a cattle-shed, his cows grazed on the acreage.

For thirty years, perhaps a little more, Nitish had drifted in Laloo’s shadow. When triumph came his way, all Nitish had to do was snatch the prize that was a thing of Laloo’s crafting, the invincible arithmetic of backwards, Dalits and Muslims. An overwhelming chunk of the vote that Nitish counts as his own today—the Janata Dal (United) vote minus the BJP’s upper- caste constituency—is what Laloo consolidated in the first place. What Nitish did was to give that gift the truth of Louis Aragon’s surrealist maxim—the marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real. Nitish touched the contradictions in Laloo’s seed of empowerment, smothered the pulpit populism, and gave impetus to the governance chromosome. Where Laloo was happy to merely grandstand from the stage, Nitish burrowed himself and got down to the job at hand. There’s no better illustration of this than Bihar’s high annual growth figures between 2005 and 2013.

Nitish brought to Bihar overdue corrections. For far too long, Bihar has remained a nationally accepted metaphor for a basket case: Bihar, off the map, irredeemably lost. You must be Bihari to feel the rough rub of it—an identity as allegory to mockery. Made in Bihar, manufactured defective. I have an indelible memory of a report on Bihar by Trevor Fishlock in The Times of London during the early 1970s. He called the state the sewer of India. The stench of it still hangs somewhere within me.

For far too long, Bihar has been symbolic of all manner of Indian ills—disparity and disease, maladministration, institutional breakdown, feudalism, casteism, wanton crime, endemic corruption, political profligacy, public cynicism. If you wanted a quick tour of the worst of India, you took a trip to Bihar. Generations of journalists, Indian and foreign, travelled to Bihar to embellish their state-of-India reports with its graphic inefficiencies. Sometime during the middle of Nitish Kumar’s first term as chief minister beginning 2005, that began to slowly change. He was named ‘Politician of the Year’ by several television channels, newspapers and society watchdogs after his first year in power; he kept winning that award year after year until it began to sound routine. The Economist, which had once called Bihar India’s armpit, paid tribute to Nitish’s helmsmanship in a report. The cheeky title said: “The Bihari Enlightenment: India’s most notorious state is failing to live up to its reputation.” That eased some of the burden of Fishlock’s damning, though very apt, verdict of three decades ago.

Bihar will remain a keenly watched space, and not merely because of the forty seats it brings to the Lok Sabha. It will be watched for what becomes of Nitish Kumar, and of Laloo Yadav, two of the most engaging political figures to emerge on the national scene over the last quarter century, and what’s to follow should their era come to a close, or be interrupted.