According to media reports, So this time Nitish was apprehensive that his situation might become like Uddhav Thackeray of Maharashtra. The truth is that Nitish’s longing to become the Prime Minister is well known. Against this background, is the over-ambitious Rahul Gandhi as the opposition face? Lalu-Tejashwi, Mamata Banerjee, K. Chandrashekhar Rao, Will Akhilesh Yadav etc. accept Nitish Kumar? The probability of that is very less.
In Bihar, Janata Dal United (JDU) leader Nitish Kumar took oath as the Chief Minister for the eighth time on Wednesday. Once again breaking ties with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Nitish again formed the government with the support of 7 parties including Congress, Left parties along with his arch-political rival Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). It is true that there are no permanent friends or enemies in politics. Yet there are certain limits, the transcendence of which would only be called the height of political dishonesty and opportunism.
Nitish Kumar’s rise in Bihar was against the familyism of RJD founder chief Lalu Prasad Yadav and corruption-jungle raj under his rule. Nitish seems to have made a compromise with both these distortions in the last phase of his political career. This is the second time in 26 years that Nitish has parted ways with the BJP. As an ally, Nitish had forged an alliance with the BJP since the time of the Samata Party. So far, he has been sworn in as the Chief Minister eight times, in which BJP has been his ally twice (2015 and 2022), five times (2000, 2005, 2010, 2017 and 2020) and RJD.
The politics of RJD in Bihar is defined by four points. First – familyism. After the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in Indian politics, Lalu Prasad Yadav is another great example of a perverted dynastic tradition. In the year 1997, when Lalu had to leave the chair of Bihar due to the scam, he handed over the governance of Bihar to his inexperienced and uneducated wife Rabri Devi, who was limited to family responsibility. Not only this, even when Lalu was convicted in 2013, to keep the center of power in the RJD under his family, he forwarded his ninth pass younger son Tejashwi, due to which the news of his 12th pass son Tej Pratap getting angry came days. The media headlines continue to be made.
The politics of RJD is based on sympathizing with extreme casteism and Islamic fundamentalism. Under Lalu’s leadership, sometimes the party worked on the Yadav-Muslim equation, and sometimes reinforced the casteist politics (including violence) of ‘Bhura-Bal Safa Karo’ (Bhumihar-Brahmin-Rajput-Lala). Those who are familiar with the politics of Bihar know how this slogan had thrown the state into the fire of casteist violence in the nineties. Bihar has not been free even today due to its effect. Caught in the web of Muslim appeasement, the RJD not only openly supported Islamists like Mohammad Shahabuddin (late) but also took it to the legislature several times.
The matter is not limited to this only. When 59 kar sevaks were burnt alive in a train compartment by a mob of jihadis near Godhra railway station in Gujarat on 27 February 2002, whose only ‘crime’ was to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’ while returning from a pilgrimage to Ayodhya. Lalu had tried to establish that the Godhra incident was only an accident, not motivated by religious hatred, when he was the Railway Minister in the year 2004-05. Later this report of the committee was quashed by the Gujarat High Court. Lalu’s successors are also taking forward this type of caste-religious politics.
The third and fourth political base of RJD is unbridled corruption and protection of criminals. The Lalu family has a deep connection with corruption-malpractice cases. Lalu is convicted like other convicts in the famous fodder scam. There are 14 accused in the IRCTC scam case including Lalu, Rabri, Tejashwi, Misa, Tej Pratap, who are currently out on bail. Apart from this, Lalu-Rabri and several members of their family have been booked under the Benami Transactions Act with disproportionate assets for land deals and tax evasion of Rs 1,000 crore.
The track-record of the RJD in the matter of law and order has been pitiable. During the Lalu-Rabri regime between 1990-2005, Bihar had become a symbol of kidnapping, murder, rape, theft, dacoity, extortion and corruption. The nexus of criminals with politicians, bureaucrats, corrupt policemen-officers was such that the ‘economic-activity’ of the state was gaining momentum through ‘industries’ like ransom-kidnapping. There are many stories and stories in this regard even today. All these elements together made Bihar a BIMARU-backward state, due to which it is still affected today.
In fact, this situation is attributed to the anti-Sanatan culture leftist thinking, which has most distorted and tarnished the national politics in the name of pseudo-secularism. For decades, this Jamaat has been carrying forward its anti-India Hindu agenda by giving ‘secular certificates’ to the people. It is a blow to Indian politics that in the name of Islam, the only Indian political class – the Left, which played an important role in the bloody partition of India and the birth of Pakistan, still sympathizes with the Islamic terrorists – separatists, but also ideologically. Tukde Tukde Gang also supports Urban Naxals and Maoists due to equality.
Suffering from the same morbid left-wing and pseudo-secularism-provided politics, Nitish Kumar broke the alliance with the BJP in 2013 opposing the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi and joined hands with the Lalu Yadav-led ‘Mahagathbandhan’, which accuses the top RJD leaders of corruption- They broke up in 2017 after being seriously accused of impropriety. In the Bihar assembly elections of the year 2020, the public had rejected the gross casteist-communal politics. But after almost two years, Nitish babu broke ties with the BJP and made an alliance again with the leaders of the same politics. If media reports are to be believed, this time Nitish was apprehensive that his situation might become like Uddhav Thackeray of Maharashtra. The truth is that Nitish’s longing to become the Prime Minister is well known. Against this background, will the over-ambitious Rahul Gandhi, Lalu-Tejashwi, Mamata Banerjee, K. Chandrashekhar Rao, Akhilesh Yadav etc. accept Nitish Kumar as the opposition face?
