UNEASY TRIUMPH
Nitish Kumar should be a happy man. He proved wrong scores of opinion polls which had predicted that he would be swept away by the perceptible undercurrent of anti-incumbency. The results of the hard fought Bihar assembly election showed that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) headed by Nitish secured a slender majority, thwarting a determined challenge by the mahagathbandhan (MGB) led by young Tejashwi Yadav, the son of his old political rival Lalu Prasad Yadav. It ensured that Nitish would be sworn in for a fourth consecutive term as chief minister of Bihar (all in all, the seventh time).
Yet, hours after the victory, barring a thank you tweet to voters from the official handle of his party, the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U), there was silence from Nitish about the outcome of the elections. This was strange, given that his alliance partners, particularly the BJP, were making a big show of celebrating the victory. Indications were that Nitish was unhappy with his own party’s performance, apart from his grouse at the way the BJP had handled some key issues during the campaign. It seems Nitish wanted to lay down the ground rules for his seventh stint before agreeing to be sworn in as chief minister of a new NDA government.
BJP, THE BADA BHAI
There are plenty of reasons for Nitish to be troubled about the outcome. For one, his party’s tally has dropped from the 71 seats it won in 2015 to 43 (a loss of 28 seats) while ally BJP is up from 53 to 74 (a 21-seat gain), which makes the national party the senior partner in the new government. Election 2020 has seen the emergence of the BJP as a dominant force in the assembly polls, garnering 19.5 per cent of the total vote,
