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Ashok Malik is a columnist and writer living in Delhi)Nitish Kumar's resignation as Bihar chief minister has set the stage for early assembly elections. State polls are due only in the winter of 2015, 18 months from now. Even so, following the break-up with the BJP, the Nitish-led JD(U) government was precariously placed, depending on stray Congress and independent MLAs.
After the Lok Sabha verdict, a slice of JD(U) legislators would be happy to do a deal with the BJP. The BJP itself would prefer a clean mandate rather than a defection-induced shot at power. In either situation, Nitish's government found itself unsustainable.
In the recent Lok Sabha elections, Bihar was the one state in northen India where the BJP faced an organised social and political alliance. The Congress had joined hands with Lalu Yadav's RJD and raised hopes of a solid Yadav-Muslim base, with dollops of localised support for individual Congress candidates such as Meira Kumar in Sasaram and Nikhil Kumar in Aurangabad.
The blunder the Congress committed was in snubbing Ram Vilas Paswan and the LJP, pushing them into the BJP's corner. As for Meira Kumar and Nikhil Kumar, on May 16, they both lost.
In terms of a caste coalition, the Paswan increment worked like magic for Narendra Modi. He had an urban and an upper caste backing. Significant segments of OBCs, particularly the EBCs or Extremely Backward Castes that had been wooed by Nitish Kumar as part of the erstwhile JD(U)-BJP alliance, were also attracted to Modi's personal OBC background. Now Paswan got him a section of the Dalit vote.
This helped Paswan and his son, Chirag, win, as well as transferred votes to the BJP in at least half-a-dozen crucial seats.
Finally, even a sprinkling of Yadavs responded to the Modi appeal, particularly in areas where the BJP was the only serious rival to Nitish's JD(U). Nitish is a Kurmi, the other dominant OBC community in Bihar, and Yadavs see him as an adversarial figure.
So overwhelming was the Modi fervour that Laloo's wife and daughter both lost. BJP candidates who would have had tough battles in normal circumstances won in a canter.
Take for example Rajiv Pratap Rudy's victory against Rabri Devi in Saran. Lalu himself had won this seat in 2009 but this time Rudy defeated Lalu's wife by a healthy 40,000 votes. In Patna Sahib, sitting MP Shatrughan Sinha was clearly unpopular and according to one pre-election survey of the BJP, faced a massive 46 per cent anti-incumbency. Riding the Modi wave, Sinha won by 265,000 votes.
Where did Lalu and Nitish go wrong? They laid enormous emphasis on the Muslim vote, but seemed to have forgotten about reaching out to other sections. For instance, Nitish's calculation that staying on in an NDA-led government by Modi would dwarf him and cause a diminution in his status among Muslims had half a point. What he didn't account for was that his non-Muslim support, especially the EBC constituency he had crafted, would desert him for the man from Gujarat.
What happens next in Bihar? In Lalu's case, the Congress has brought him nothing by way of accretion. The RJD-Congress alliance is for all practical purposes over. The BJP will be riding high, probably projecting Sushil Modi as chief minister and asking for votes for the Modi-Modi combo (Narendra in Delhi, Sushil in Patna).
Nitish will be hoping for a recovery of his EBC voters and of the anti-Lalu sentiment, praying that this gives him enough of a core to ensure a critical mass of Muslims too come to his side.
While he retains his Yadav loyalists, in a state election, Lalu will be hamstrung by the fact that he cannot be chief ministerial candidate himself, following his conviction in a corruption case. Further, two of his family members - both possible chief ministerial candidates - have been defeated in the Lok Sabha battle.
So will the assembly elections turn out to be a contest between the BJP's two Modis and Nitish? Will the BJP consolidate itself as the new pole in Bihar politics, even in an assembly contest? Will Nitish and Lalu simply hurt each other by dividing the opposition vote? Bihar is in for churning.
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