In Nitish Kumar's Bihar, Old Guard Is The New Guard

In Bihar, the old guard is the new guard. The narrative by some experts that a new generation of younger leaders would take over yesteryear's Bihar from the experienced hands of leaders like Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav has turned out wrong.

Two things proved this - the Janata Dal (United) is still in the game, and Nitish Kumar, even at 74, just took oath as Bihar Chief Minister for the 10th time.

Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party, which ran a different kind of campaign with weightage on contemporary social issues instead of the traditional caste politics, didn't win a single seat of the 238 seats it contested in the 243-member assembly.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) with its campaign face Tejashwi Yadav, who is much younger to Nitish Kumar, also performed poorly.

In a political career spanning 50 years, Nitish Kumar's 'staying power' has defied both sceptics and detractors every time they predicted he would be history.

A chief minister for a record 10th term, he has broken into the national top-10 list of longest-serving heads of government.

Born in 1951 in Bihar's Bakhtiyarpur, Kumar entered politics during the JP movement. He joined the Janata Party and unsuccessfully contested his first assembly election in 1977. His first electoral victory came in 1985.

Kumar stood out for his ability to address governance deficit, unlike a majority of the breed reared in the socialist stable, but was often accused of pursuing politics of opportunism.

Call it political opportunism or sagacity, his moves have not allowed the BJP to appoint its own chief minister to date, despite enjoying a near hegemonic status nationally and the best performance in recently held assembly polls where the BJP won 89 seats, followed by his party JD(U) with 85.

His frequent switching sides earned him the nickname 'Paltu Ram', whereas he is also called 'sushashan babu' for good governance.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the JD(U) outperformed the BJP in terms of strike rate, winning as many seats despite contesting one less than the BJP, which now depends on the state ally for survival in power at the Centre, having fallen short of a majority.

An engineer by training, Kumar spurned a job offer from the state electricity department and decided to take the political gamble, an oddity among educated youth in Bihar for whom the lure of "sarkaari naukri" remains undiminished.

Unlike Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan, his co-travellers during the movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, electoral success eluded Kumar for a long time. He got the first taste of victory, after three successive defeats, in the 1985 assembly polls when he won from Harnaut as a candidate of the Lok Dal.

Four years later, he entered the Lok Sabha from Barh even as fellow MP from Saran, Lal Yadav, shifted to Bihar and took over as chief minister.

Kumar's first five years as Chief Minister are recalled with admiration even by critics, marked as these were by vast improvement in law and order. Realising fully well that unlike Lalu Yadav, he did not have the advantage of belonging to a populous caste group, Kumar created sub-quotas among OBCs and Dalits who were called "Ati Pichhda" (EBC) and "Mahadalits".

He also brought in measures like free bicycles and school uniforms for schoolgirls, which won him much adulation, and saw him return to power in 2010, leading the JD(U)-BJP coalition to a landslide victory in the assembly polls.

His acceptability in political camps on either side of the ideological divide was on display when he left the BJP in 2022, accusing it of having tried to "break" the JD(U), and, while surviving in power with the RJD, Congress, and Left as new allies, cobbled together a new front that was to be known as the INDIA bloc.

True to form, he jettisoned the anti-BJP front when he felt it was not giving him the respect that was his due, only to be welcomed back into the NDA with open arms.

With inputs from PTI