Bihar shakes off its old normal

Bihar shakes off its old normal

So, the insurance that NDA had sought to counter the anti-incumbency sentiment of the 15-year-old Nitish Kumar government — PM Narendra Modi — worked. In a see-saw battle that clearly makes Bihar the new ‘swing state’ of elections, BJP now is the net winner: both in terms of being on the winning combine, as well as being the leading turbine of the winning NDA combine for the first time in Bihar. The gambit of using the prime minister as a ‘neelkanth’ — soaking up the toxins of not just anti-incumbency, but also the anger against the Kumar-led government resulting from perceptions of how it has handled the Covid pandemic, especially returning migrant workers — also shows that Modi remains the best electoral tool in the NDA bag, six years since he became PM.

The other winner is Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Tejashwi Yadav, who nearly managed to put a spanner in the work of BJP/NDA. RJD emerged as the single-largest party in the contest. On its part, it was Congress that showed its genius to effortlessly turn itself into a millstone around yet another alliance partner’s neck. Clearly, Bihar has a new set of contestants in BJP and RJD. As a result, what one hopes will be the ‘new normal’ in Bihar is a healthy mixture of politics that addresses both economic and social (read: governance and law and order) concerns.

The tight fight in Bihar, in a way, is an auto-corrective — shaking off NDA’s dependency on a perceived ‘past its sell-by’ Nitish Kumar regime. Competitive politics now allows both Yadav or the next NDA government (even if it is nominally ‘chief ministered’ by Kumar) to take development and governance in Bihar to its next logical and logistical level. The poll has also shaken off the ‘Ghost of Hamlet’s father’ carried by Tejashwi — Lalu and Rabri Pvt Ltd — allowing the young leader to hone RJD into a modern electoral fighting machine. And fight another day. Despite the nail-biting finish and ding-dong through the day, one can very well describe Bihar entering a new phase in a continued glide path out its old ‘Bimaru’ state.