An add-on to the identity politics in economic terms and a credible political face to deliver it are important takeaways from the Bihar elections
The sight of a rattled Nitish Kumar in his public appearances during the recently held Assembly election campaigns in Bihar intrigued many observers because of his image of a cool, suave and well-mannered politician, who hardly ever breached the decorum of public life. But in his speeches, he not only lost his poise but also became personal in his comments against his adversaries. This made people wonder as to what went wrong with him, given his reputation as a seasoned and confident leader. These days though, the parties and leaders actually get to know the real mood of the people only during electioneering due to defunct organisational networks and, therefore, the sight of leaders losing balance during the election should not surprise us.
So, when post-Covid travails of the people started unravelling themselves in the midst of an election in Bihar, Nitish would have definitely sensed the slide of his popularity, the erosion and limitation of his brand of social justice politics. Political analysts believed that it was Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) leader Chirag Paswan, who was seen by many as the BJP’s proxy to keep him in check and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav’s populist job promise that unsettled him. But things appear much deeper and to understand the whole gamut of it, one needs to take a snapshot of Bihar politics, particularly the period in which the game of social justice got played out.
Ironically, Nitish seems to be both a beneficiary and victim of social justice politics. He and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav have been its architects for the last three decades. Together, they have evenly shared the ruling years, setting the political narrative and even forcing the national parties like the Congress and the BJP to bend backwards and play second fiddle to them in order to survive in the State. They rode on the high tide of Mandal politics with finesse and dismantled the cultural-political hegemony of the upper castes in Bihar’s social fabric.
Since Bihar had not witnessed a social reform movement like some other regions of India during the colonial period, their politics struck a responsive chord with the backward castes. The social justice politics, which they spearheaded, resulted in the much-awaited course correction in the State and they became the recipient of its political dividends. But one day this politics had to hit its dead end and if the people’s ire against Nitish, and this not going out rightly in favour of Tejashwi in the current Assembly election, is any indication, then it seems to have already reached that moment. The Covid crisis only precipitated this process by exposing the underbelly of the State, with the sight of lakhs of beleaguered migrant workers parading and dying on the highways and their images going viral through social and electronic media.
But does this mean that the politics of social justice, which promised both dignity and livelihood to the under-privileged, has outlived its utility and has come of age in Bihar? And to what extent is Nitish culpable in the derailment of this project of social justice? Why did this discourse falter in adding economic content to the rhetoric of reservation and representation?
It would be unfair to say that the second generation social justice politics based on economic agenda did not take off at all in Bihar. Lalu, no doubt, will be faulted for squandering the opportunity. But this may not apply to Nitish. He started his innings with a promise to take the politics of social justice to a higher pedestal and add the missing economic content to it, without abandoning the process of political empowerment of the backward castes, which had been set in motion. Rather, he tried to make political empowerment more institutionalised and broad-based, compared to the Lalu era.
He not only made the local bodies as new sites of empowerment by reserving political posts for extremely backward castes, women, Mahadalits but also deftly dovetailed the agenda of development and good governance with caste arithmetic.
Therefore, his first five-year tenure definitely held out hope for all and sundry with the law and order improving in the State and the GDP hovering above the national average. He even lowered the anti-upper caste tirade of Lalu’s regime. And this was not an ordinary achievement, given his constraints, which included the loss of mineral-rich Jharkhand, empty coffers and the tattered administration bequeathed by his predecessor.
The much hyped economic growth of his era was not going to last long, with construction activities contributing substantially to this growth story without adding much in the manufacturing, agriculture and other key sectors of the economy. The result was that Nitish’s good governance agenda floundered on generating employment, arresting migration of workers and turning around agriculture and allied activities, which could have acted as the engine for employment and economic growth. The infrastructure definitely improved, particularly the roads and electricity. But this was not enough for the new aspirational class, which was in the making among the backward castes, in particular, due to several factors, including the affirmative action programme.
Problems for Nitish further got compounded when he started vacillating politically in the aftermath of Narendra Modi’s rise to the national scene. This took a heavy toll on his political credibility and severely constrained his manoeuvrability. The astute politician in him must have sensed that somewhere along the way he had lost the plot, with people restive about unemployment in a resource-starved State, the populist and majoritarian politics stacked against him and his advancing age not on his side.
Does this mean that Bihar is heading for a post-social justice era in politics? Though, looking at the current election result, it is too early to write an obituary of social justice politics in the State. But in search of a new meaning, the old style politics based on pure caste arithmetic of the Mandal era will not work. Tejashwi’s failure to cash in on Nitish’s sliding popularity, largely due to his father’s legacy and RJD’s poor track record on development and economic justice, is indicative of that fact. Therefore, one can say that an add-on to the identity politics in economic terms and a credible political face to deliver it are important takeaways from this election in Bihar.
(The writer is Associate Professor in Political Science, Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi)