It is sad to see a promising politician stumble and be in danger of falling flat on his face. Till the Janata Dal United’s (JDU) setback in Bihar in the last parliamentary polls in 2014, its foremost leader, Nitish Kumar, was riding high. He had won two successive assembly elections in 2005 and 2010 and was seen as someone who could be prime minister one day.
However, the blow that his party suffered at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies in 2014, when the saffron combine won 31 of the 40 seats in Bihar, clearly threw Nitish off balance. It is evident from some of his recent acts that he hasn’t yet recovered his poise, although he demonstrated his continuing influence in the state by decisively defeating the BJP in the 2015 assembly elections.
After the 2015 victory, it might have been expected that Nitish would settle down to give good governance to Bihar, which has been his hallmark for the last 10 years. Unfortunately, these hopes have been belied. Instead of focusing on development, Nitish is bogged down with his latest obsession of ‘prohibition’. This fetish is a new one for him. Throughout his career, as a partner of the BJP and later as the Chief Minister of Bihar — from 2005 to 2014 — Nitish had never mentioned the subject. It is unlikely that he thought long and hard on the matter during this period, weighing all the pros and cons, including the rise of Al Capone and the Mafia in America in the 1920s as a result of the ban on liquor consumption.
Instead, like most Indian politicians, he is obviously guided by short-term considerations, generally related to cultivating support bases. In this case, Nitish’s objective is to win over the votes of women who hold up half the sky, according to Mao Zedong. Primarily, he is targeting the poor, lower middle-class and rural women, leaving out those in the higher strata of society. Nitish’s claim is that prohibition will reduce, if not eliminate, instances of women being beaten up by inebriated husbands. Following his diktat, the chief minister’s supporters say that the villagers have never been happier.
So far, so uplifting.
However, Nitish has gone where no advocate of abstinence has gone before — to borrow a line from the Star Trek science fiction series — to formulate an unprecedented law that will incarcerate not only the offender, but all adult members of his family. Thus, the sins of the consumer will engulf his relatives as well. There are also provisions for the confiscation of the offender’s property and penalising an entire village for harbouring the degenerated reprobate.
It is not known if the proposed bill will finally become law in its present egregious form, or whether it will pass the scrutiny of the judiciary. But, at the moment, it does seem that the Bihar chief minister is being driven by a compulsive fad which is capable of clouding one’s judgement.
Fodder scam
It is possible that Nitish’s weak political position, vis-a-vis his foe-turned-uneasy friend Lalu Prasad Yadav, is behind his current mania. After all, Lalu’s Rashtriya Janata Dal had forged ahead of the JD (U) by winning 80 seats with 18.4 per cent of the votes in last year’s assembly elections, with the JD (U) winning 71 seats and 16.8 per cent of the votes. Moreover, in the new assembly, one out of every four members is a Yadav, the most influential of the backward castes. While the Yadavs make up 14 per cent of Bihar’s population, the Kurmis — the caste that Nitish belongs to — comprises only 3.8 per cent.
In terms of both seats in the assembly and support base, therefore, Nitish is politically vulnerable to Lalu. Nitish also knows that he would not have been the CM if the RJD leader had not been debarred from holding any office by the judiciary because of his conviction in the fodder scam.
Notwithstanding this disadvantage, Lalu was the driving force behind the success of the RJD-JD (U)-Congress combine in the last assembly elections. The appointment of the 26-year-old political novice, Tejashvi Yadav — Lalu’s second son — as the deputy chief minister is a concession that the JD (U) had to make to the RJD leader’s clout.
Given these vulnerabilities, Nitish evidently had no option but to look for another group of supporters beyond his tiny caste base. But his experiment with prohibition, which has been tried unsuccessfully in several states — Haryana being the latest — is unlikely to be the Bihar chief minister’s magic wand, not least because the Bihar exchequer’s annual loss of revenue will be Rs400 million (Dh21.9 million), which the state can ill-afford. Besides, the half-hearted nature of Nitish’s policy is evident from the exemption that has been granted to toddy, a traditional beverage of the poor in Bihar.
As the humble toddy crosses the rich-poor divide to reach middle-class homes, Nitish will find himself on a slippery slope.
— IANS
Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst.
