What Nitish Kumar's latest U-turn means for the 2024 elections + links

'How the turn tables'.

How do parties compete against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s aggressive Hindu nationalism, which seeks above all to turn India’s Hindus – 80% of the electorate – into a loyal votebank? Historically, the idea has been to turn to ‘Mandal politics’, a social justice platform that seeks affirmative action quotas and greater recognition of caste- and class-based inequality within the Hindu population, and beyond.

(The term ‘Mandal’ comes from a commission set up in the late 1970s, which eventually recommended quotas in higher education and government jobs for the section of Indian society known as ‘Other Backward Classes. This was traditionally posed against the politics of the BJP, historically opposed to such quotas and referred to as Kamandal politics, a reference to a water pot traditionally carried by Hindu religious figures).

The Indian political spectrum isn’t distributed across the the progressive-conservative dividing lines that are familiar to electorates in the West. Instead, Mandal vs Kamandal has, historically, been one of the more salient axes to consider.

As various Opposition groups began building their platform to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP in the 2024 General Elections, they turned back to Mandal politics in the hopes of denting the immense success of the BJP, particularly knowing the Ram Temple inauguration – which we wrote about last week – was around the corner.

The significance of Modi's Ram Temple ceremony + podcast announcement

The principal call was for a ‘caste census’, a national survey that would gather social and economic data with a breakdown on caste and community lines – information that has not been collected and formally released by the union government since 1931. (A Socio-Economic Caste Census was conducted in 2011, but the its results have never been released, with the government claiming the results are “shoddy and unusable”).

I wrote about the broader history and context of this demand last year:

India Inside Out: What is driving demands for a 'caste census' ahead of the 2024 elections?

This movement was to emerge out of Bihar, the north Indian state (population: 130 million) known for social justice politics, and one where the BJP has struggled to win power on its own. Bihar’s state government conducted a caste survey of its own and released the data over the last year and a half, sparking calls for increased affirmative action and similar efforts in other Opposition-ruled states. The Congress and its allies hoped that this issue would then provide wind to the sails of the anti-BJP alliance as they approached the 2024 General Elections.

This week, one of the key players in this effort – Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar – jumped ship.

Kumar, whose Janata Dal (United) party was in power in an alliance with other members of the Opposition ‘INDIA’ coalition (the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Congress and a clutch of Communist parties), ditched this grouping and instead, retained power by joining hands with the BJP.

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We spoke about Nitish Kumar on this week’s episode of the Election Tricycle, a podcast with Emily Tamkin and Tom Hamilton where we discuss US, UK and Indian elections every week.

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Now, switching partners is nothing new for Nitish Kumar. This is his ninth time being sworn in as the chief minister of Bihar. He has been in power almost continuously for the last two decades, flipping from having the BJP as a partner (2004-2013, then again 2017-2022) and working with the Opposition ‘Grand Alliance (2015-2017, then again 2022-2024). Each time leaders from both sides either praise him or attack him, depending on whether they stand, only to reverse course once he makes his inevitable flip. As Sankarshan Thakur wrote back in 2017, “the call of conscience is never a poor thing to possess; but it serves infinitely better to possess a conscience on call. Ask Nitish Kumar.”

There is a personal element to his decision: Reportedly the Congress and others in the Opposition were unwilling to give him the respect and, possibly, the title (in this case ‘national convener’ of the ‘INDIA’ grouping) that he hoped for. Kumar has historically harboured prime ministerial ambitions. And he isn’t the only leader in the alliance complaining of arrogant behaviour from the Congress.

But, as always, there are more fundamental political and social reasons for this decision, as well as important takeaways for the 2024 race. The most immediate is that the expectation of Bihar being the only North Indian state where the BJP might drop seats has now been nullified. But here are a few more:

• Is Mandal vs Kamandal relevant?
  Most fundamentally, the Mandal vs Kamandal fault-line today is not the same as it was in the 1980s or 1990s. First off, in the 1980s both of these were ways to take on the Congress, then the still dominant national party. In the decades since then, the BJP, while still uncomfortable with the idea of a caste census – broadly because it frames the debate in terms of a competition for resources from within the Hindu fold – has not remained the anti-quota party that it once was. The BJP leadership in Bihar supported the demand for a caste census (even as the national party remained mum) and has made efforts to be seen as a party that embraces OBC demands. Moreover, the Mandal plank may not be as salient as the Opposition expected. It certainly did not help the Congress retain power in the three north Indian states that voted in late 2023.

• What happens to Kumar’s JD(U)?
  If Kumar had concluded that the national contest was one the INDIA grouping couldn’t win, he turned his attention back to politics within Bihar – where his party, the Janata Dal (United), has found its electoral support diminishing as it gets squeezed between the BJP and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the bigger anti-BJP party that was likely to demand the chief ministerial post had Kumar remained in the partnership. Going with the BJP allows Kumar to maintain his relevance heading into the national elections, with hopes of taking that momentum into the state elections due in 2025.

• What about the BJP in Bihar?
  The flip-flop isn’t just from Nitish Kumar’s end. Last year, the BJP’s Amit Shah said that their doors have been shut to Nitish Kumar “forever.” So why did it accept him back into the fold? The answer lies in the underlying politics of Bihar, which have not fallen into a simple binary in the way they have in other North Indian states. As Anand Vardhan explains, the BJP “has come to grips with the fact that, despite its OBC and Dalit inclusion drive, national narratives, welfare politics, and Modi’s appeal, there are segments of constituencies where it has made only little headway, or faces stiff competition in the state.” In that context, even though tying up with the JD(U) has stymied growth within the BJP’s state leadership for decades now, it has felt the need to do so to shore up its prospects in an important North Indian state, where – had Kumar stayed with the Opposition – it might have faced challenges and dropped seats in both national and state elections.

• Where does this leave ‘INDIA’?
  It was no coincidence that the INDIA grouping had its first meeting in Bihar’s capital, Patna, in 2023. As Vikas Pathak writes, “Nitish, who chaired that meeting, is with NDA; [West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata] Banerjee has said the TMC will contest all seats in West Bengal; AAP has said it would go alone in Punjab, and Akhilesh Yadav sprang a surprise Saturday by announcing just 11 seats to a Congress that was thinking of contesting on 20. Mayawati is silent in UP and Opposition unity has crumbled in Bihar.”
  Challenges to the Congress leadership of the Opposition were inevitable after its miserable performance in the state elections in late 2023, and that has become evident over the past few weeks. But Kumar’s departure undermines its social justice plank more fundamentally, given his identification with the caste census cause and Bihar’s role in conducting it. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has tried to protect his party’s positioning, claiming it had to force Kumar’s hand on the census. Whether voters will actually buy this narrative, however, remains to be seen.

A few more pieces to read on this:

• Roshan Kishore’s excellent explanation (written at the time of the last U-turn) of how Nitish Kumar continues to carry out palace coups against himself and still maintain his relevance in Bihar politics.

• Asim Ali points out, among other things, that this situates RJD well for 2025 state elections, but not this year’s national polls.

• “Political parties that are completely dependent on a single face, do not have a large social base or organisational resources, are likely to get squeezed as politics become polarised. The BSP in Uttar Pradesh, and JD(S) in Karnataka are examples of this emerging phenomenon. This politics, perhaps in slow motion, is playing out in Maharashtra, too. As for now, Nitish Kumar remains the median of Bihar politics,” writes Rahul Verma.

• “The BJP needs [Kumar] in the Lok Sabha elections to use whatever electoral utility he has. Then the party can go back to completing its unfinished agenda from the 2020 assembly election: Finish Nitish Kumar. Once Modi is in office for the third term, the BJP can afford to pull the rug from under Kumar’s feet and try to realise the BJP’s actual potential in Bihar,” writes DK Singh.

• "The Sangh Parivar has moved to the centre on the question of social justice... The pendulum of social justice politics might stop swinging for now. Mr. Kumar’s opportunism might end with the complete assimilation of his politics by the BJP,” writes Varghese K George.

• Anjishnu Das looks at the seat and vote share data underpinning Nitish and the BJP’s decision-making.

• Shoaib Daniyal on why the anti-defection law doesn’t apply here, and what that tells us about Indian politics.

Ram Temple Links

• “In the mind of BJP leaders, the temple is not a puranic project but a political one. They have never tried to hide this. It is a project to create bhakti or devotion to something that holds the nation’s cultural & civilisational imagination together,” writes Sugata Srinivasaraju.

• Amrita Dutta speaks of how the Hindutva project demands complete surrender, including of our memories of the violent demolition of 1992:

“Some argue, despite all evidence, that the January 22 inauguration is an apolitical resolution for a vast majority of the faithful, and that the reminder of December 1992 is a cussed way to deny them this moment.

But this is closure without compassion, or remorse, or inclusion – that only whets the Hindu appetite for Kashi and Mathura and more. The project of Hindutva, which faces little effective opposition, is demanding complete surrender, even of our memories. How many of us will hold out?”

• Isaac Chotiner speaks to Mukul Kesavan about the temple inauguration:

”The reason that this is symbolically so important is that the Ram Mandir was the ramp which brought the B.J.P. to power. It allowed them to create this astonishing mobilization of Indians for political purposes. It helped the B.J.P. get into government, in the late nineteen-nineties, and then Modi ran with it. And, while he has achieved and consolidated his political power through two elections and an absolute majority, I think it’s always been the larger ambition of the R.S.S., which is in a sense Modi’s progenitor, to literally reconstitute the Indian Republic. There is a sense in which they think of the period between 1947 and 1950, when the constitution was written, as one where the soul of India was suppressed, and they would like to do it over again.

• Indian civilisation is being “disrobed” in the city of Ram, writes Ashutosh Bharadwaj.

• Suhas Palshikar on the erasures that are embedded into the inauguration and the way it was celebrated:

“We are supposed to be witnessing a transition. It is another matter that its nature and consequences are deeply controversial, though currently nobody seems to be in the mood to recognise this. With the inauguration of the new temple at Ayodhya, it is said, historical wrongs have been righted. But more than that, with the new temple, a new Ram is being launched. The talk of the town is not so much about deep devotion or faith, but about the grandiose nature of this moment…

What does the new temple mean for someone who is persuaded by the aura of the temple and the arrival of the new Ram? It is the erasure of guilt. A society that witnessed the vandalisation of a disputed structure and sustained violence is happy that the temple now outshines many other places of worship, that it will become a new attraction for international tourism. Huge resources were generated by a community to avenge the past and unimaginable political investment was made into an exercise that should have been a matter of spiritual pursuit and religious learning. All this, without guilt. Some democracies are built on reconciliation, some trudge on the debris of conscience. Ours will be an outlier to have a formal democratic mechanism decorated with sumptuous erasures.

• Samar Halarnkar on the transformation of Modi from chowkidar to divine messenger.

• Pratap Bhanu Mehta:

“The Ram whose role in Indian cultural and spiritual life was one whose centre was everywhere and circumference nowhere, has now been anchored to a centre. Ram has been transformed from a radiant glow of righteousness, compassion, and imaginative power into something merely instrumental: A litmus test for national loyalty. We are now more valorous devotees of Ram — more than Tulsidas or Gandhi, who rejected the logic of retaliation. You now have to swear allegiance to this Imam-e-Hind, or else.”

• Tabassum Barnagarwala reports on how Hindutva mobs ran amok in Mumbai’s Mira Road a day after the inauguration.

What Can the Congress Learn From Pran Pratishtha of Ram Lalla at Ayodhya?

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