Bihar Assembly Elections Oct-nov 2005

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Bihar back in picture
<b>Back in the picture</b>

<i>Will the new politics survive, will the old economy change, and what on earth will Rabri Devi do now?</i>

ASHOK MALIK 

Ashok Malik Two days before the Bihar assembly election results, Nitish Kumar was at a dinner in Delhi, still answering questions from doubting Thomases about why he felt so confident — quietly confident, as befits the man’s understated demeanour — of victory.

Finally, exasperated and allowing himself a hint of a smile, Nitish broke his silence, ‘‘Arre bhai I agree there has been some MY consolidation, but there are others who vote also ... Don’t non-MYs vote?’’

Having made his point, he threw his head back and said, almost wistfully, ‘‘I have no complaints. The Election Commission did a good job, all our grievances were addressed. This election has been a genuine test of popularity — if Laloo wins he is more popular, if we win we are more popular. There will be no scope for doubt.’’

A little later the same evening, Sushil Modi — BJP leader and Nitish’s ally in Bihar — silenced another interrogator keen to know the difference between the February and November elections. ‘‘The mood for change,’’ replied Sushil, ‘‘was strong, very strong.’’

The two politicians were to prove prophetic. Between them they had spelt out the three reasons that made the difference in Bihar this time. They even named the final tally: ‘‘140 plus’’.

So it turned out to be, thanks to the arithmetic of caste coalition building, the rigorous physical framework laid out by the EC — and the chemistry of change in a society yearning to move on.

In Laloo’s defeat Bihar has made the journey to post-Mandalism. Caste is still important, OBC empowerment is still a dominant theme — Nitish, after all, is a Kurmi — but no longer can ‘‘Backward assertion’’ be seen as synonymous with Yadav raj and substitute for proactive government.

Laloo, the Mandal movement’s poster boy, had started to think of himself as the whole poster. He’s been shaken out of his time warp — much like his mustachioed man Friday who told NDTV 24x7 at 9 am on Tuesday, ‘‘Hum dus baje ka baad jeetenge, jab gaon ka vote gina jayega (We’ll win after 10 am, when the rural votes are counted).’’

In a sense, this election welcomes Bihar back to India. In the years after the decline of the Congress, state after state went through a chaotic interlude before settling into a sort of bipolarity. From Tamil Nadu to Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh to Kerala, Indian states are increasingly two-party — or two-alliance — battlegrounds.

<i>
<span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>
This political fragmentation after the fake Mandalism/social justice movement had weakened the center for over 15 years. The unstable center could not handle the growing threats from TSP and China in the 90s</span>
</i>

Bipolarity — as opposed to menacing monopoly or messy multipolarity — lends itself to relative stability, keeps governments under watch and curbs the space for blackmailing ‘‘third forces’’ who jump from one ship to the other.


The two states that spent the 1990s resolutely resisting the natural evolution towards a bipolar system were Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. With this election, Bihar has ended its boycott. Two coalitions centred on individual core groups — Yadavs for the RJD; non-Yadav OBCs and the upper caste for the BJP — have demonstrated a certain sustaining power.

If they continue to define the Bihar polity — such as it is — the state could be far more pacific than the imminent ‘‘caste wars’’ direly predicted by Congress cronies on DD News right through Tuesday.

Are there larger, national implications of the Bihar election? For a start, the NDA is back in business, having conquered a state where it was a write-off a year ago. That the alliance remained intact despite 18 months out of power — even if Congress functionaries were happily planting stories all of this past winter about how ‘‘Nitish could join the UPA’’ — indicates its resilience.

If obituaries of the NDA were obviously overstated, the UPA needs to concoct a new elixir for itself. True, the government at the Centre is in no danger. Yet, Ram Vilas Paswan will now be Laloo’s — and the CPI(M)’s — fall guy and probably be turfed out of the ruling alliance. Junior allies will get more prickly. A bolstered NDA — particularly the very vocal JD(U) contingent in the Lok Sabha — is going to be rampant.

The biggest problem will be that of the Left. No longer can it afford the luxury of being the UPA’s in-house opposition. ‘‘Fascist forces’’ have captured the ultimate citadel of ‘‘secularism’’. It is the NDA that will now lead the attack on the government, and play the real opposition. Prakash Karat’s phoney war is over.

At the back of its mind, however, the Left will not be thinking of Bihar 2005 as much as West Bengal 2006. As a senior IAS officer in Patna stressed, the EC’s arrangements this time were designed to negate ‘‘scientific rigging’’.

For the first time, Central paramilitary forces didn’t just patrol a district generally but actually manned booths. <b>Two and a half million ‘‘bogus voters’’ were removed from the rolls.</b> The EC requisitioned army and air force helicopters for aerial surveillance.

‘‘It was almost exciting for the voter,’’ said the civil servant, ‘‘to vote under the security of a Punjab commando. He felt that much more confident that his vote would count ... This triggered the mood for change, so much so that by the third and fourth phases, even the bureaucracy felt it.’’

<b>The only people who didn’t sense the ‘‘mood for change’’ were, of course, Delhi’s election tourists, the ‘‘national’’correspondents who happily reported a ‘‘kaante ki takkar’’. On the contrary, among those who did sense change were election observers from West Bengal. As one of them confessed to a Bihar cadre colleague, ‘‘If the EC insists on similar measures in West Bengal in May 2006, heaven knows ...’’</b>

<b>From the land of Gautam Buddha to the land of Chief Minister Buddha, how far can the EC’s dogged struggle for a foolproof election make it a catalyst for change? We’ll know next summer. For the moment, grant Nitish his nirvana.</b><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->