Bihar’s ruling JD(U), reeling under its humiliating performance in the UP Assembly polls and the shadow it has cast on the party’s aspirations to pitchfork its stalwart and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar as the prime minister, is quietly back into its fort of regional politics.
Shorn of its earlier unabashed hubris about the “Nitish model of governance in Bihar” having a national appeal and acceptance, the ambitious regional party has been drawing solace from the rout of the Congress in UP and speaking emphatically about the might of the regional parties in the states. Having burnt its fingers in UP’s political hotbed by losing all of the over 200 seats it contested without any alliance, the JD(U) is yet to provide a cogent explanation for its first major foray into the path of national expansion.
On Monday, Mr Kumar explicitly said the JD(U) would remain a part of the NDA in the event of a mid-term poll in the country and the emergence of a third front.
Mr Kumar’s remarks were viewed as a sign of a calibrated climb-down of a party whose national president, Sharad Yadav, had said at Bhadohi in UP in February that he and his party were going to clean up the “garbage existing in the name of leaders” in UP just like it “ended Lalu’s jungleraj in Bihar”.