Bihar renaissance

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In an overpowering replay of the winter of hope of five years ago, Bihar’s ruling NDA on Wednesday returned to power with an extraordinary three-fourth majority in the Assembly as the state’s people reposed their faith in JD(U) stalwart and chief minister Nitish Kumar’s politics of positive change.

The landslide victory for the JD(U) and the BJP at such an unexpectedly high scale — 206 seats in the 243-member Assembly — clearly meant the month-long polls had effected a cloudburst of votes for the two parties in approval of the coalition government’s performance and promises. Wednesday’s poll results signified Bihar’s willingness to shed its seemingly endemic politics of caste and culture of crime.

The JD(U) and the BJP won 115 and 91 seats as against 87 and 55 seats respectively in the October 2005 polls. The JD(U) had contested 141 seats and the BJP the remaining 102. These super-rich dividends, which came through a rigorous, persuasive goodwill campaign led by Mr Kumar and deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi of the BJP on the basis of the government’s performance, pushed all the Opposition parties virtually to the brink. The RJD-LJP alliance, led by the once-mighty RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, won just 25 seats — 22 for the RJD out of the 168 seats it contested and three for the LJP out of the 75 seats it contested. The RJD, which ruled Bihar for 15 consecutive years before Mr Nitish Kumar, had 54 seats in the outgoing Assembly while the LJP had 11. Worse, Mr Lalu Yadav’s wife, Mrs Rabri Devi, a former chief minister who was the Leader of the Opposition in the last Assembly, lost in both the constituencies from which she contested while both the brothers of LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan lost.

The Congress, which contested all 243 constituencies and raised hopes for itself, won just four seats as opposed to the nine it had won in the 2005 polls. The BSP, which also contested in all the constituencies, failed to win even a single seat. The Left parties met their worst disappointment as only the CPI won one seat. Independents and unrecognised parties bagged seven seats.

The Assembly polls, practically a no-holds-barred contest between the ruling JD(U)-BJP and the RJD-LJP, eventually thoroughly rearranged the jigsaw puzzle of Bihar’s electoral politics by erasing much of the past shades of grey. “This verdict is truly the victory of Bihar’s people. We do not take it as our alliance’s win. The question in the polls was whether the people wanted to go ahead on the path of progress or return to the darkness of the past,” said a beaming Mr Nitish Kumar.
Mr Kumar, who resigned on Wednesday, is likely to take the oath as the next chief minister in a grand ceremony in Patna’s historic Gandhi Maidan on Friday.