With Nitish winning praise as a master strategist after the Bihar electoral verdict, I was reminded of an episode back in the late 1960s. We were then classmates at the Bihar College of Engineering (now National Institute of Technology) in Patna. The college union had turned into an oligarchy of a few elite caste boys from senior classes. Nitish was hardly the kind of a boy the oligarchs would have feared. He was three years junior, not aggressive and not much known. He was not even a candidate in the union election. There was a panel opposing the oligarchy, but it had no real challengers. None of us knew Nitish was working behind the scenes, holding meetings with students at night in his hostel room, fixing an alliance of non-elite castes and discontented groups among the savarnas with the purpose of dethroning the oligarchy. When the results came, the oligarchy did not know where to hide. All of us Nitish’s friends had wanted the oligarchy to go. We also had some inkling of Nitish’s involvement in the election. But we didn’t know his engagement was so deep. The difference was between thought and action.
That was Nitish’s first sortie as a political animal. Influenced by Lohia’s socialist ideology, he had joined the Samajwadi Yuvajan Sabha (SYS), the student wing of the Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP), three years before playing the strategist in college. It was his first experiment in political strategy. He’d used the union election as his lab.
The late 1960s and early ’70s were a remarkable phase in student politics at Patna University, of which our college was a part. The Patna University Students Union was a testing ground for Laloo Prasad Yadav, Sushil Kumar Modi, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Ranjan Yadav and Ram Jatan Sinha, all of whom were to become top political leaders later. Nitish Kumar was using the college union as his laboratory, assuming its president’s office twice and mobilising votes of college students for fellow socialist Laloo.
Our Man: Laloo, Nitish and Sushil Modi in the Bihar assembly in 2000. (Photograph by K M Kishan)
The oligarchs were bullies, and could have caused Nitish harm in many ways for working for their defeat. Besides, by mobilising students along backward-caste lines, he ran the risk of being seen as a ‘casteist’ and the Kurmi that he was. He took both the risks. He had the support and sympathy of the majority of college students, so this restrained the oligarchs from harming him in any way, but fighting the ‘casteist’ perception was hard. Working for consolidation of backward castes, including Kurmis, and avoiding being seen as a Kurmi was like walking on a tightrope. But he succeeded. His closest friends, including me, were from privileged castes, but we were not alienated from him, because we saw that, as a Lohiaite, he stood for the mobilisation of backward castes as a whole for bringing them forward and at par with the richer castes—which all of us wanted too—and not for promoting only the interests of his caste.
He has been doing it all his life. He lost the first two elections of his political career because, although he fought from a Kurmi-dominated assembly constituency (Harnaut), the Kurmis did not recognise him as a ‘true leader of Kurmis’ and reposed their trust in a brazenly militant fellow caste-man. Even today, while the Kurmis identify with him as an icon of their collective pride, Nitish does not identify himself with them the way Laloo Prasad does with the Yadavs.
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Nitish’s Successful Strategy to unseat the college union oligarchy showed us not only his political calibre, but also another important trait of his character: inscrutability. He would not just share everything with everyone around him. His close circles were concentric circles: what he shared with one circle he might not with another.
With The NDA: A 2005 photo of Nitish with Vajpayee and NDA leaders. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)
He just does not believe in talking aloud, especially about his strategic plans. He is very conscious that rivals are always elongating their noses to smell what’s going on in each other’s camps. He loves to give them surprises. All the tension in planning and executing the surprise is released after he has delivered it and he is laughing at the angry, dirty and acerbic phrases hurled at him by his bewildered rivals.
Nitish is simple, but not an easy man to deal with. He seldom shouts at anyone. He never uses pejoratives or four-letter words, even in private. In the college canteen, when we would share saucy jokes, he would just react with a smile, lips slightly more open than Mona Lisa’s, amid guffaws shaking the canteen walls. He was with us, yet not with us. He would rather be happy if the subject of conversation changed.
If he looked like a ‘statesman’ amid dirty-mouthed politicians during the 2015 assembly election campaign, it hardly surprised us. He is made like that. He has modelled his speech after his two greatest icons, Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan. He can hit you hard, making you bleed inside without an open wound.
Rough & Tumble Nitish joins in a protest against the Dunkel draft, 1994. (Photograph by Hindustan Times)
He has a sense of humour but is not jovial. He does not crack jokes or enjoy pranks. His company is marked by an absence of playfulness. He has no interest in music, fine arts, sports, theatre or cinema. He makes up for these absences by playing a good host (though his being a vegetarian with occasional indulgence in eggs can sometimes be disappointing to carnivores) and being extremely nice and respectful to you. Conversations with him usually veer round to politics and society. But there again, he would keep it to generalities, rather than specifics. He is very annoyingly conscious of what and who to talk about with whom. Very few people around him really knew why he resigned as chief minister after the 2014 Lok Sabha results or what was going on in his mind during the months Jitan Ram Manjhi was in the chair. Very few people could guess what he was going to do. He would not share it even with us, his closest friends, who met him several times during the period. He visited Goa during the time. I was with him throughout his stay. I kept on telling him to take over as chief minister again in the interest of Bihar, as the state was sliding under Manjhi. He would not say a word in response, just give his characteristic little-larger-than-Mona-Lisa smile.
They say one of the top qualities of a true leader is ‘open door policy’—meet as many people as possible, talk to everyone, high or low, listen to them, for you never know where the good idea can come from. Except for his never-sagging willingness to listen to the common man, Nitish is very choosy in who he meets. He does not socialise. Even as a college student, he would not go out and meet people. He would be nice and warm to anyone who happened to meet him, but he would not go out to cultivate relationships. He did not go to meet top socialist politicians as student politicians like Laloo did.
He has sort of defined his boundaries in this respect: he meets people either for work or for protocol. It is a kind of attitude shaped by his self-dependence in his growing-up years, his semi-rural background, and his strong adherence to values of propriety and dignity—an attitude that has been hardened by his political experience and the self-confidence he has gained. His political life is a success story, so he feels no reason to break out of that mould.
Home & Hearth Nitish visits his old home in Kalyanbigha, Nalanda. (Photograph by Manoj Sinha)
This was one of the reasons he would not take himself to the social media. Narendra Modi was capitalising on social media during the Lok Sabha campaign, but Nitish, despite the prodding of his friends, would not set up a team to increase his social media presence on the net forums to connect to the youth and urban voters: he relied on traditional means of communication, such as public meetings and media. His logic was that his supporters were the rural poor, who were not on the social media. It was only after Modi’s resounding success in 2014 that Nitish realised he had to break out of his mould and use the power of social media. For the 2015 assembly campaign, he hired a team led by professional election strategist Prashant Kishore, and the success is there for everyone to see.
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Nitish Might Have taken time to catch up with the social media, but that does not mean he cannot see into the future or anticipate things. He is very creative in social engineering and administrative management. Nobody before him had thought of separating the backwards among Dalits and Muslims as Mahadalits and Pasmanda to give them benefits of positive discrimination.
He can also think out of the box in political engineering. He is willing to take risks to achieve his goal of gaining or retaining power with no assurance of success. In 2005, he allied with the BJP to fight Laloo even at the risk of being discredited for joining hands with communalists. He partnered with Laloo in 2015 to fight the BJP even at the risk of being discredited for associating with someone with a record of terrible governance. He gave no room to the Hindutva agenda despite his alliance with the BJP. He will be under watch for the compromises, if any, he makes in governance owing to his alliance with Laloo Prasad. Those who know him closely do not expect him to make any. He is uncompromising in governance and always goes by the rule book.
Nitish has no pretensions of being a visionary. But he undoubtedly is a special type of political leader who has a clear idea of where he is going and what he is trying to accomplish. “I am not an intellectual like you people,” he would often tell close friends, half by way of banter, half by way of self-effacement. He sets aside no time to read books. If he reads anything seriously, it is newspapers. But his reading is utilitarian: he gets to know what his political rivals are saying, so that he can frame his response, and keeps track where bad things are happening, so that he can instruct officials to act immediately.
He virtually has no personal life. He is often derided as being chief secretary rather than chief minister. However, it is his focus on implementation that has earned him the huge popularity he enjoys. He is defined by the average Bihar in one line: “He does what he says.” That’s why the majority reposed faith in him in 2015.
Tailpiece: After his gigantic win in Bihar, Nitish is being seen as a potential alternative prime minister candidate in 2019. He was being seen as a potential PM candidate also in the years preceding Modi’s nomination for the post by the BJP. He was well aware of the perception, but he was also aware of his smallness owing to the smallness of his party within NDA. Whenever we talked on the issue, Nitish’s refrain was: “Yeh aukat se fazil baat hai (Our party is not in a position to claim the prime minister’s post).” He broke away from the BJP not because Modi and not he was named PM candidate (as BJP slander goes) but because he knew he could not work with an ‘autocratic’ Modi. The nation is looking at Nitish as a Modi alternative in 2019, and it would be exciting to watch how opposition politics shapes up.
(Arun Sinha, editor of Navind Times, is the author of Nitish Kumar and the Rise of Bihar and Against the Few: Struggles of India’s Rural Poor.)
