Is INDIA ready for the NDA–ECI alliance?

In less than a month from now, Bihar will have a new state Assembly, a new government — and quite possibly a new chief minister. At the time of writing, all eyes were still on the tug-of-war over seats, which party got how many and which alliance — the INDIA bloc or the NDA — is looking more (un)settled. Truth to tell: they both have a lot of work to do.

Once again there is a lot of speculation over the future of chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has been around forever, has shown an amazing ability in the past to judge which way the political wind is blowing and has clung to power for nearly two decades, with some interruptions. There are all sorts of rumours about his failing health and, as a consequence, his weakening hold on his own party, the Janata Dal (United). Judging by his conduct in recent public appearances, it is safe to say these are not just rumours.

Talking to a TV channel on 16 October, Union home minister Amit Shah once again said the NDA will contest the election — scheduled in two phases on 6 and 11 November — under the leadership of Nitish Kumar, but also that the allies will decide on a chief minister after the elections. That is as clear an indication as you’ll have of how the BJP is assessing their ally, their ‘face’, the man they still can’t do without in Bihar, the man they must still humour before the elections but will likely stab in the back after.

The two JD(U)s

Nobody really knows how much fight is left in Nitish Kumar. Some pundits project his gift for survival, his reputation for jumping ship and his ideological agnosticism.

Others are busy writing his political epitaph, pointing at the disarray in the party and the shenanigans of the party’s national working president Sanjay Jha and of Union minister Rajiv Ranjan Singh — better known as Lalan Singh — who was JD(U) national president from July 2021 to December 2023, when he was eased out of that office for hobnobbing with Nitish’s adversaries. Both these leaders are still with the JD(U) but are known to be close to the BJP.

Apex court asks Election Commission to fix errors in final Bihar voter list

It is widely rumoured that the JD(U) is ripe for a split, and that the party’s dissident faction will find a welcoming home in the BJP after the elections. Nitish loyalists in the party know this of course, and are trying to forestall a situation where they are left with no bargaining chips.

After the distribution of seats in the NDA revealed that his bête noire Chirag Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) had been given seats that the JD(U) too had claims over, Nitish is believed to have bestirred himself into a rebellious posture, and named JD(U) candidates on some of the 29 seats allotted to Chirag’s party.

Paswan had contested the 2020 Assembly election independently, and while he finally won only one seat, his party is believed to have been instrumental in damaging and downsizing the JD(U) in that election, giving the BJP greater leverage in the alliance and government.

Sensing more trouble ahead and the very real possibility that Nitish may be replaced as chief minister if the NDA wins, his loyalists have demanded that he be declared the chief ministerial face. But that ain’t happening, it seems, and we’ll have to wait and see if Nitish has a trump card up his sleeve.

The EBC gambit

The INDIA bloc too has its own seat-sharing challenges. But if you go by the lapdog-media chorus, you might get an exaggerated sense of the dissonance in their ranks. For example, Mukesh Sahani of the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) made headlines for apparently making make-or-break demands for more seats. It was rumoured that he was negotiating with the BJP moneybags.

For the Congress, which announced its ‘Ati Pichhda Nyay Sankalp’, a 10-point manifesto for the state’s extremely backward communities (EBCs), on 24 September, the commitment to shoring up the voice, representation and empowerment of EBCs is more than just tactical.

The Nyay Sankalp is an articulation of that vision and a declaration of policy intent. But the party and its INDIA bloc allies also understand the strategic value of the EBC vote, which accounts for more than a third of the state’s electorate.

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That understanding was manifest in the efforts to keep Mukesh Sahani onside. While the INDIA bloc had not yet made a formal seat-sharing announcement at the time of writing, Sahani, in a letter to Rahul Gandhi, is learnt to have reaffirmed his commitment to the alliance. He apparently wrote that the issue was not how many seats his party got but how to “fight communal and divisive forces”.

CPI-ML leader Dipankar Bhattacharya also pressed for efforts to keep Sahani on board, arguing that the larger parties should sacrifice a seat or two to preserve unity — and that his CPI-ML was willing to do so. The Congress backed this stance. It is said that following Rahul Gandhi’s intervention, the RJD has agreed to give Sahani 15 seats. According to some other reports, Sahani was also promised a Rajya Sabha seat and two MLCs.

Sahani, who once worked as a set designer in Hindi films, had founded the Nishad Vikas Sangh before the 2015 Assembly elections and had campaigned for the BJP. But he broke away from the BJP over the exclusion of his Nishad community from the Scheduled Caste list. He launched the Vikassheel Insaan Party in 2018.

Engineer Indra Prakash Gupta, who represents the Tanti-Tantwa EBC community in Bihar a.k.a. Paan Samaj, has also now joined the INDIA bloc. In a video statement, Gupta said his Indian Inclusive Party (IIP) has been allotted three seats, which his candidates will contest on his party’s ‘Karni’ symbol. In addition, “three to four” will contest on RJD/ Congress symbols, he said, while announcing his own nomination from the Saharsa seat.

It is worth remembering that in April, Gupta had demonstrated his strength by organising a massive ‘Paan Samaj Adhikar Rally’ at Gandhi Maidan, Patna. Senior journalist Abdul Qadir says the INDIA bloc’s strategy is to signal inclusion through representation.

Appetite for change

This election may also test Bihar’s appetite for real change. Where RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav is promising a government job for every family, Nitish Kumar is back to wooing women with yet another election-time freebie — the Mahila Rojgar Yojana, announced on 29 August. Packaged as a self-employment and entrepreneurship welfare scheme, its obvious allure lies in the Rs 10,000 direct benefit transfer to bank accounts.

On the other hand, the INDIA bloc manifesto, not officially released at the time of writing, reportedly features land re-distribution initiatives like plots for the landless poor in both urban and rural areas. Their promises for EBCs — who make up 36 per cent of the state’s population, according to the state caste survey — include audacious affirmative action like reservations in the state’s private sector and educational institutions.

But we have to wait and see if Bihar really wants change. If you go by the slight margin of 12,000 votes that decided the 2020 election, maybe it has been ready for a while.

The joker in the pack

We also have to wait and see what nasty surprises the Election Commission of India (ECI) has in store, and whether it has done enough already via the opaque and deceitful SIR exercise — and despite all the damning exposés — to game the elections in favour of its political masters.

We have written extensively on the dubious deletions in the draft rolls, followed by the unsubstantiated additions in the final rolls, and the bottom-line exclusion of nearly 76 lakh adults who should legitimately have been on the list.

These ‘intensively verified’ final rolls have mysterious entries in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada, and several addresses are hashtags and gibberish characters. There are still hundreds of voters registered at a single address when the ECI’s own rulebook states that more than 10 voters at a single address must be deemed to be suspect and physically verified. The ECI has not even bothered to reply to the (well-verified) allegation, in a Reporters’ Collective exposé, that it did not use the de-duplication software it has had since 2018 to clean up the Bihar rolls.

There is enough reason to believe the voter rolls are not clean. Is that, then, the joker in the pack?