The Hindu WHAT LIES AHEAD? The real test of the ‘grand alliance’ will come towards the end of 2015 when the State goes for Assembly polls. Picture shows Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad (left) and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar at an election meeting in Hajipur, Bihar. Photo: Ranjeet Kumar
More evidence is needed before the ‘grand alliance’ in Bihar is termed a success, as strong indications of communal polarisation exist despite its victory in the by-elections
All those who have been anxious to figure out the direction of Indian politics after the unprecedented victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in May this year have had their eyes fixed on Bihar, where a newly formed alliance between Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) took on the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in the recent by-polls to 10 Assembly seats. The “grand alliance” — as the coalition of the two Socialist leaders, who were together until 1993 and bitter enemies subsequently, is called — won six seats; the BJP won only four. The Congress had also hitched on to this bandwagon.
The victory in six seats has been almost universally described as a clear success of the “grand alliance” experiment in turning the tide for “secular” politics, so much so that archrivals in Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh are being advised by commentators to join hands to push back the BJP, taking a lesson from the Bihar experiment. But a closer look at the results would show that describing the Bihar outcome as proof of the success of the new alliance may be an exaggeration.
To understand why, we first need to examine what the new alliance set out to achieve. The BJP-led alliance had won 31 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar in May. Paraphrasing and summing up the arguments of the Nitish-Lalu duo, the alliance sought to consolidate the backward castes and the Muslims in a social coalition to stop the BJP in its tracks. The “grand alliance” defined its politics in terms of the twin principles of “secularism” and “social justice.” In this parlance, “secularism” is used and understood as a willingness to reach out to, and accommodate, Muslim minorities in power sharing; “social justice” broadly implies a pre-eminence of backward castes in representation.
Outcome of the polls
If we examine the by-poll results against this backdrop and organise the outcome accordingly, it would be as follows:
One, in the “grand alliance,” all upper caste candidates won and all Muslim candidates lost.
Two, of the six seats that the JDU-RJD-Congress “grand alliance” won, four were won by upper caste candidates — two Bhumihars, one Rajput and one Brahmin. A Dalit won from a reserved constituency and the other seat was won by a Yadav. Bhumihars are cut up with the BJP, their favourite party, for not getting a ministerial berth in the Centre.
Three, two of the ten candidates fielded by the alliance were Muslims, and both lost. In Narkatiaganj, the defeat of the Congress candidate Fakhruddin Khan by a margin of 15,742 votes clearly confirms abundant oral evidence of a sharp religious polarisation. In Banka, the defeat of the RJD candidate Iqbal Hussain Ansari by 711 votes does not allow us to conclude that there was polarisation along religious lines, but there wasn’t a backward consolidation behind him evidently.
Four, in the other two of the four seats lost by the “grand alliance,” one candidate was a Yadav and the other a Dalit.
Five, the four seats of the BJP were won by a Kayasth, a Dalit, a Baniya and a Kurmi. In Hajipur, the Kurmi candidate of the BJP won with substantial support from the Yadavs, in a completely counterintuitive churning, as the Kurmis and Yadavs — castes of Mr. Kumar and Mr. Prasad respectively — joined hands, though not wholly, not behind the “grand alliance” but behind the BJP. And it was in Hajipur that Mr. Kumar and Mr. Prasad first appeared together to canvass for the new alliance.
Hardly a success
All this indicates that the six of the 10 seats won by the alliance is hardly a success of the politics it claimed to represent, of “secularism” and “social justice.” Votaries of the “grand alliance” say such an interpretation is “unfair and irrelevant.” Chandan Yadav, Congress spokesperson, said: “The whole attempt of our politics is to take the debate beyond caste and religion; so what matters is the fact that we have won an ideological battle.” Manoj Jha, spokesperson of the RJD, said: “This outcome is an affirmation of our politics which is about next generation issues of social justice — that development cannot be a rhetoric devoid of equity and secularism. We are 100 per cent confident that this alliance will flourish.”
However, to conclude that a social coalition of the backward castes and Muslims is possible, yet again, and can act as bulwark against the BJP tide, we need more evidence than provided by the Lalu-Nitish alliance experiment. In fact, for those who are looking for quick-fix strategies to fight communalism, by stitching up opportunistic alliances devoid of any positive programme but driven merely by a claimed apathy for Sangh Parivar politics, the Bihar results are a warning. If there is a counter to the Modi-led BJP narrative that combines Hindu identity politics with the promise of economic prosperity, that has yet to emerge. While parties opposed to the BJP are trying tired tricks such as quota — the latest is for the Marathas in Maharashtra ahead of the polls — the Bihar results suggest that anti-Muslim polarisation and Hindu voter consolidation that transcend traditional caste barriers are driving politics, and an opportunistic alliance may not be able to offer any meaningful and sustainable alternative to it.
The Bihar by-polls had no bearing on who would rule the State or the country, and in that sense, the stakes were limited for the public. The real test of the “grand alliance” will come towards the end of next year when the State goes for Assembly polls, and when the fundamental question will be framed as “who will rule Bihar?” Mr. Kumar’s governance credentials are formidable but his caste support base is thin; for Mr. Prasad, the caste base is formidable, but his governance track record is nothing to advertise. The alliance seeks to overcome their respective weaknesses. The alliance cannot be written off as yet, but one must remember that alliances can have unexpected consequences as George Bernard Shaw told a beautiful actress who suggested they have a child who would get his brains and her beauty. Shaw is believed to have told her: “What if the child gets my beauty and your brains?”
varghese.g@thehindu.co.in
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