Rahul vs Narendra Modi in Bihar

Rahul vs NaMo in Bihar Rahul vs NaMo in Bihar


Updated : 23 Jul 2010 11:49:33 PM IST

Every sixth Bihari is a Muslim. (On the other hand, every eighth Indian is a Muslim according to the 2001 census, though some in the community argue that it is closer to every seventh Indian. In any case, ten per cent of India’s Muslims are in Bihar.) The Bihar Assembly polls will take place in around three months, and as always, whoever has the best caste/community combination will win. Incumbent Chief Minister Nitish Kumar tried to split the Muslim vote by attacking his Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi over a minor matter of newspaper ads during the BJP meet in Patna last month. It apparently backfired. The Muslims are now doubly suspicious of Nitish despite his not-inconsiderable achievements of fast-tracking development and improving security; and the upper castes do not look as if they will transfer their votes from the BJP to the JD(U) in constituencies where the latter will fight. Lalu Prasad has gained. After a year of silently suffering the cavalier treatment by his senior UPA partner, he can afford himself a smile. He now has the edge in Bihar.


This has not gone unnoticed by the Congress party which, like Rip Van Winkle, hopes to electorally wake up in Bihar after 20 long years. It is repeatedly said that the Congress cannot ever hope for a parliamentary majority unless it gets substantial numbers of MPs from the Hindi heartland states of UP (80 Lok Sabha seats) and Bihar (40). Bihar, due to Lalu’s dominance for most of the past two decades, seemed a much tougher nut to crack than UP. Rahul Gandhi’s surprising performance in UP in last year’s Lok Sabha elections appears to have given the Congress a ray of hope.

Given the Muslim voter’s importance in the Congress’ traditional electoral strategy, the party not surprisingly last month appointed a relatively young, fresh face as its party chief: Mehboob Ali Kaiser. And then, seeing how Nitish fell flat on his face trying to confuse Muslims by demonising their enemy no. 1, Narendra Modi, the Congress has decided to do one better, and this is perhaps why it aggressively moved the Central Bureau of Investigation against his close associate and Gujarat minister of state for home, Amit Shah. If the CBI summoned Shah, do not assume this is a logical consequence of the investigation of the encounter killing of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh, which has already led to the arrest of an IPS officer (Gujarat claims Sohrabuddin had terrorist links, much like Dawood Ibrahim). If the CBI acted methodically, Ottavio Quattrocchi would be singing arias in Tihar jail. And saying the investigation was ordered by the Supreme Court is besides the fact; the ruling party can turn up or lower the pressure in CBI cases whenever it chooses. The summons is simply intended to show Bihar’s Muslims that the Congress is their enemy’s enemy; so the Congress deserves their votes.

You may wonder whether this strategy is any good, and the best clue is in how Lalu behaves. His core combination of the Yadavs and Muslims in Bihar has been impregnable; you could argue that hubris is what defeated him in the last Assembly elections. His voter-coalition has survived longer than Mulayam Singh’s in UP because unlike Mulayam, Lalu never betrayed his voters by getting into bed with Kalyan Singh, the man who oversaw the 1992 demolition in Ayodhya. If he feels even slightly unsettled by other politicians’ outreach to Muslims, he will react. The fact that he has not and that after a long year in sulk he finally allows himself an occasional smile should tell you how good the Congress’ strategy is.

There are also rumours that the Congress may try to woo back its traditional Dalit voters by announcing that its chief ministerial candidate will be Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar. (She can safely be a candidate because the likelihood of the Congress taking the lead in forming a government is remote.) Though she is the late Jagjivan Ram’s daughter and also India’s first woman Speaker, these are credentials that impress only middle-class newspaper readers, not rural Dalits. More importantly, Ram Vilas Paswan is well-entrenched as Bihar’s Dalit leader. This rumour will thus remain a fanciful notion.

The only sure hope for the Congress party is Rahul Gandhi. Indeed, with Nitish scoring a self-goal by bickering with his alliance partner, and with Lalu not participating in the central government (a source of patronage for party workers and constituents), you would think this is the best window of opportunity that Rahul and his party have in Bihar. Strangely, the princeling has of late kept a low profile.

Perhaps it has to do with his 40th birthday last month, when the youth icon holidayed abroad to celebrate his metamorphosis into a middle-aged man. Around that time, The Economist wrote a damaging piece about Rahul and the fact that no one knew about this future prime minister’s policy on anything (although many have guessed that Rahul believes Union home minister P Chidambaram to be “intellectually arrogant”, as Digvijay Singh put it). Rahul’s beliefs are so secret that you would need Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Inception to enter his dream and dig them out. And since then, Rahul has not stirred from Delhi, preferring to meet party colleagues from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu at his home. (It is not known if he accompanied his brother-in-law Robert Vadra to South Africa to watch the World Cup final that was won by Spain, a country that apparently has emotional significance for Rahul.)

Rahul has promised to visit Bihar in late August; his mother will be addressing a rally at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan a month from now. Somehow that does not seem to measure up to the kind of effort he put into UP where he did the occasional sleep-over at Dalit homes. This is a chance for Rahul to show that his party is on the comeback trail; selecting fresh candidates will help pick up a bunch of seats; and the time to do so is now. If Rahul is just going to attend a couple of functions here and there, the equally returns will be equally meagre.

And if that’s the case, then the contest will be simply Nitish versus Lalu. With three months to go, Nitish has enough time to make up lost ground. In which case, the results will show that Bihar was not just Nitish’s win, but Rahul’s loss. Rahul may try and chalk it up as one of those losses like Gujarat and UP in 2007 that did not matter in the long run. But if the voters see it differently, then the princeling’s plan to become prime minister (and one unfettered by coalition allies) will, to refer back to Inception, remain a dream-within-a-dream editorchief@expressbuzz.com