Will Nitish Kumar Be the Future Leader of the Opposition?

Hyderabad: Congress leaders are always prone to committing mistakes. This has again come out in the national media. When asked about the possibility of Nitish Kumar being chosen as the future candidate for the post of Prime Minister on behalf of the Opposition bloc, a senior Congress leader said, “ The Congress is too big […]

Hyderabad: Congress leaders are always prone to committing mistakes. This has again come out in the national media. When asked about the possibility of Nitish Kumar being chosen as the future candidate for the post of Prime Minister on behalf of the Opposition bloc, a senior Congress leader said, “ The Congress is too big a party to be overshadowed by regional players”. But the leader forgot to keep it in mind that regional leaders are ruling the roost in most of the states with the Congress being a pale shadow of what it had been in the 1950s and 1960s.

It is still premature to say whether Nitish Kumar will pitch himself for the top job in the days to come. But Congress leaders always show a tendency to underestimate him. The same mistake was committed by Mani Shankar Aiyer in 2015 when a conglomeration of political parties led by Nitish Kumar won the Bihar assembly election. Faced with a question whether Nitish Kumar can become a rallying point for opposition at the national level Aiyer discounted the possibility on the ground that Nitish did not have a presence outside Bihar.

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Aiyer had conveniently forgotten the example of Vishwa Nath Pratap Singh who in the late 1980s had become a focal point of anti Congress forces and had even cobbled up a coalition which was supported by the BJP and the Left parties. V.P. Singh had also very little political presence outside Uttar Pradesh. Even some close confidants of Rajiv Gandhi like Arun Nehru had sided with V.P. Singh. The political space which Nitish Kumar occupies today, does not seem to be at variance with what V.P. Singh enjoyed in the 1980s.

V.P. Singh had banked on two aspects- the Bofors controversy and the Mandal commission report. Both of them helped him to dethrone the Congress. Similarly Nitish Kumar will also have several wherewithals at his disposal- the Pegasus spyware controversy, caste census, National register of Citizens etc to name a few. On all these items Nitish has differed with the BJP. Moreover Nitish is a direct beneficiary of the Mandal politics and this time he will be supported not just by the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress but also by the CPI, CPM, CPI(M-L) and the Hindustani Awam Morcha of Jitan Ram Manjhi. This last mentioned organization has considerable influence among the extreme backward castes.

BJP cadres have been calling Nitish Kumar Paltu Ram (the opportunist who changes sides at will). It is true that Nitish Kumar has shown signs of opportunism at different times of his political career. But this time Nitish was afraid of a repetition of the Maharashtra model when R.C.P. Singh, an ex central minister from the Janata Dal (United) tendered his resignation from the party and said later that joining the BJP was an ‘option’ to him. The BJP-JD(U) coalition in Bihar could have been saved had the BJP publicly distanced itself from R.C.P. Singh.

By Amitava Mukherjee