Nitish Kumar’s administrative acumen stood him in good stead

Public memory, they say, is short. Is this correct? Well, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has proved that it is both correct and incorrect. Owing to his repeated political somersaults—allying with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then fighting it, again joining hands with it—he has been lambasted and lampooned as ‘Paltu Ram,’ a man who keeps changing his stance. Nobody has forgotten that. But when it came to choosing between the so-called Paltu Ram and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav, the people of Bihar didn’t waver in supporting him; they gave him a massive mandate. Of course, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and the saffron brigade’s impressive election machinery played a critical role in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s huge victory in the Bihar Assembly elections. Nitish has also demonstrated that providing better administration and law and order can make public memory very long. A caveat needs to be added here. Despite his claim of being ‘Sushasan Babu’ (Mr. Good Governance), he has not been able to make Bihar administration a paragon of excellence and peace. For instance, the overall number of crimes in Bihar soared 80.2 per cent from 2015 to 2024, according to the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) data.

As per available national-level data, from 2015 to 2023 there was just 33.5 per cent rise in the total number of crimes in the entire country. In the last 10 year, the state has figured in the list of the 10 worst states in terms of overall cases of crimes. And yet, despite a less than satisfactory record on this count, the sobriquet Sushasan Babu doesn’t appear to be misleading or out of place, for what preceded was a veritable ‘jungle raj.’ Political slogans and accusations are seldom accurate; jungle raj is one of those rare instances. Coined by the opponents of Lalu Prasad Yadav, father of Tejashwi, the term perfectly describes the conditions that existed when RJD was in power for 15 long years, from 1990 to 2005. That was the period when the rule of law ceased to exist in the populous Hindi state. During the heyday of Lalu, the politics-crime nexus bloomed as never before, or since, for anarchy had acquired the veneer of social justice. Law and order, constitutional properties, reasonableness in politics, decency in public life, etc., were dismissed as upper caste abominations. Infrastructure development was never on the radar of Lalu rule.

Intellectuals on the Left tolerated, if not appreciated, the Lalu regime for its commitment to uplift ‘those masses.’ The real people, however, are not some gathering of automatons; they are not the masses; their requirements and concerns are real, which cannot be addressed by the theorizing of deracinated academics and editorialists. Solutions to the problems of people are predicated upon the competence of the state; under Lalu, the state, to use a Marxian term, had ‘withered away.’ The withering away, however, not in the utopian sense—when its role becomes superfluous. In Bihar, the withering away was the result of the anarchic situation. Nitish Kumar’s administration, while suboptimal in efficacy, was infinitely better than that provided by Lalu. People did not forget that; the NDA’s strategists, campaigners, and activists succeeded in keeping that memory alive. All politicians should learn an invaluable lesson-good governance can be electorally rewarding.