Musical Chairs

NITISH KUMAR FACED a moral dilemma in the summer of 2013. He had been chief minister of Bihar for almost eight years, making a name for himself as an able administrator in a state once considered synonymous with lawlessness. There was talk about him being a future prime minister. In the previous assembly election, his Janata Dal (United) had won almost enough seats to form a government without requiring the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party, with which the JD(U) and its precursor, the Samata Party, had been aligned for the past seventeen years.

The BJP and the JD(U) had both emerged from the fragments of the Janata Party, which ended three decades of Congress rule, in 1977, before collapsing under the weight of its ideological contradictions. In 1980, the Janata Party’s national executive voted to expel members affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, leading to the formation of the BJP, which had a meteoric rise through its campaign to demolish the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and establish a Ram temple at the site. After the Congress failed to retain its majority in the 1989 general election, the BJP supported a minority government led by the Janata Dal. It brought down the government, a year later, when the chief minister of Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, halted LK Advani’s procession to build national support for the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign—which was accompanied by communal violence that killed over five hundred people—and had the BJP president arrested.

In 1994, two years after a Hindu mob demolished the mosque, Nitish and George Fernandes, a veteran trade unionist from Bombay who represented Bihar’s Muzaffarpur Lok Sabha constituency, broke away from the Janata Dal and formed the Samata Party. At the time, the BJP held 120 seats, 95 of which were from the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. It was competing with the Janata Dal to fill the political vacuum left by an atrophied Congress and needed to forge alliances with regional outfits in states where it was weak.

Bihar, with its history of socialist politics and assertion by oppressed castes, was the one state in the Hindi heartland where the BJP was still a marginal presence. It was also the greatest source of strength for the Janata Dal, contributing 31 of the 59 seats the party won in the 1991 general election. An alliance with the Samata Party, therefore, allowed the BJP to expand its social base in Bihar, weakened one of its two national rivals and undermined any effort to set up a cordon sanitaire and isolate the Hindu Right. In 1996, the two parties collectively won 24 out of the 54 Lok Sabha seats in undivided Bihar, and the BJP emerged, for the first time ever, as the single largest party. Nitish and Fernandes were both union ministers under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the alliance was able to form a state government in 2005.