6 December 2010

by Praful Bidwai

Mr Nitish Kumar has made history in Bihar by leading his Janata Dal (United)-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition to an overwhelming electoral victory and winning 206 of the 243 Assembly seats. The landslide has reduced Mr Laloo Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal to a poor 22 seats, his partner Ram Bilas Paswan’s Lok Janashakti Party to just 3 seats, and the Congress to a pathetic 4 seats, its lowest-ever Bihar score. Bihar has no official Opposition, which must win at least one-tenth of the Assembly seats. The results have important implications for national political trends.

Many commentators claim the key to Mr Kumar’s victory lies in his decisive break with identity politics, speeding up GDP growth to 11 percent, and making the bureaucracy work. Some have called him “Bihar’s Narendra Modi”, who has created a new political mould in which caste, religion and other identities don’t matter; what matters is “development” (read, GDP growth). They say the electorate punished the practitioners of the “negativist” politics of “social justice” and reservations.

This is wishful Right-liberal thinking. In fact, Mr Kumar didn’t reject identity politics, but built a new social coalition based on economic status and identities. Thus, in place of the JD(U)’s earlier base among OBCs like Kurmis, Yadavs and Kushwahas, with a smattering of Muslims, he crafted a coalition of EBCs (extremely backward classes) comprising 109 particularly underprivileged, occupation-based layers, Mahadalits (the worst-off Dalits), and Pasmanda (backward) Muslims.

Mr Kumar stitched them together through reservations and affirmative action. As a result, the JD(U)’s share of these groups’ votes rose by a huge 14 to 16 percentage-points. Although this coalition is so far limited to Bihar, it is potentially capable of wider replication and opens up new political possibilities.

However, it would be wrong to attribute the JD(U)-BJP’s stellar performance to the new social coalition alone. Nor are such coalitions easy to construct. Other factors played a role, including Mr Kumar’s effort to improve law and order; revive Bihar’s collapsed social and physical infrastructure; use public investment for growth; and empower women. The improvement in the social and economic climate and personal security, and creation of new jobs, inculcated pride and hope amongst Biharis, probably for the first time since the 1950s.

One of the first things the Chief Minister did is to secure the convictions of 54,000 known criminals through a productive dialogue between the administration and the judiciary. This restored the authority of the state which was widely seen as nonexistent. He also made Bihar’s cities safer. Women who dared not step out after dark could now move about safely. Street crime decreased.

Mr Kumar took numerous measures to empower women, including raising their representation in gram panchayats to 50 percent, overnight creating 4,300 women mukhias (village heads). The government launched a major adult literacy programme for mothers. It donated almost 5 lakh bicycles to girls who enter the eighth standard. It announced a Rs 10,000 prize for girls who score 60 percent in the board examinations. This raised girls’ high school enrolment almost threefold.

These measures made Mr Kumar the favoured choice of half the electorate. Women’s turnout inn the election was an impressive 54.7 percent, 5 percentage-points higher than men’s, and 10 percentage-points higher than in 2005.



Mr Kumar pumped Rs 40,000 crores into the physical infrastructure—almost threefold more than the previous regime. He concentrated on reviving the state school system by improving teacher attendance. Some 100,000 new teachers were recruited on probation, which would encourage better performance. Equally important were special scholarships for the EBCs, Mahadalits and Muslims.

Mr Kumar also tried to revive Bihar’s rotten public health infrastructure—perhaps less successfully. The average number of visits to primary health centres (PHCs) rose from 39 in 2005 to 4,800. Institutional deliveries almost tripled to 14.5 lakhs. Maternal mortality decreased from 376 to 312, although this is still unacceptably high. All these rates must be seen in perspective—as building on an abysmally low base. But the direction is indisputably positive.

This is also true of GDP growth. The bulk of this is in roads (2,400 km) and bridges (2,300), and doesn’t translate into a proportionate rise in incomes for the poor. Bihar still has a long way to go in providing electricity to the people. Its power-generation capacity is a mere 1,850 MW, one-half that of the tiny territory of Delhi and less than one-tenth that of Maharashtra, whose population is only slightly higher than Bihar’s.

The JD(U)-BJP highlighted these achievements in its election campaign, but without extravagant slogans like “Shining Bihar” or “Swarnim (golden) Gujarat”. Its opponents had no real alternatives to offer. The RJD-LJP made unconvincing claims about its past governance record, on which it said Mr Kumar was building. And the Congress got it all wrong when it emphasised Central assistance to Bihar, underestimating the “Bihar pride” factor.

Mr Rahul Gandhi personally campaigned in Bihar and to an extent revived the Youth Congress. But of the 22 constituencies where he campaigned, his party won only one seat. The state Congress chief lost his own seat.

The election, first expected to be a three-way contest, quickly became a plebiscite on Mr Kumar when Mr Prasad announced he’d be his coalition’s Chief Ministerial candidate. This gave the JD(U)-BJP a huge advantage. With just a 3-percentage-point increase in its vote-share from 2005 (to 39 percent), it won 85 percent of seats, a record unmatched even by the Congress in the 1984 Lok Sabha election, when it won 76 percent of all seats. The BJP was luckier still. Its success rate in contested seats was 91 percent, higher than the JD(U)’s 82 percent.

The RJD’s vote-share fell from 23.5 percent in 2005 to 18.8, but its seat tally plummeted sharply, from 54 to 22. This is partially because the RJD-LJP weren’t able to ally with the Congress or the CPI and CPM, as in 2005. Then, the RJD-led combine bagged 30 percent of the vote, only 5 percentage-points less than the JD(U), but won 82 seats to the JD(U)-BJP’s 143. But a weightier factor was the erosion of the RJD’s Muslim support. Evidently, there was some RJD fatigue among Muslims who constitute 16.5 percent of the total population.

The BJP-JD(U) did exceptionally well in the 54 constituencies where Muslims form 20 percent or more of the population. The BJP won 30 of t