Can Nitish do a Naveen?

This is a post I started writing about 4 months ago but then got too lazy to complete it. Going by the recent events in Bihar, this has become a topic about which everyone has got a view but anyways I will finish this now.

After having delivered on some of his promises in the last 5 years and doing something as opposed to the Laloo-Rabri’s regime doing nothing, Nitish Kumar has got an image of being a good chief minister and is likely to improve his performance. Nitish needs another term to build on his successes and deliver long lasting changes and bringing some semblance of economic revival to Bihar. Most of the growth of the last five years has come because of government spending and private investment is still very low. Before that picks up, investors need to be assured that whatever Nitish is doing is long term and this is what the voters in Bihar also want and will support. A question that arises here just before the elections kick in is whether Nitish should look at alternatives politically. The options before him are:

• continue with BJP
• go alone
• team up with congress, and
• go alone now and team up with congress after the elections.

Its high time Nitish considered his options seriously and finalized a strategy sooner rather than later. By the looks of it it seems that Nitish has finalized a strategy and is moving towards going alone. According to me at this point of time, going alone might not be in the best interests if Nitish and JD(U). Nitish is still not assured of Muslim votes so much that he can chuck out BJP and go all alone. He still doesn’t have the votes to pull it off alone and most probably he never will. Naveen was a different case as his father has ruled the state for three terms I think and the opposition was non existent. BJP was facing severe problems there and they were real problems. Congress at that point of time was a non-starter there. That’s what helped Naveen pull off the coup so successfully.

As for Nitish, the best scenario could be that all the four parties in Bihar, JD(U), Congress, BJP and RJD fight alone, and somehow Nitish getting enough votes to cobble together a government with Independents which is highly unlikely. The other scenario could be Nitish goes with Congress post polls and forms a coalition with both extending support to each other at center and state level respectively which will be good for both parties as well as the state but this is a very optimistic scenario.

Going by the current trends however, Nitish would do well to stay with BJP. In the current scenario, he can muscle BJP and get a larger share of seats to contest which will be better for future break off. Also the caste equations which govern the voting patterns in elections in Bihar haven’t change that much, and Muslims are as likely to vote for Nitish as for the Congress-RJD combine. So going after votes which may not materialize, leaving behind the assured votes maybe a mistake. Yes, it can be so that Congress eats into a chunk of BJP’s votes into the state but I don’t see any work done by Congress in Bihar to stage a revival and sticking with RJD will continue to be a sore point for Congress in this elections too.

So in the end we should see the current formulations continue in Bihar for some more time at least.

I know this is a very generalist post and there are no numbers to prove my vague theories. From the next time I might try to put in more effort an dback my theories with some numbers at least.