After resolving issues with its Mahayuti allies and putting in place their government in Maharashtra, the BJP has shifted its focus to boosting coordination among its NDA partners in Bihar, which is slated for the Assembly polls in October-November 2025.
The NDA constituents in Bihar have made it clear that Chief Minister and JD(U) president Nitish Kumar would again lead the coalition in the upcoming Assembly polls, dismissing speculations that the ruling coalition may do a rethink on the matter.
The buzz made the rounds in the wake of Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s comment in a recent interview to a new channel, when on the NDA’s leadership face for the 2025 Bihar polls, he said, “We will sit together and decide.”
Bihar BJP president Dilip Jaiswal, however, quickly cleared the air, saying “Amit Shah was trying to underscore that he was a ‘karyakarta’ (worker) of a party in which big decisions are taken by the Parliamentary Board”.
Jaiswal then asserted that “Nitish Kumar will continue to lead the NDA in Bihar in the 2025 polls. There are no two ways about it”.
To reinforce this point, the NDA also announced a detailed joint campaign under Nitish’s leadership across the state. According to this plan, Nitish would address joint NDA meetings in every district of the state, starting with a meeting at Bagaha in West Champaran on January 15. He will then proceed to East Champaran, Sitamarhi, Sheohar and Muzaffarpur, and will wrap up the first leg of this campaign on January 22 with a meeting at Vaishali.
Besides the BJP and the JD(U), the Bihar NDA comprises Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) and Chirag Paswan’s LJP (RV).
In Maharashtra, the Mahayuti had gone to the recent polls under then CM and Shiv Sena chief Eknath Shinde, but following its triumph the BJP and the Sena were caught in a power tussle over the chief ministership which eventually went to the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis.
Like in Bihar, the BJP is the senior partner of the ruling coalition in Maharashtra. However, Bihar’s NDA leaders point out that the state’s case is “different”.
“The BJP knows that Nitish is indispensable for the NDA. It will not attempt any bravado ahead of the polls,” a JD(U) leader said.
Echoing this point, a state BJP leader said Jaiswal had to “almost disown” Shah’s remark (on NDA leadership for 2025 polls) within 24 hours. “Nitish will continue to dominate state politics for a while. The BJP can only silently wait for him to walk into the sunset,” the leader said.
Nitish’s leadership received a big boost as LJP (RV) state president Raju Tiwari too backed him to lead the alliance in the Assembly polls. “There is absolute clarity about Nitish leading us in the forthcoming polls. Jaiswal has already cleared the air,” he said, even as the HAM(S) echoed his view.
Despite earning the moniker “paltu ram” over his frequent flip-flops, Nitish has managed to carve a niche for himself in the state politics since 2000, when the BJP chose first offered the post to Ram Vilas Paswan, who said Nitish was the more “senior” leader. It later nominated Nitish (then with the Samata Party) over its prominent leader Sushil Kumar Modi to lead the state.
The move had irked senior BJP leader Kailashpati Mishra, who went on a sabbatical to register his protest against the party’s decision and went on to predict that the party would not grow out of Nitish’s shadow in the future.
His first stint as CM lasted only a week but propelled him as a big leader of the state, a tag he has managed to keep till date.
However, this is not the first time that the BJP has tried to adopt its “twin-track politics” against Nitish. In the February 2005 Assembly elections – which threw up a fractured mandate – as well as the October 2005 polls, the NDA did not project a face but sensing a poor performance in the first phase of the four-phased polls, former Union Minister Arun Jaitley urged the BJP top brass to project Nitish as the NDA’s face.
Jaitley even got BJP’s probable CM face Sushil Modi to declare Nitish as the alliance’s leader.
The move paid off and the NDA crossed the 130 mark in the 243-member House with the JD(U) emerging as the senior partner. Nitish firmly made the CM chair his own while Modi settled as his deputy. Five years later, the NDA swept the polls as the NDA won 206 seats with JD(U) winning 115 while the BJP won 91.
In 2013, Nitish jumped ship and contested the 2015 polls as a part of the Mahagathbandhan with the RJD and Congress. The alliance won 178 seats and Nitish became CM even as the JD(U) emerged as the second-largest party behind the RJD.
Nitish left the Mahagathbandhan in 2017 and led the NDA in the 2020 polls, when the BJP emerged as the bigger player with 74 seats as compared to the JD(U)’s 43. However, Nitish became the CM yet again, even as his party’s tally was lower than the BJP’s figure.
In 2022, Nitish again ditched the NDA, but the BJP reportedly kept its “options open”, even though Shah publicly claimed that the NDA’s doors for him were shut. The BJP also went on to project its Kushwaha leader Samrat Choudhary to counter Nitish. As Nitish returned to the NDA in January this year, Choudhary, who is now deputy CM, was forced to accept him as the NDA’s leader.
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