Bihar Ally Leaves Opposition Coalition Over Modi’s Elevation

Saurabh Das/Associated Press Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar, at a conference on internal security in New Delhi on June 5.

NEW DELHIâ€" The efforts of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, to come to power after general elections due in April received a setback Sunday as a key regional ally decided to part ways.

Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of the eastern state of Bihar, who belongs to the Janata Dal (United) party met the governor of Bihar D.Y. Patil on Sunday afternoon and declared the end of his 17-year-old alliance with the B.J.P. The J.D.U.- B.J.P. alliance has won two state assembly elections in Bihar.

At a press conference, Sharad Yadav, the president of the Janata Dal (United) party, formally announced the end of the coalition with the B.J.P. “The way things have been moving in the B.J.P in the past six to seven months, it became necessary for us to leave the B.J.P.,” said Mr. Yadav.

Mr. Yadav has also resigned as the convenor of the National Democratic Alliance opposition coalition.

It was a veiled reference to the B.J.P.’s appointment of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the chief of its election campaign. Accused by many of having looked away as Hindu nationalist mobs killed more than 1,000 people in an anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, Mr. Modi has been bidding for the post of prime minister in 2014, all but saying it in as many words.

Mr. Modi’s elevation within the B.J.P. posed a problem for the chief minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, whose political base includes Muslim voters, 16.5 percent of Bihar’s population. The J.D.U. fears losing power if the Muslim vote abandons it for being seen as part of an effort to make Mr. Modi the prime minister. The decision was not a difficult one for Mr. Kumar. In the 2010 Bihar state legislative elections, the J.D.U.-B.J.P. alliance won 206 out of the 243 state assembly seats. Mr. Kumar’s J.D.U. had won 115 and the B.J.P. had won 91 seats. Mr. Kumar requires a simple majority of 121 seats to remain the Chief Minister and is just six seats short of a majority in Bihar, and hopes to gain support from six independent legislators.

“Even when we would tell the story of progress of our historically poor state that was seen by the B.J.P. as an attack on someone,” Mr. Kumar added in an unnamed reference to Mr. Modi, who tries to position himself as a “development man.”

No political party has come to power in India since 1996 without forming a coalition with regional parties. Bihar sends 40 lawmakers to the lower house of the Parliament. In the last general elections in 2009, the J.D.U.-B.J.P. alliance won 32 of the 40 seats.

Mr. Kumar’s decision to leave the B.J.P.-led National Democratic Alliance opposition coalition will make it even more difficult for the B.J.P. to cobble together 272 lawmakers in its attempt to form a national government in 2014. The B.J.P. won 18.8 percent of the votes in the 2009 general elections, which translated into 116 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Parliament, and its allies another 43. Even if Mr. Modi galvanizes the B.J.P.’s voters and they come out in greater numbers on the polling day, it would increase their voting share, and essentially the margins of victory in the seats the B.J.P. had already won or had lost narrowly. But Mr. Modi’s campaign is unlikely to lead to a substantial increase in B.J.P.’s seats as the party is limited to the north and west of the country.

From the rest, it would need allies. Mr. Modi’s leadership is seen as limiting the B.J.P.’s ability to woo allies, who either have Muslim votes or personal ambitions for the prime minister’s post.

“This was not an alliance of principle but power sharing between two parties whose social bases are not only different but whose interests clash with each other,” said Ashok Yadav, a political analyst based in Patna, the state capital of Bihar. “The alliance had outlived its utility and needed an excuse to break.”

While the B.J.P. is said to command the loyalties of upper caste Hindu voters, the J.D.U.’s main social base are Kurmi and Koeri middle caste voters. Mr. Kumar is himself a Kurmi. This was not enough for them to displace Lalu Prasad Yadav, who had governed Bihar, along with his wife Rabri Devi, for 15 years from 1990-2005 by yoking together middle caste Yadav and Muslim votes. Then, in 2005, Mr. Kumar played a new strategy whose rewards he is still reaping.

“Nitish Kumar, a quiet strategist, split the middle caste vote into two, and consolidated the most backward caste in his favor,’’ said Ashwani Kumar, a political scientist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, and the author of the book “Community Warriors: State, Peasants, and Caste Armies in Bihar.” “He even managed to take away many of Lalu Yadav’s Muslim votes by splitting them on caste lines, and similarly divided the Dalit vote. Finally, his victory hinged crucially on upper caste Hindu votes.” Dalits are the former ‘untouchables.’

Among the many firsts of this successful experiment with India’s complicated intersection of caste and religion in politics was the use of caste among Indian Muslims. Mr. Kumar co-opted the “Pasmanda” or “backward” Muslims’ movement against upper caste Muslim domination. The architect of this strategy was a low caste Muslim leader, Ali Anwar, who traveled across Bihar with Mr. Kumar, raising the slogan, “Your fatwa, our vote, no more, no more.”

This “coalition of extremes” brought together Muslims with B.J.P.-allied upper caste Hindu voters with Mr. Kumar’s J.D.U. as a guarantor against sectarian violence and discrimination, but the arrangement existed uneasily. Upper caste Muslim leaders in Bihar would accuse the low caste Muslim leaders of helping the B.J.P. The question of Narendra Modi, seen by many as responsible for the 2002 violence against Muslims in Gujarat, became a key test of Mr. Kumar. Mr. Kumar refused to share a platform with Mr. Modi, and even refused to take flood relief aid from the state of Gujarat.

The B.J.P. has demanded that Mr. Kumar call fresh elections and win without B.J.P. support. “It is not just the upper caste vote but also the cadre of the B.J.P.’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that has helped Nitish Kumar. That organization could pose a challenge to Mr. Kumar,” Ashwani Kumar said.

That may not be so easy for the B.J.P., because Nitish Kumar’s has been a rather popular leadership, credited with development and the improvement of law and order. A survey conducted by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, during the state legislature elections in 2010 showed that an overwhelming majority of voters felt there had been a marked improvement in education and health care infrastructure, and more than 85 percent of respondents felt there had been a decline in crimes such as theft, robbery, kidnapping, and inter-caste and inter-religious violence. Seventy-seven percent of respondents expressed satisfaction with governance, as compared 63 percent in Delhi and 64 percent in Gujarat.

Such ratings had made analysts say that Mr. Kumar could have won the 2010 state assembly election even without the B.J.P. alliance. “The breakup of this alliance shows it is the national parties that need regional parties, not the other way round,” said Sanjay Kumar, an election analyst at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies.

But Nitish Kumar chose to quietly use the B.J.P. cushion to expand his social base. He went from a “coalition of extremes” to leading a “rainbow coalition” that seeks to attract all voters regardless of caste and religion. “Why do you think upper caste voters will desert us?” asked Ali Anwar, the J.D.U. leader who was the architect of the low caste Muslim strategy. “We have been catering to all communities and their interests.”

Khalid Anis Ansari, a scholar researching the Pasmanda movement at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, said that Nitish Kumar will see a new positioning before the Bihar electorate. “Without the B.J.P., he will now occupy the purely ‘secular’ space that Lalu Yadav once did. This will help him consolidate the Muslim vote and the upper caste Muslim vote will come, too. This will help fill the gap left by the B.J.P. voters who could desert him,” Mr. Ansari said.

It is with such confidence that Mr. Kumar not only hopes to do well in the 2014 general elections without the B.J.P.’s support but has also openly come out in support of a “federal front” of regional parties that would seek to form a national government in 2014.

Shivam Vij is a New Delhi based journalist