Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar and a regional leader who is quite familiar with the corridors of power in New Delhi, was born on 1 March 1951. His father, Kaviraj Singh, who took part in the Independence movement, later switched allegiance from the Congress to the Janata Party.
Nitish studied engineering and did a stint with the Bihar State Electricity Board before turning to politics. Perhaps his first major lesson in the art of political mobilisation came in the mid-1970s when he participated in Jayaprakash Narayan’s mass movement against the Indira Gandhi-led Congress regime.
Interestingly, four decades later when asked by Outlook magazine if he found any parallels between the Aam Aadmi Party and the JP Movement, Nitish quipped: “You cannot be serious. Those were different times, difficult times. Young people were beaten up, detained, tortured, arrested, put in jail. And still the movement spread like wild fire. There was passion for sacrifice with no reward in sight. Do you find a similar mood in the country today? It is like chalk and cheese.”
Nitish entered the Bihar Legislative Assembly as an independent candidate in 1985.
He became president of the Yuva Lok Dal in 1987. His political graph rose quickly after this. He became the Janata Dal secretary-general in Bihar in 1989, at a time when an anti-Congress wave was again spreading in the country. In the general elections that year, Nitish was elected to the Lok Sabha.
In 1990 he became the Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Co-operation. He was re-elected to the Lok Sabha in the 1991 polls. But the Congress was now back in the reckoning and formed the next government, with Narashima Rao becoming prime minister.
Nitish occupied the post of general-secretary of Janata Dal as well as the party’s deputy leader in Parliament for some years. He was re-elected to the Lok Sabha in 1996 and again in 1998 and became the Union Minister for Railways in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA cabinet. Nitish went on to occupy other ministerial posts in the BJP-led coalition, including those of agriculture and surface transport.
He got to the Bihar chief minister’s chair for the first time in March 2000 but could stay there for only a week as his party did not have the numbers to upset his main rival in Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav.
But five years later the political winds had changed course in Bihar, and Nitish in partnership with the BJP ended the 15-year reign of Lalu and his RJD. In November 2005 Nitish became the Bihar chief minister, this time of a stable government. Five years later in the next state elections, Nitish consolidated his position as the tallest leader of Bihar, with the JD-United winning 115 seats and its ally BJP bagging 91 seats in the 243-member assembly.
Soon, the media began taking more notice of a changing Bihar.
An article in India Today magazine noted: “[Nitish] Kumar, in his current stint, has learnt from past mistakes. Only two years ago, in February 2009, he had got bureaucrats to give out their mobile numbers from the dais at a public meeting, to let the common man have direct access to the higher echelons of government. The move backfired….Now, two years later, he has introduced the Right to Service Act that will ensure time-bound services to people. Kumar’s idea of a responsive administration has not changed, but his methods are more realistic and less rhetorical now.”
In 2013, however, the JD-U broke its alliance with the BJP after the latter madeGujaratchief minister Narendra Modi the party’s national election campaign committee chairman, effectively preparing the ground for declaring him prime ministerial candidate (which it eventually did).
“This is an era of alliances; no party should be under the impression that it will win majority on its own. This country is diverse…,” Nitish told India Today after the split. “We observed that some people were overconfident about their capability and they had started bulldozing other partners. It was then that we decided to part ways with them.”
Whatever his reasons for the split, Nitish Kumar is expected to play a significant role in national politics in future. In his book ‘Single Man: The Life & Times of Nitish Kumar of Bihar’, the journalist Sankarshan Thakur writes: “Nitish’s political mien is strongly pro-minority and pro-underprivileged, positions that are under renewed, often furious, debate in the current political discourse. He advocates caution on land acquisition for urbanization or industrialization and would not have the state intervene on behalf of big money….Nitish is, by nature, a political negotiator, not a confrontationist. He may be firm about his convictions, but he is not ideologically doctrinaire.”
Also on this day:
1944 — Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Chief Minister ofWest Bengal, was born
1953 — M.K. Stalin, DMK leader and minister, was born
1968 — Salil Ankola, Indian cricketer, was born
1994 — Manmohan Desai, Bollywood film director and producer, died
