Before writing off any party and political personality – the act in which many of our media-commentators relish – one needs to be reminded that Sheila Dikshit in 1998 and Nitish Kumar in 2005 came to power in Delhi and Bihar respectively when their parties, Congress and Janata Dal (United) were down in the dump.
While Dikshit, a relatively less significant figure in Delhi Congress, became the chief minister from nowhere Kumar surprised many political observers by leading the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to victory in November 2005, over a year after the defeat of the Janata Dal (United)-Bharatiya Janata Party (JD (U)-BJP) alliance in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. The two parties could win only 11 out of the 40 seats during the parliamentary elections in Bihar. Kumar himself lost from one of the two parliamentary constituencies from where he contested.
Dikshit’s success was more astonishing as Delhi till then was considered a very strong bastion of the BJP. When Congress won the November-December 1998 Assembly polls everything was against the party. In the Lok Sabha election held early the same year, the BJP won six out of the seven seats in Delhi. Dikshit herself lost from East Delhi to the BJP candidate Lal Bihari Tiwari.
Emergence by default
Although Dikshit was a Punjabi, she was no match to H.K.L Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler, the two other Punjabi stalwarts in Delhi Congress. She got the opportunity to emerge as the chief ministerial face as Bhagat and Tytler were accused of fomenting anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984. Incidentally, Tytler’s mother was a Sikh while his father was a Hindu.
Dikshit was made the president of the Delhi unit of the Congress immediately after her defeat in 1998 Lok Sabha polls yet she led the party to victory in just a couple of months. The party’s decision to experiment with a new face clicked. Her emergence led to the gradual decline of old guards in the Congress, most of them held responsible for the massacre of Sikhs.
That was the time when the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Union home minister Lal Krishna Advani were completely dominating national politics. Sonia Gandhi was no match to their stature as she was thrust with the responsibility of the Congress party’s leadership after the rout of the grand old party in the Lok sabha election of March 1998.
The BJP was in power in Delhi between 1993 and 1998. Yet the election result of November-December 1998 completely surprised everyone. Hardly anyone imagined that the Congress would win as Sitaram Kesari, the president of the party before Sonia Gandhi, had almost wrecked the ship called INC.
But the problem with the BJP was that it was plagued with bitter infighting within the Delhi unit. In the five-year term it had three chief ministers – Madan Lal Khurana, Sahab Singh Verma and Sushma Swaraj. The sky-rocketing price of onion drove the last nail in the coffin of the Delhi BJP.
Bihar scenario
Kumar was till May 13, 2004 a prominent Union minister in the Vajpayee cabinet. Yet his party JD (U) could win only six and BJP five seats in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. The rest were grabbed by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (22), Congress (three) and Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) (four) combine.
Bihar had then double engine government with Rabri Devi as the chief minister and Lalu Prasad Yadav as the railway minister. That was the peak period of the ruling family of RJD. But within a few months the fortune changed.
In the Assembly election held in February 2005, no party could secure majority necessitating another election in October-November in which the NDA got majority. Though Kumar claimed all the credit for the victory, the truth is that it would not have been possible had Ram Vilas Paswan-led LJP not withdrawn from RJD-Congress-LJP alliance in Bihar, though he was still a minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet.
Paswan facilitated the victory of the NDA by not only dissociating his party from RJD and Congress but also by floating the outlandish idea of a Muslim chief minister. Although he did not name any Muslim from his own party for this post, his stand caused some confusion among the voters belonging to the minority community. Throughout his election campaign Paswan targeted Yadav for doing nothing for minorities and Dalits in 15 years of the RJD rule. He was more critical on the then Rabri Devi government than the JD (U) and BJP alliance. This was bound to have its impact on the election.
The irony is that in this process his own party, LJP, too suffered serious setback. Yet, it was evident that Paswan played a major role in the defeat of the RJD in the 2005 Assembly polls in Bihar. Once in power Kumar soon consolidated his position by sewing up an alternative social alliance.
Kumar, who was fighting for survival in May 2004, became a powerful force by November 2005.
Lesson from Dikshit’s decline
As the Assembly elections in Delhi is to be followed by one in Bihar, one needs to understand the factor which led to the fall of the 15-year rule of Dikshit. Similar threat is looming over the 20 years of Nitish government in Bihar now.
What is generally overlooked is that Dikshit not only lost because of the concerted India Against Corruption (IAC) campaign of Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal. She could have weathered this storm. Her government, in the name of beautification of Delhi for Commonwealth Games, uprooted those very labour class who worked really hard to make so many stadiums, flyovers, roads, bridges, hotels and other structures for this extravaganza.
In the process, she antagonised a large chunk of sub-altern voters, for whom she did much in the initial phase of her government. Kejriwal fully exploited this situation and walked away with the support of this section of voters.
While even in the worst case scenario 30-odd per cent middle class voters always remained with the BJP, the rest shifted from Congress to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). In subsequent years, Kejriwal fully consolidated his position by working earnestly for this class of people. That is why his party, even now got 43.57% of votes, just 2% less than the BJP.
If Dikshit lost because her government – to appease the middle-class BJP voters and to showcase Delhi for international tourists in the name of anti-encroachment drive – rendered homeless her own vote-bank, Kumar in Bihar will have to be watchful whether the massive construction boom (like during Commonwealth Games in Delhi) is really turning the extremely backward castes and Dalit votes away from the NDA. The displacement of millions of people for the rampant infrastructure development is causing a lot of hardship to the weaker section of the society.
Also read: Why Bihar Will Not Go the Delhi Way
Curiously, like in the case of Dikshit, the middle-class dominated media is not taking into account this crucial factor. Bihar has a large number of newly-built hospitals with half the posts of doctors and para-medical staff vacant and hardly any medicine for patients.
Impressive school and college buildings have fewer teachers to teach and academic sessions in universities are late by one or two years or even more. Competitive exams have become a permanent headache with reports of almost all the question paper leakages coming from the chief minister’s home district of Nalanda. News of regular collapse of bridges and uncontrolled bootlegging are taking its toll.
If Kejriwal, another rank outsider in politics of Delhi can bring down the powerful Dikshit government in an otherwise strong citadel of the BJP in 2013 and then finally in 2015, one cannot rule out any surprise in Bihar where the Opposition is already a formidable force.
Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.