“Let the elections happen, the Bharatiya Janata Party will be wiped out”, Nitish Kumar said on August 11 in Patna, adding, “The central government does nothing. It thrives on propaganda with its control on the media”.
The Bihar chief minister who is otherwise known for speaking in measured words, of late, resembles his friend and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) president, Lalu Prasad Yadav when it comes to attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Reacting to Modi’s speech in the Lok Sabha, Nitish said, “Sawal kya thaa, kya kya bol gaye (He spoke gibberish, ignoring the question)”.
“They [Modi and BJP] are frightened of our unity. It began with the oppositions’ conclave in Patna. We grew in number and our resolve at our Bengaluru meet also grew. At the next meeting we will decide how to take the country forward…the BJP will be washed out,” he said.
A day after Nitish attacked Modi and the BJP, the prime minister in his video address to the Panchayat Raj Parishad in West Bengal named health centres his government had set up. Among those, he named the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at Darbhanga – a district town in north Bihar’s Mithila region. The hospital is yet to be constructed and has led to a flood of back and forth between the RJD, JD(U) and BJP.
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Now, Bihar’s Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) leaders have come out with all guns blazing. “Safed jhooth (white lies)”, the state health minister Tejashwi Yadav, pulling out the official records that testified that the Bihar government had given 151 acres of land on the Shobhan bypass in Darbhanga free of cost for the AIIMS project.
“Moreover, the state cabinet sanctioned Rs 309.29 crore for filling the land”, Tejashwi said.
JD(U) president and MP Lallan Singh, who had attacked the prime minister in the Lok Sabha over his silence on the Manipur violence on August 11, said the prime minister “spoke lies habitually”.
The Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya came out in defence of the prime minister, saying that the land allotted by the Bihar government in Darbhanga was not appropriate. BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Kumar Modi too defended the prime minister by saying that the “JD(U) and the RJD, in a bid to take credit, relegated the project to backburner”.
But the fact remains that the prime minister had made a false claim. And despite Mansukh Mandaviya, Sushil Modi and a plethora of Bihar BJP leaders defending the prime minister on the issue, Modi stands exposed.
Modi ignoring ‘Modi’
This writer recently travelled to the north Bihar-Uttar Pradesh borders to find aggressive RJD and JD(U) cadres on the Bihar side, taking up efforts to tell people about the Nitish Kumar government’s work in health, education and civic infrastructure with emphasis on empowering women, extremely backward classes and the Scheduled Castes.
Social media – a mandatory tool in present day politics – is something that JD(U) and RJD have been making their presence felt on.
First, Tejashwi Yadav beefed up his and his party’s social media presence by employing professionals. Besides the official Twitter handles, parody accounts counter the BJP IT cell’s ‘propaganda’. The JD(U), initially lagging behind on the social media front has augmented the same.
The BJP has not made significant gains in Bihar after the setback last year.
Like in Haryana, UP and other states, Modi, after becoming prime minister in 2014 tried to build his own team of party cadres with his confidante Amit Shah. The duo might have succeeded in other states but they have failed in Bihar.
Prior to the dawn of Modi-Shah era in the Hindutva party, Sushil was the BJP’s face in Bihar. A product of the Jayaprakash Narayan led ‘total revolution’ and groomed by Kailashpati Mishra, L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee, Sushil was the architect of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Bihar and a link between Nitish’s JD(U) and the BJP at the national level. Rooted in the philosophy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Sushil enjoyed all acceptance and respect among the cadres.
In fact, Terkeshwar Prasad, a product of the ABVP and Renu Devi, of Durga Vahini, who replaced Sushil as the deputy chief minister after the 2020 polls had grown under Sushil’s patronage. Even the Union minister, Giriraj Singh, who is of late known for his anti-Muslim rhetoric too grew under Sushil.
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It is believed that the Modi-Shah duo tried to promote Giriraj, Nityanand Singh, Samrat Choudhary and others at Sushil’s expense. In Bihar’s political circles, it’s widely believed that Modi and Shah got Sushil out of Bihar by making him the Rajya Sabha MP to promote their own brand of party leaders who could work more aggressively against minorities.
However, their experiment seems to have failed in the state. Giriraj, Nityanand and Samrat Choudhary have not displayed the flair of local leaders.
As one crosses the Mehrauna Bridge on the Gandak river and enters eastern UP’s Deoria district, BJP’s influence grows. Right beyond the bridge, there is a signpost of the Hindu Vahini. The houses and shops along the Mehrauna-Laar-Deoria road have saffron flags fluttering on them.
The streets are full of kanwariyas in groups, travelling on motorcycles, jeeps and tractors chanting ‘Bol Bam’ and ‘Jai Shriram’. There are policemen to serve and escort them respectfully. This writer saw a group of kanwariyas getting frenzied when they reached a mosque at Salempur. The policemen did little to quell them. No Muslims were visible.
Nalin Verma is a senior journalist, media educator and independent researcher on folklore.