Nitish Kumar gears up to take Bihar CM’s oath for 8th time as BJP fumes over ‘betrayal’

After dumping former ally BJP to walk out of the NDA and into the Mahagathbandhan, Nitish Kumar is set to take oath as Bihar’s eighth chief minister on Wednesday.

Nitish Kumar on Tuesday submitted his resignation to Governor Phagu Chauhan and submitted a list of 164 MLAs and claimed the support of seven parties to form a new government in Bihar.

So, here’s a look at how it came to this, what prompted Nitish Kumar to break the BJP-JD(U) alliance and what’s the road ahead as Bihar gets a new government.

A combination of the JD(U) getting fewer seats to contest and winning even fewer seats in the recent assembly elections might have influenced Nitish Kumar to change alliances yet again.

It is also being speculated that the immediate trigger for Nitish Kumar’s decision was the BJP’s alleged attempt to poach JD(U) MLAs, a claim that the saffron party has denied. According to JD(U) sources, party rebel RCP Singh had attempted to influence JD(U) MLAs at the behest of the BJP.

They said that at least six JD(U) MLAs have audio clips purportedly of phone calls made to them to BROKER A “deal” — break away from JD(U) in lieu of cabinet berths. This was apparently an attempt to weaken Nitish Kumar’s hold on his party and consequently the alliance government.

JD(U) national president Rajiv Ranjan Singh recently alleged that a ‘conspiracy’ was hatched in 2020 to “cut Nitish to size using the Chirag [Paswan] model”. This was yet another plot to try and destabilise the Nitish government.

Besides this, a number of issues — such as the National Register of Citizens (NRC), uniform civil code, offering namaz at public places, wearing hijab at government educational institutions, use of loudspeakers at religious places, Pegasus spyware scandal, and a caste census for Bihar — had been plaguing the JD(U)-BJP alliance. The recent comment by BJP president JP Nadda that regional parties had a bleak future added to the JD(U)’s anger against the BJP.

BJP CRIES BETRAYAL
Reacting to Nitish Kumar’s move, the BJP said that he betrayed the mandate of the people. Bihar BJP chief Sanjay Jaiswal said: “We fought the 2020 polls together under NDA, the mandate was for JD-U and BJP, we won more seats despite that Nitish Kumar was made the CM. Whatever happened today is a betrayal of Bihar’s people and the BJP.”

BJP MP in Bihar, RK Singh commented on the ongoing political crisis in the state and said, “Nitish Kumar’s politics is entirely about the ‘kursi’ (chair).”

Haryana Home Minister Anil Vij took a dig at Nitish Kumar after the fallout. He said: “Nitish Kumar is a migratory bird. It is their nature to jump from one branch to another. By mistake some birds have gathered on a branch. Who does not know when to fly where, it is only a matter of few days.”

RJD’S TAKE ON THE BIHAR POLITICAL DRAMA
RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on the BJP and accused the saffron party of destroying its alliance partners in states like Punjab and Maharashtra.

“Look at what they do to allies. Across the Hindi heartland, the BJP does not have any alliance partners. History tells us that the BJP destroys the parties with whom it forms an alliance. We did see that happening in Punjab and Maharashtra,” he said.

“The BJP’s agenda shouldn’t be implemented in Bihar. We all wanted that and we won’t relent at any cost,” he said.

CONGRESS’S ‘NO-CASH’ BOAST
Congress MP Jairam Ramesh on Wednesday tweeted: “Bihar was no Operation Lotus. No cash caught. No ED raids. No Assam CM. No resort travel. All done in characteristic Bihar style, civilised & low-cost. CM gets support of largest party and others. In Maharashtra, BJP engineered defections. In Bihar, BJP was rejected and ejected.”

Congress’s Rajya Sabha MP Naseer Hussain said that the BJP was being haunted in Bihar by what it did in Maharashtra, referring to the Eknath Shinde-led rebellion that toppled the MVA government.

RJD-JDU ALLIANCE AGAIN
This is not the first time that Nitish Kumar has walked out of an alliance or the NDA in the particular. He first dumped the BJP in 2013 after Narendra Modi was appointed the chairman of the BJP’s Lok Sabha election campaign committee.