Number one Anne Marg is the most high-profile and prominent address in Patna, residence-cum-office of the chief minister of Bihar. It’s a Monday morning and the lawns are abuzz with visitors from neighbouring villages and districts. It’s the chief minister’s day for an open house, or “Janata ki durbar mein Nitish Kumar” (Nitish Kumar in the people’s court), as the man himself puts it.
Almost like the avuncular chief of a village panchayat, Kumar sits by a table, under a makeshift shamiana. Before him is a stack of files, and a telephone. At the next table sit three bureaucrats, secretaries to the government of Bihar, and part of a tribe that Kumar watchers say he trusts more than he does many of his party colleagues. Ministers are also hanging around. Since today is the Monday designated for education and health issues and, complaints, the relevant ministers are present.
A serpentine queue forms and one after the other, complainants come to Kumar. He listens to the grievances, pointing them towards the relevant secretary or minister. This reporter is given a ringside view of the proceedings to monitor the chief minister’s problem solving approach. “If the grievance of any of those who approach the chief minister involves a direct involvement at the highest level,” says a senior civil servant, “the chief minister sees to it that, it is addressed in his presence. This has contributed to the impression of him being a man of action.”
There are all sorts of people and faces at the durbar, including Muslims easily identifiable in their skull caps, representing a constituency that Kumar has courted and been careful to be seen as courting. As if to complete the picture of inclusiveness, the chief minister walks to a group Muslims, speaking to them for a while. Next he walks to a group of elderly women.
His ministerial colleagues are relegated to the background, decidedly awkward, almost as a support cast in a film. The minister for education, a Janata Dal (United) person, a former advocate general, can’t stop gushing about how his leader is a 24/7 politician. The minister for health, from the BJP, nervously laughs off suggestions of feeling left out, and insists on the good work of the coalition.
Meanwhile, the media circus has begun. As photographers click away furiously, Kumar gives them the appropriate photo-ops — listening patiently to an old man in a skull cap, stopping and enquiring after a man in a wheelchair. This is the image Kumar loves to convey: the kinder, gentler face of non-Congress politics.
There are critics among local journalists too. They dismiss the janata durbar as an eye-wash. Some are the usual cynics, and Bihar is never short of them. Some clearly owe allegiance to the Laloo Yadav camp and are trying to make inroads into the post-Laloo establishment. The Opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal, Laloo’s party, questions Kumar’s secular credentials and points out that he maintained silence as the railway minister during the Gujarat riots of 2002. There are questions about his silence following the Forbesganj firing a year ago, which saw the death of four Muslims.
Others punch holes into Kumar’s achievements in Bihar. National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) reports are cited to argue that crime rates have not dipped to the extent they should have. As a result, the hospitality industry is almost nonexistent in Patna. Power cuts also trouble citizens and Kumar hasn’t really made a difference on that count.
Despite the criticism, there is a sense of reassurance that Kumar has given his people. In spite of abject poverty, Bihar topped the list of states this year with a record GDP growth of 13.1 percent in 2011-12. This is also evident in the popular mood. Away from the cynicism of the hangers-on and the local journalists at the janata durbar, the proverbial man on the street is more undiluted in his assessment.
The taxi driver who drives you to the small sweet-shop, the women in the tiny accessories store, even the auto-rickshaw driver in Delhi, ferrying passengers for years in the capital, but finally hoping there may just be something for him to return home to in Darbhanga: these are the little people and theirs are the little stories that speak for Nitish Kumar’s success. He has put optimism back in business in Bihar.
Behind Kumar's genial demeanour and obvious administrative acumen lies an astute politician. He has managed to stay in office for seven years now despite an unlikely and, at times uneasy, partner in the BJP. In a state where caste politics has historically been the single most important determinant for government formation, Kumar has combined social engineering with good governance. An innovative formula of upper OBCs (largely Kurmis, Kumar’s caste), poorer Muslims and the so-called Maha-Dalits (the poor and disadvantaged among Dalits) has worked wonders for him.
Kumar has also managed to monopolise the accolades and take sole credit for his government’s achievements. Despite being a near-equal alliance partner, the BJP is not seen as the redeemer of Bihar; Nitish Kumar is. Sushil Modi, Kumar’s old friend in the BJP and the state’s deputy chief minister, is regarded a rubber stamp. A national functionary in the BJP says, in whispers, “Hum paper par coalition hain, sarkaar toh Nitish ki hai (We are a coalition only on paper, the government is run by Nitish).”
What is remarkable is, Kumar senses, he can get away with it. When he makes remarks against Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP unit in Bihar as well as party spokespersons in New Delhi run for cover. An ally, with his cultivated laidback humour, mocks the BJP’s bestknown chief minister and the party can do little about it.
Becoming apparent is the tacit support Kumar is getting in his anti-Modi positioning from sections of the BJP itself. In 2011, Modi held his sadbhavna fast in Gujarat to project himself as a pan-Indian leader, acceptable even to minorities. This unilateralism upset equations within the BJP. It angered LK Advani, who started his anticorruption yatra not in Modi’s Gujarat, but in Kumar’s Bihar.
This would indicate a pattern. Each time Modi is attacked for the post-Godhra riots, the BJP brass rushes to defend him. Yet it maintains a stoic silence when Kumar hits out at Modi, more or less suggests he is communal and calls for accountability for his record in office.
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