on the spot
Tavleen Singh
When Nitish Kumar made his announcement about breaking relations with the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) last week on ‘secular’ grounds I happened to be driving down the Mumbai-Goa highway in pouring rain. This is one of our major highways but I was in a rural stretch that went past villages that were creeping their way onto the highway as they developed haphazardly into small towns. So the highway has come to resemble a broken, village road. In the rain it becomes a nightmare of clogged traffic that includes all forms of vehicular transport from the most primitive rural kind to modern articulated lorries of vast proportions. The observant traveler cannot fail to notice how hard it is for these lorries to negotiate the endless unmarked speed breakers on a road that is itself an endless speed breaker. Nor can he fail to notice the spreading pools of rotting garbage that line the highway and spill across it with the rains. They pour out of the squalid, ugly villages and towns on either side that in the absence of municipal facilities dump their waste on the edge of the highway.
Why am I telling you all this in a week that I am writing about the very ‘secular’ Chief Minister of Bihar? What does it have to do with his recent ‘secular’ drama? In my view it has everything to do with it and with every other political drama that grabs headlines every week when we should be talking of much more important things like our enormous problems of unplanned urbanization. And, our even more enormous problems with waste disposal so inadequate that half of India’s diseases spread from rotting garbage and dirty water. If the political dramas gave us a break we would be able to talk of our serious, chronic problems. The dramas give us no choice but to write about the topic of the moment. So here is my analysis of what the supposedly high-minded chief minister of Bihar is up to.
For more than a year now I have heard from colleagues who have traveled to Patna that Nitish Kumar has his eyes set on being prime minister. It was after he won his second term in 2010 that he began to contemplate the possibilities of attaining the highest office in the land and he has worked towards this with impressive assiduousness. Narendra Modi is often charged by the Congress Party of manipulating the media but he is a novice compared with what the Chief Minister of Bihar has managed to do. Let me give you just one small example. In the 2010 Bihar election it was the Bharatiya Janata Party that nearly doubled its seats going from 55 in the 2005 election to 91. It won 36 more seats while the Janata Dal (United) went up less dramatically from 88 to 115. But, to discover this you would have needed to read the fine print because every political commentator in the country projected it as a ’massive victory’ for Nitish. Long articles appeared in the national press about his schemes in rural Bihar that had allegedly reduced poverty and increased growth rates dramatically. Almost nobody noticed that Sushil Modi deserved even more credit for having almost swept all the seats in urban Bihar.
Nitish Kumar then went on to project himself as the creator of what his acolytes started to call the Bihar model in which they said economic development was slower but more effective because it was ‘inclusive’. This idea got international currency not long ago when Imran Khan said that he would like to use the ‘Bihar model’ of development in Pakistan if he ever got the chance. The truth is that there is nothing new about Nitish Kumar’s economic ideas. He is an old-fashioned socialist of the Ram Manohar Lohia genre, all that he has done is to implement his socialist ideas better than the chief ministers who went before him.
There is no question that there are signs of progress in Bihar but since it went through a dark age under Mr and Mrs Laloo Yadav any improvement would be seen as a miracle. And, why should Nitish Kumar not boast about it? Why should his suave, ex-bureaucrat spokesmen not sing paeans to him in the drawing rooms of Delhi and on primetime television? Why should all of us not rejoice that India’s poorest, most backward state should finally be in the hands of a man who is sincere about dragging it up by the bootstraps?
My problem is not with Nitish Kumar’s socialist economic ideas, although I am not a socialist, and nor do I have any problems with him wanting to become prime minister. It is an ambition that anyone who enters a career in politics should have. My only problem with Nitish Kumar’s withdrawal from the NDA is with his ‘secular’ reasons for doing so. He now says that he will return to the NDA if it is put once more in the hands of LK Advani whom he now considers a ‘secular’ leader.
Has he forgotten that it was Advani who rode his chariot from Somnath to Ayodhya with the specific purpose of building a temple at Rama on the exact spot where the Babri Masjid stood? Has he forgotten the thousands of Muslims who were killed in the Rathyatra’s wake? Has he forgotten that the violence was so bad that Laloo Yadav as chief minister of Bihar refused to let Advani’s chariot go beyond Samastipur? Has he forgotten that it was Advani during the course of the Ayodhya movement who invented the term ‘pseudo-secularism’ to denounce the kind of secularism that has been the moral creed of political parties like his own? Speaking of ‘pseudo-secularism’ it is a good time to revive the expression because if we have seen a recent example it has been in the withdrawal of the Janata Dal (U) from the NDA.
Not even the lefty political pundits in Delhi who despise Narendra Modi have dared say that the Bihar chief minister has come out as a shining example of secularism. Even they have noticed the political opportunism of the move. For me personally I have serious reservations now about Nitish Kumar after this because in my view the most dangerous kind of political leaders are those who are shameless hypocrites. They are impossible to trust.
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