'Going By The BJP's Style, A Surprise Can't Be Ruled Out'

'The BJP is keeping its options open and that the final decision is still tightly held.'
'That is consistent with the party's tendency to preserve suspense, avoid premature factional conflict, and use leadership selection as a way of resetting internal hierarchies.'

"The task is not to nostalgically reproduce the 1990s, nor to discard them, but to build a new language of mobilisation rooted in both memory and contemporary needs in Bihar," says Dr Vignesh Karthik KR.

Dr Karthik is a postdoctoral research affiliate of Indian and Indonesian politics at The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, and a research affiliate at King's India Institute, King's College London. He is the author of Caste and Crisis of Dignity and The Dravidian Pathway.

In the concluding part of his informative interview to Rediff's Archana Masih, Dr Karthik says assessing Nitish Kumar's legacy requires stepping back from the habit of contrasting it with the 'Lalu years', the challenges confronting Bihar's new leaders and why resolving out-migration is beyond the capacity of a single CM.

• Part 1 of the Interview: 'Nitish May Have Been Moved Aside, But Nitishism Is Not Over'

What does the eclipse of Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar -- who have defined the trajectory of the state based on the politics of social justice and caste arithmetic since the 1990s -- mean for the state?

It marks the end of an era, but not the end of the questions that era placed at the centre of Bihar's politics.

Bihar has long been one of the few states in the Hindi heartland where majoritarian consolidation, both caste and religious, was repeatedly checked by a strong politics of social justice, coalition building and representational negotiation.

That legacy should not be dismissed casually.

Some of the state's most important democratic gains came from precisely this repertoire.

Social justice in India cannot be imagined without some engagement with caste arithmetic, because representational justice is part of social justice.

The eclipse of Lalu and Nitish therefore creates a loss, but it also creates an opening. No political generation lasts forever.

The challenge now is whether new leaders can emerge who are historically aware, who understand why dignity and representation mattered, but who are also capable of articulating a politics adequate to the present: jobs, education, social security, migration, and democratic rights.

The task is not to nostalgically reproduce the 1990s, nor to discard them, but to build a new language of mobilisation rooted in both memory and contemporary needs.

Nitish Kumar improved infrastructure, law and order, governance and ushered a changed political climate after the Lalu years -- yet, migration and jobs are issues that remain unresolved.
What is Nitish Kumar's legacy in Bihar?

Assessing Nitish Kumar's legacy requires stepping back from the common habit of viewing Bihar's recent history as a simple contrast between the 'Lalu years' and the 'Nitish years'. That framing misses the deeper transformation that actually took place in the state.

Leaders such as Karpoori Thakur and later Lalu Prasad Yadav emerged in a Bihar marked by an extremely entrenched social hierarchy dominated by landed upper-caste elites who exercised both political authority and social coercion.

Electoral victories against such social power are never neat, and they are not always legible through elite moral standards. The electoral victories of backward caste politics in the late twentieth century did not merely change governments; they fundamentally altered social relations.

Groups that had long been excluded from power began to see themselves as legitimate political actors.

Lalu's politics was maximalist in this sense. It foregrounded dignity, representation and voice for backward castes and minorities, and it destabilised an older social order that had kept these groups at the margins of power.

The symbolic dimension of that politics often receives attention, but its structural effect was equally important. It reshaped the everyday grammar of authority in Bihar.

One telling example is the relative absence of sustained Yadav-Muslim violence during the 1990s, even as communal mobilisation elsewhere in north India intensified. The coalition between backward castes and minorities functioned not only as electoral arithmetic, but also as a social compact that helped contain polarising forces during that period.

Nitish Kumar emerged in the next phase of this transformation. If Lalu altered the social terrain, Nitish sought to stabilise and institutionalise the new order through governance.

His politics was less about radical social upheaval and more about administrative consolidation layered on top of the social changes that had already taken place. Roads improved, the state machinery became more responsive, welfare schemes expanded, and law and order stabilised compared to the turbulence of earlier decades.

Programmes targeted at women, educational incentives and local governance reforms created a more predictable relationship between citizens and the state.

This is why Nitish retained credibility across multiple social constituencies for so long. He represented order without reversing the social empowerment that preceded him.

At the same time, the enduring issue of migration and employment exposes the limits of this model. It is tempting to interpret Bihar's out-migration simply as a failure of governance, but the problem is more structural and historical.

Decisions such as the freight equalisation policy of the 1950s meant that mineral-rich eastern states including Bihar (then including present-day Jharkhand), Odisha and West Bengal did not industrialise proportionately from their own resource base, while mineral-based industries expanded elsewhere in the country.

Over time, Bihar became one of India's largest suppliers of labour rather than a major centre of industrial employment. Today, in a federal system marked by deep regional inequalities, Bihar effectively provides the workforce for large parts of the country's economic growth.

The real question therefore lies within the federal framework: how to acknowledge that contribution and how to rationalise the value created by this labour mobility in ways that strengthen the state's own developmental prospects.

Migration, in that sense, is not only a story of local governance, but also of uneven federal development.

Seen from this perspective, Nitish Kumar's legacy is one of stabilisation and administrative consolidation rather than structural economic transformation. He helped make Bihar more governable after a profound reconfiguration of social relations.

He embedded welfare and state accessibility more deeply in everyday life. But the deeper economic constraints that drive migration lie beyond the capacity of any single chief minister to resolve.

Understanding his legacy therefore requires recognising both the stabilising role he played and the structural limits within which he governed.

Will he be able to wield power and hold his own party together? What is the future of the JD-U? Does it risk disintegration with its MLAs drifting to the BJP?

This is the hardest question to answer with confidence right now. Much depends on whether Nitish Kumar retains enough symbolic authority to discipline the JD-U after leaving the chief minister's chair, and whether the BJP chooses co-option, gradual absorption, or selective neutralisation as its strategy.

Reports already suggest that the BJP's long-term goal is to grow out of dependence on Nitish. That makes the JD-U's internal cohesion inherently fragile. The danger of drift is real.

In moments of political transition, MLAs often respond to power, patronage and future viability. If the BJP can persuade them that its leadership is stable, electorally durable and socially broad enough, some migration or soft alignment becomes plausible.

Yet it would be premature to declare the JD-U finished. Nitish's public image is not easily tarnished, and the party still sits atop a legacy network among constituencies that saw it as a vehicle of administrative access and moderated welfare.

The next five years will therefore be decisive: whether they are enough for the BJP to detach those networks from Nitish personally and fold them into its own political structure remains an open question.

What impact is his son, a political novice who has never held a political post and maintained a low profile, likely to have in the JD-U and in state politics?

His novelty is less important than his substance. The real question is not whether he is inexperienced, but whether he can articulate a political vision and whether he has the patience to build a party rather than merely inherit a surname.

Politics in Bihar is still demanding, layered and organisationally thick. Without ideological clarity, social rootedness and perseverance, he may remain a respectable public figure without becoming an effective political actor.

There is also a second question: What role, if any, would the BJP permit him to play? If it sees utility in keeping a fragment of the Nitish legacy alive for transitional reasons, it may accommodate him in a limited or moderated form. If not, his room for manoeuvre narrows sharply.

So his impact will depend not only on his own capacities, but also on how much political space the new dispensation is willing to leave for a dynastic continuation of Nitish's legacy.

Who will be the new leaders of Bihar? Likely CM and deputy CMs? Will the new CM be a surprise candidate?

Going by the BJP's broader style, a surprise cannot be ruled out at all.

Reporting in the immediate aftermath of Nitish Kumar's Rajya Sabha move has explicitly noted that the BJP is keeping its options open and that the final decision is still tightly held.

That is consistent with the party's tendency to preserve suspense, avoid premature factional conflict, and use leadership selection as a way of resetting internal hierarchies.

So yes, a surprise candidate remains entirely plausible. On the broader question of Bihar's future leadership, I would resist reducing the issue to a list of names.

What Bihar needs after the eclipse of its older giants is a particular kind of political temperament: Strategic patience, perseverance, and a serious commitment to subaltern empowerment in social, economic, educational and political terms at once.

This is a state that developed a grammar of justice and dignity in the face of entrenched violence and elite dominance. Its next generation of leaders will matter not because they are new, but because of whether they can carry that grammar forward while responding to the present.

That is the more important test.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff