Bihar | Nitish maps a path

The voting was over in early November, and he won hands down, but Nitish Kumar still seems to be in campaign mode. A state-wide sojourn, sanguinely called ‘Samriddhi Yatra’ (prosperity tour), saw him in near-continuous movement for nine days, across nine districts of Bihar. And when the tenth-time chief minister took the mic in Vaishali on January 24, at the conclusion of this first phase, he was still invoking the past. Times when conditions were dire: when the streets emptied after dusk, conflict was a bullet away, roads patchy, electricity metered in flickers of hope, healthcare ailing, and schooling a lesson in ‘how not to’.

So why does he look like a batsman intent on hitting sixes long after the match is over? It’s a classic Nitish feint. He’s actually playing a different match. Meanwhile, he clearly needs to play up while he negotiates a tricky phase in his record tenth term. Also, as a source of ongoing validation while he does that.

INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION

While leader of the opposition Tejashwi Yadav has said he will give the Nitish government a 100-day window before presenting his assessment, the CM is not retuning the favour. Instead, he continued in this vein during a three-day second phase of the yatra, winding through three more districts on January 27-29. So, what’s the game?

Despite posting a remarkable recovery within the electoral sweep for the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA)—202 seats out of 243—Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) or JD (U) is a notch lower than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), at 85 seats versus 89. That meant a significant recalibration of power within his government. So, Nitish is finding ways to regirdle his authority.

Events in Patna tell the story. Right at the outset, Nitish had to cede the crucial home department to his alliance partner. Instead of trying to be an immoveable object against an unstoppable force, his playmaker instincts told him to redirect energies in a lateral direction. Thus the sweeping administrative reorganisation last announced last month, aligned to his governance objectives and popularly felt needs.

JOBS IN THE FOCUS

Three new departments were born to that initiative: Youth, Employment and Skill Development; Higher Education; Civil Aviation. The intent is clear. Unemployment, the big red flag that Nitish’s cavalcade managed to evade during polls, is no longer to be ignored. That got an enabler with a new Directorate of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises under the Industries Department. Alongside, the new Bihar Marketing Promotion Corporation will seek to bridge the chronic gap between production and market access.

Nitish has also been outlining the third run of his Saat Nischay—an ambitious five-year agenda that aims to rev up industrialisation, double Bihar’s per capita income, provide jobs to 10 million youth and establish degree colleges across districts. Questions are seldom invited in his public interactions, but a degree of formalisation is being built into the public audit of policy. Every Monday and Friday has been fixed for administration-citizen interfaces: officials across the hierarchy, from panchayat and district HQ offices to state departments, are to be physically present to record complaints. Will it do the job? Time will tell. But it catches Nitish in a maestro moment, meeting political fluidity with governance structure.