BJP knows Nitish Kumar isn’t enough. So Sushant Singh Rajput is its invisible ally in Bihar

Nitish Kumar had a tried and tested campaign pitch of comparing his term with RJD’s ‘Jungle Raj’, but then came coronavirus, exposing his good governance claims.

Illustration | Ramandeep Kaur

A youth icon of India, who belonged to Bihar, died by suicide. And if you watch Sushant Singh Rajput’s coverage on national news, death and elections seem to go hand-in-hand in India. At the heart of this madness is Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s colossal failure on governance. The Narendra Modi and Amit Shah-led BJP knows it only too well. They have no other option but to continue the NDA alliance in Bihar. But Nitish Kumar cannot take them to victory alone. So, Sushant Singh Rajput has become an invisible partner in the NDA coalition in Bihar.

That the BJP is no more sure of Nitish Kumar-Sushil Modi duo repeating their previous electoral feats is also reflected in the party’s choice of a heavyweight campaign manager for the Bihar election — former Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. The BJP leader, who was in Patna recently, is likely to play both sides in the ongoing Bihar vs Maharashtra battle over Sushant’s death. He can freely attack the Congress for being part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government in Maharashtra that has come under scrutiny for its handling the actor’s death by suicide case—in Bihar, this will fetch votes for the BJP and also impact Shiv Sena’s anti-poorvanchal politics in long-term.

Even though the Prime Minister is all praise for Nitish Kumar, saying that he “played a big role for a new India and a new Bihar”, Modi knows that 15-years of ‘Sushasan babu’ isn’t enough for the people to bring him back to power.

Although India has stamped the highest single-day spike in coronavirus cases in the world, the media, especially the TV, is dominated by reports of a gold-digging girlfriend who drove her boyfriend to death. For a minute, you feel you’re watching some screechy version of a C-grade news show titled ‘Love, Sex aur Dhoka’. Annoyed by the crass coverage, you change the channel, but things don’t change. Sushant Singh Rajput’s death and its investigation could not have been made more obviously political by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party’s attempt to deflect the failures of the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government in Bihar, especially in the wake of the upcoming assembly election sticks out like a sore thumb.

Politics in death

The BJP’s cultural cell has hung posters of Sushant Singh Rajput all over Bihar, with the caption: ‘Na bhoole hain, na bhoolne denge (We haven’t forgotten, nor will we let anyone forget)’. The slogan is similar to the resolve tweeted out by the CRPF in the aftermath of Pulwama attacks: “WE WILL NOT FORGET, WE WILL NOT FORGIVE”.

Nitish Kumar had planned to continue his tried-and-tested campaign pitch of comparing his tenure with that of Rashtriya Janata Dal’s (RJD) 15 years of ‘Jungle Raj’, but then came the coronavirus, exposing his good governance claims. In the last six months, the people of Bihar have seen a dodgy implementation of the lockdown, rising unemployment, a migrant labour crisis, and floods, of course. The collapse of the Sattarghat Bridge, 29 days after CM Nitish Kumar inaugurated it, is symbolic of the collapse of governance in Bihar. All this has left the people of Bihar, especially the youth, very angry.

Nitish Kumar is feeling the heat. In his Independence Day speech, which lasted for nearly an hour, the Bihar Chief Minister focussed his energies on calling out his detractors who, according to him, spread lies about him and his government on social media. He went back to comparing his tenure with that of his now-best-friend-now-arch-nemesis Lalu Yadav, asking the youth to see the changes he had brought in 15 years.

The BJP, too, has realised Nitish Kumar’s ineptitude, which is why the party is in a creativity overdrive to make the Bihar election campaign ride on an emotive issue, a skill that it holds a mastery in. And it has found the emotive issue in the death of a young actor from Bihar. Many had assumed that the BJP would fight the 2020 assembly election in Bihar on its own, but the Modi-Shah duo, it seems, is still not powerful enough to sift through the politics of Bihar on their own.

Therefore, the BJP has a lot of damage control to do. The migrant labour exodus during the lockdown and the recent floods would certainly find a place in the list of Nitish Kumar government’s biggest failures in the current term.

The real issues in 2020

While a significant population of Bihari workers were stuck in metropolitan cities without food and shelter due to loss of daily wages, Kumar and his ally — the BJP — did nothing about it. They watched like mute spectators up until May when thousands of migrant workers were already on foot, trying to walk hundreds of miles in the scorching heat to reach their homes.

According to estimates, 1.8-2.8 million migrant workers would have returned to their homes in Bihar during the lockdown. The BJP has already sensed the anger within the working class in Bihar that is hit by rampant unemployment. This explains why the Modi government announced the Rs 125 crore package to draw up rehabilitation schemes for the migrant workers who have returned to the state.

The floods have left 66 lakh people affected in 12 districts of the state. While Nitish called it an act of god, thinking this absolves him from all responsibility, except making “aerial surveys”, the lack of preparedness was stark.

The BJP-JDU government also sat over one of the grimmest incidents of child abuse — the 2018 Muzaffarpur shelter home case — that saw sexual abuse, rape and torture of minor girls. The destruction of ecology in Begusarai — the constituency of “go to Pakistan” MP Giriraj Singh— is another example of the failures of Nitish Kumar government. Begusarai’s Kanwar jheel – a 6,311 hectares freshwater lake — is being drained to access farmland. The hardest to be hit by this move are the sahnis, a local boatman community. The lake that attracted over 100,000 migratory birds is now losing its ecology because the fisherman are now hunting birds for their livelihood. The Nitish Kumar government sits mum over this, too, because they do not want to upset the bhumihars, the dominant caste in Begusarai that is turning the lakebed into farmland.

While Sushant Singh Rajput’s case is discussed ad nauseam on TV channels and social media, it is with a keen eye that we should watch the Bihar elections. Will those who suffered on ground be moved by the mysterious death of an actor, or will poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment count for voters in Bihar?

The author is a political observer and writer. Views are personal.