Patna: Former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi’s son Santosh Kumar Suman resigned from the Nitish Kumar Cabinet Tuesday — a development that could potentially leave the ruling Mahagathbandhan without a prominent Dalit face.
Suman, the minister for SC/ST welfare, said Tuesday that he had submitted his resignation letter to Bihar’s Finance, Commercial Taxes and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary, a close aide of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.
“I handed my letter to Choudhary because Nitish Kumar said during our last meeting that henceforth Choudhary will deal with us,” Suman told ThePrint.
The Bihar government confirmed the development later in the day, announcing through a notification that Suman was no longer part of the ministry.
Addressing the media after his resignation, Suman said he was quitting to “save his party”. “We were being pressured by the JD(U) to merge our parties. This is unacceptable,” the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) added.
The development could bring the curtains down on the ties between JD(U) of Nitish Kumar and Manjhi’s party. The relationship between the two parties, which has been rocky ever since Manjhi’s rebellion against Nitish in 2015, has been especially shaky of late, with the former chief minister even holding meetings with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), sparking speculations of a possible alliance.
For the JD(U), the setback comes just ahead of an opposition meeting that Nitish is hosting in Patna. Seventeen opposition leaders, including ally Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi, will meet on 23 June on his invitation.
The development also comes less than a year before the next year’s general election.
There have been no ostensible efforts on the part of JD(U) to convince Suman to withdraw the resignation. On their part, leaders within the JD(U) have downplayed the development.
“Jitan Ram Manjhi is no big leader and does not have influence over his own community,” JD(U) legislator Gopal Mandal told ThePrint.
But Upendra Kushwaha, a former Nitish ally who quit the party in February before launching the Rashtriya Lok Janata Dal, called it another attempt to “demoralise a Dalit leader who was also a former chief minister”.
Nitish, he claimed, tried to do to Manjhi the same thing that was done to him — “getting him to merge his party and trying to finish him politically”. Kushwaha was referring to the time when he merged his erstwhile party, the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party, with the JD(U) in 2021.
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‘Talks over LS polls inconclusive’
Speaking to the media Tuesday, Suman claimed that his father had met CM Nitish last week to hold discussions on seat sharing for the 2024 general election as an “honourable member of the (Mahagathbandhan) alliance”.
According to The Hindu, Manjhi was vying for five seats — Gaya, Samastipur, Aurangabad, Jamui, and Purnia.
The meeting, however, was inconclusive, with Nitish making no promises, Suman said.
Meanwhile, JD(U) sources told ThePrint that in the immediate aftermath of Suman’s resignation, Nitish held a meeting with Choudhary and another one of his ministers, Bijendra Prasad Yadav. The sources said that the chief minister has decided to replace Suman with another Dalit leader, Sonbarsa MLA Ratnesh Sada.
Another JD(U) insider also told ThePrint that Nitish was keen to jettison Manjhi out of the Grand Alliance for some time now because of the tight spot the HAM patron had put him in, particularly concerning the state’s dry policy.
Manjhi has been critical of the stringent anti-liquor policy that the Nitish government first instituted in 2016, even advising people to “enjoy drinks on the sly”, on one occasion, according to media reports.
What Manjhi’s possible exit means
The last few years have seen Nitish share a rocky relationship with his once close confidant Manjhi.
In 2014, after the JD(U) poor showing in that year’s general election, Nitish resigned from the chief minister’s office and chose Manjhi to replace him.
Their ties, however, steadily declined over the next 10 months, with Manjhi resigning from the position on 20 February 2015, just before a vote of confidence in the Bihar assembly.
The relationship has never been quite the same since. Despite this, however, Manjhi’s HAM allied with the JD(U) in the 2020 assembly election and won four seats — including his own seat, Imamganj.
In August 2022, when Nitish dumped the BJP for the third time — having done so previously in 2013 and 2017 — Manjhi even followed him back into the Mahagathbandhan, an alliance of the JD(U), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress.
The developments of the last few months, however, have indicated that the fences have not completely mended — in fact, Manjhi’s recent meetings with BJP leaders, including Union Home Minister Amit Shah in April, have fuelled speculations that he could be offered the post of governor and his son could be made a candidate in the next year’s elections.
In sheer numbers alone, Manjhi’s potential split from the JD(U) will not have much impact on the Grand Alliance, which is currently comfortably placed at over 150 seats in Bihar’s 243-member Vidhan Sabha.
But it could potentially leave the party without a Dalit face.
Dalits constitute about 16 percent of the state population. The largest of these are two groups — Paswans and Manjhi’s own community, Musahar.
With the state’s most prominent Paswan face, Chirag Paswan, already seemingly inclined towards the BJP, the loss of the other prominent Dalit face could potentially dent the party.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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