New Delhi: With its former partner Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar snapping ties and forming a new government with the Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) comprising the RJD, Congress, and other parties this month, the BJP faces the onerous task of standing on its own feet in the state.
According to sources in the party, a two-pronged strategy is in the works to destabilise Nitish ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the assembly polls the year after that.
The first is to co-opt support from the extremely backward classes (EBCs), which refer to the most economically disadvantaged among the other backward classes (OBCs), and Mahadalits — a term coined by Nitish himself in 2007 to describe the 22 poorest Dalit groups. Both these communities were closely cultivated by the Nitish-led JD(U) through means such as welfare schemes and reservations.
The second is to promote a more aggressive, go-getting ‘face’ for the BJP in Bihar, in contrast to the two relatively low-profile former deputy chief ministers, Tarkishore Prasad and Renu Devi.
“Our immediate priority is to select a Leader of Opposition in both houses [of the bicameral Bihar legislature], as well as deputy leaders, and a chief whip. The selection of these leaders will set the stage for the Lok Sabha elections. They should be articulate, combative, and have some legislative competence,” a senior BJP leader from Bihar told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
“If there is consensus from the central BJP, we could select some EBC leaders, since Nitish draws strength from this group,” he added.
Speaking to ThePrint, Bihar BJP spokesperson Prem Ranjan Patel said that the party hopes to find a balance between caste politics and Hindutva, especially with Nitish conducting a state-wide caste census that many have described as Mandal 2.0.
“Nitish is playing his Brahmastra (a divine weapon in Hindu mythology) of caste census to engineer Mandal Part 2, which suits him as well as the RJD. The dilemma before the BJP is to find the balance between Mandal politics and Hindutva,” Patel added.
This Tuesday, 31 ministers were inducted into the new Bihar cabinet, in addition to CM Nitish Kumar and Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD. Bihar BJP leader Sushil Modi reportedly immediately grabbed the opportunity to criticise the new government for allotting “33 per cent” of its berths to Muslims and Yadavs and “marginalising the EBCs”.
The Bihar BJP core group has conducted a three-hour meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah and party president J.P. Nadda, where much of the discussion centred around strategies for the Lok Sabha elections in the state, sources said.
Also read: Decline in popularity main reason why Nitish Kumar snapped ties with BJP, says Sushil Modi
Need for a prominent EBC face
EBCs are estimated to make up about 25 per cent of Bihar’s population and are key factors in pre-poll caste arithmetic.
So far, the BJP has ridden on the coattails of the JD(U) on this front as a coalition partner, but now leaders are keenly aware of the need to ramp up efforts to woo this community, as well as the Mahadalits, who make up about 10 per cent of the state’s population.
A second senior BJP leader said: “Our core votebank has so far been primarily upper caste and non-Yadav OBCs, while Nitish mainly had the support of the EBCs and Mahadalits. Because the Prime Minister [Narendra Modi] is from the OBC community himself, we did get some EBC votes in pockets of Bihar, but now it is really essential for the party to target this votebank.”
According to this leader, Nitish is “ageing” and “after his departure from Bihar”, there will be a vacuum left that the BJP hopes to fill.
“There will no strong leader who can garner EBC votes in Bihar, so we will have to give more prominence to EBC leadership in the BJP,” this leader added.
However, BJP leaders concur that they will need to pick leaders who can make more of an impression than the two former deputy CMs, Renu Devi, who belongs to an EBC group, and Tarkishore Prasad, who is an OBC leader.
“The party selected Renu Devi as deputy CM from the Nonia caste to cultivate leadership from the community, but she was not able to become its voice over the last two years. Tarkishore is a gentleman and had the backing of the central leadership, but he too could not become the face of the party,” a third BJP leader said. “With the current social combination we can win 25-30 Lok Sabha seats (out of 40), but in assembly we can’t win more than 40 seats (out of 243),” he added.
This BJP leader also speculated about more “vibrant” leaders that the party could potentially use to further its cause.
“Samarth Choudhary, who is from the OBC community, can be the choice in the legislative council as leader. We need a vibrant face as Leader of the Opposition and someone who can take on Nitish and Tejashwi. Whether Tarkishore and Renu Devi will be chosen is not clear as we need someone more aggressive,” he said.
According to him, it was telling that it was Sushil Modi — the predecessor as deputy CM to Renu Devi and Tarkishore Prasad — who primarily addressed mediapersons in the wake of the BJP-JD(U) split.
Earlier this year, the BJP selected Shambhu Sharan Patel, a member of the EBC Dhanuk community, as a Rajya Sabha MP. This, party leaders claimed, is a sign of things to come. “The party has realised its mistake in not cultivating enough EBC leaders. We will see more such leaders in the coming days,” the second BJP leader quoted above said.
The current BJP president in Bihar is Sanjay Jaiswal, whose term gets over in October. Here, too, party sources said, the BJP is considering a decision that could aid in its caste calculations.
‘Bhupender Yadav formula didn’t help BJP’
The BJP currently doesn’t have an in-charge for Bihar after former general secretary Bhupender Yadav went on to become a Union minister.
The first BJP leader quoted above said that when Bhupender Yadav was in charge of the party in Bihar, he tried to leverage the name of Union minister Nityanand Rai to appeal to the Yadav votebank of the RJD, but this method did not have much success.
“It did not help the party in getting any sizeable portion of the Yadav votes. Lalu and Tejashwi are still the supreme leaders of the Yadavs. Our experiment failed in Bihar. But we have now realised that we should focus on the EBC group, since it is most backward and also gaining benefits from the PM’s welfare schemes,” he added.
In the last assembly elections in 2020, the BJP stuck to its traditional strategy of relying on upper castes, which comprise only about 16 per cent of Bihar’s population. Of its 110 candidates for the 243 assembly seats, 51 belonged to upper castes.
The party fielded only five candidates from the EBC community — in contrast with 26 from the JD(U) and 24 from the RJD.
While the BJP did leave 11 seats for Mallah leader Mukesh Sahani’s Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP), the ties between the parties have broken since then. In April, the BJP suffered an unexpected defeat in the byelection to the Bochahan assembly constituency (reserved), which it had tried to wrest from Sahani.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)