Patna: On Sunday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah was supposed to address a rally in Bihar’s Sasaram to mark the birth anniversary of Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who has for the past decade been projected by the BJP as belonging to the Kushwaha caste — a questionable assertion as far as historians is concerned.
Shah arrived in Patna Saturday, but had to defer his trip to Sasaram, which has a large Kushwaha population even though it has been a reserved seat right from Independence. The cancellation was attributed to the communal flare-up in Sasaram and Nalanda after Ram Navami processions, and blamed on the Nitish Kumar government.
“The state government has deliberately engineered a communal riot to prevent us from celebrating the birth anniversary of Ashoka,” new BJP state chief Samrat Choudhary, a Kushwaha, told ThePrint. Later in the day, the BJP even submitted a memorandum to Bihar Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar, accusing the state government of not providing security for Shah’s visit. The CM denied this claim.
Amit Shah is, however, scheduled to address a meeting in Nawada Sunday.
Ever since Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) switched sides and joined hands with Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) last August, there has been a deliberate effort to wean away the Kushwaha votes from the CM’s core votebank, popularly known as ‘Luv-Kush’ votebank. The ‘Luv-Kush’ votebank comprises the Kurmis, who comprise two per cent of the population, Kushwahas, who make up six per cent of the population. This is the basic votebank he started with when he formed the Samata Party in 1994. Kushwahas are the largest block among OBCs in Bihar after Yadavs.
In subsequent years, Nitish cobbled up a formidable votebank in alliance with the BJP — which comprised 12 to 15 per cent upper castes and five per cent Baniyas. He later added the Extremely Backward Classes, who comprise 29 per cent of the population. He dented Lalu’s Muslim-Yadav votebank to such an extent that in the 2010 assembly polls, the Nitish-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 206 of 243 seats while Lalu’s RJD had won only 23 seats.
Post August 2022, one of the most well-known Kushwha faces in JD(U), Upendra Kushwaha, began openly questioning Nitish’s leadership and accused him of having made a “deal” with the RJD before he returned to the Grand Alliance. In February this year, he quit the party.
A few days ago, the elevation of Samrat Choudhary as state chief of the BJP appeared to make the intentions of the latter, clear — that they were after the second major OBC group in Bihar to challenge the Grand Alliance of Bihar, both in the Lok Sabha and assembly polls.
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‘6% of population, but might to pull 12% voters’
The Kushwahas are traditionally farmers found mostly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Their population strength in UP and Bihar is almost identical. In UP, the BJP has promoted Keshav Prasad Maurya as deputy CM despite his defeat in the last assembly polls. In Bihar, they have now sought to create another leader like Maurya.
“The population of Kushwahas may be just half of the population of Yadavs in Bihar, but they are much more acceptable to other sections of society than Yadavs and even Bhumihars, particularly the EBCs (Extremely Backward Classes),” former MLC Prem Kumar Mani told ThePrint.
He explained: “In the villages of Bihar, there is a ‘Mahtoji ka Dalan’. The ‘Dalan’ serves as a guest room in villages. In Bihar, relatives and acquaintances are sent to ‘Mahtoji (a title used for Kushwahas) ka Dalan’ for the night as there is no room in the villagers’ homes. The Kushwahas may be just 6 per cent of the population, but they have the capacity to pull along another 6 per cent of the voters from EBCs, and the combined impact may be more than 10 to 12 per cent.”
Mani, once close to Nitish Kumar and also a Kushwaha, was among the founders of Samata Party in 1994. Kushwahas have a major say in the outcome of results in 63 assembly seats and in half a dozen Lok Sabha seats like Ara, Khagaria, Karakat, Ujiyarpur and Sasaram.
Difference between 2015 & 2022
The last time RJD and JD(U) contested polls together was in 2015. The Grand Alliance won 178 seats and the BJP was limited to 53. Despite the massive difference in seats, the voting percentage difference was just 7 per cent. It was a poll in which three powerful OBC groups — the Yadavs, Kushwahas and Kurmis — known as the ‘Triveni Sangh’ of Bihar politics, voted together.
But the Kushwahas voted because Nitish Kumar was the CM candidate, said former MLC Mani, adding that this time, he will be behind Tejashwi Yadav as leader of the Grand Alliance, and the many castes who voted for Nitish may not be inclined to go with Tejashwi.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when the NDA won 39 of the 40 seats in Bihar, the difference of the vote percentage was around 25 per cent. “The BJP knows that this time, the vote percentage may fall but if the Kushwahas come on board, the losses in seats can be minimised,” said a BJP MLA, not wanting to be named.
Kushwaha leaders
Despite being the second largest block in OBC, the political representation of Kushwahas has been limited. Since Independence, there has been only one Kushwaha CM, Satish Kumar Singh, picked by the Congress in 1968 for just five days. He was a stopover arrangement to enable the Congress to install B P Mandal as the CM.
Other Kushwaha leaders have been the late Jagdev Prasad — who was killed in 1974 in police firing. There was his son Nagmani, who once wielded the tag of a Kushwaha leader and even became a Union minister in the Vajpayee ministry. There has been Shakuni Choudhary, a founder of the Samata Party and former MP — an ex-Armyman who was once close to both Lalu and Nitish. There have been prominent Kushwha leaders like Chadradev Prasad Verma and Upendra Prasad Verma.
Upendra Kushwaha is among those leaders who projected themselves as Kushwaha leaders. However, most Kushwaha leaders are known to be political turncoats and have limited influence in certain pockets. It is not surprising that unlike Yadavs or Paswans, they till now have not voted as a block. Suddenly, the BJP has projected Samrat Choudhary as a possible CM candidate and wants the Kushwahas to start voting as a block.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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