Even if there is little doubt that he will become the chief minister again if only because of the BJP’s earlier assurances, no one knows whether he will be able to last for a full term considering that his party, the Janata Dal (United), has yielded the No 1 place to the BJP in the ruling alliance.

Arguably, Nitish Kumar will no longer be able to criticize as freely as he did a few days ago the centre’s policies on evicting ghuspetiyas (infiltrators) for fear of antagonizing Big Brother. For all practical purposes, therefore, the chief minister is today as much a loser in the NDA camp as the Congress is in the opposition mahagathbandhan (grand alliance).

But it is also true that having lost three allies in recent times – the Shiv Sena, the Akali Dal and the Lok Janshakti Party – the BJP will not be too disrespectful towards Nitish Kumar. However, the narrowness of the BJP-Janata Dal (United)’s winning margin has demonstrated that the previously unfancied RJD-led mahagathbandhan has emerged as a formidable force in Bihar.

Whether it will be able to carry this momentum into national politics is the million dollar question. But its success in running the ruling dispensation close is bound to energize the moribund opposition in the rest of the country.

For the BJP, on the other hand, it was an election it had to win. After having lost Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi and suffered a jolt in Haryana, the party simply could not afford to lose in Bihar, especially on the eve of next year’s West Bengal elections where it faces an even tougher battle. Even now, despite its success, there is little doubt that the BJP has been shaken by the Bihar experience.

To have nearly lost at the hands of a 31-year-old novice, who carried the stigma of his father’s and mother’s 15-year long reign of “jungle raj”, is undoubtedly a blow to the BJP’s prestige. The outcome shows, however, that it is possible to challenge the BJP’s organizational might, which is reinforced by Narendra Modi’s oratory.

But the fact that the prime minister had to fall back on his party’s standard divisive tactics towards the end of the campaign when it became clear that the going was getting tough should encourage opposition tacticians. The message is that positive assertions like focussing on padhai, kamai, sinchai and dawai, as Tejashwi did by emphasizing education, employment irrigation and health care, pay dividends rather than falling back on the Congress’s tired rhetoric, as it is doing now, of faulty EVMs.

Even earlier, the murmurs that the gathbandhan had erred by allotting 70 seats to the Congress to contest underlined the realization that the aging Grand Old Party was finding it difficult to bear the rigours of war. It isn’t only in Bihar that the Congress has fared poorly. The story is the same in U.P., Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.

While the Congress has earned the dubious distinction of being a burden on its allies, the BJP has managed to shrug off Nitish Kumar’s unpopularity by enhancing its tally of seats in Bihar. It also appears to be on a roll in U.P. where it was on the defensive not long ago against the bua-bhatija combination of the BSP’s Mayawati and the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav.

But by winning six out of seven by-elections in the state, the BJP has shown that it faces virtually no opponents there at present with Mayawati gravitating towards the saffron outfit and Akhilesh Yadav being barely able to hold on its power base.

The BJP’s success in U.P. shows how it can cleverly intertwine its vikas plank with a communal agenda whose high point at the moment is framing a law against the phenomenon of love jehad or interfaith marriages in the states ruled by the BJP.

To quote Modi’s phrase for the BJP-Janata Dal (United) duo, the “double engine” of development and divisiveness is the BJP’s trump card to which the opposition does not seem to have an answer. A feature of this saffron tactic is that even if vikas falters, it can bank on polarizing comments directed against those who are unwilling to chant “Bharat Mata ki Jai” or “Jai Shri Ram”, as Modi did in the last stages of his campaign in Bihar, to boost the party’s prospects. (IPA Service)