Sunday, May 18, 2014
Burning Nitish' Boat
 |
| English: Bihar Districts (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
At the party, all his friends burn his boat down, and thus bring an end to his plans to move to New York.
The people of Bihar burnt Nitish' boat. They do not want him to move to Delhi, not just yet. There is still so much work to do in Bihar that noone else is capable of doing, not anyone in his party, not anyone outside his party.
Nitish Should Give 10 More Years To Bihar
 |
| English: Flag of Janata Dal (United) of India (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The PM chair might have been taken by Modi. But the country does not have a clear Opposition Leader. There is only one person who can fill that void. And that person is Nitish. I am aware he is not a MP. He does not need to be. He can be Chief Minister and the top Opposition Leader at the same time.
The people of Bihar love him so much they snuffed out all possibilities of him moving from Patna to Delhi. That is why they gave him only two seats. They don't want to lose him. The people of Bihar have given him a clear mandate to continue in Patna, and he should respect that mandate, the janadesh.
He has a comfortable majority in the Bihar assembly right now. His party will get a 60+% majority on its own next year. In 2018 his party will get 20+ MPs. In 2019 his strength in the Bihar assembly will only get better. Then in 2022 the people of Bihar will give him 40 MPs so he can lay a claim to the throne in Delhi.
Until then he gets to act the Opposition Leader to Modi in Delhi. Modi has been good for business, and that is also important, but the same Modi has been rather weak on the human development index, and there Nitish is strong.
Saturday, May 17, 2014
Nitish Is Hurt
 |
| English: Nitish Kumar (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
"If Naveen's BJD and Jayalalithaa's AIADMK could fetch 44% votes each to bag 20 of the 21 LS seats in Odisha and 37 of the 39 LS seats in Tamil Nadu respectively, why was JD (U) trounced despite the fact that I have worked no less hard to better things in Bihar?"'Hurt' Nitish unlikely to leave Bihar for BJP
Sources close to the CM said Nitish was bitterly baffled at the way the voters rejected him in the just-concluded parliamentary election despite all the "hard work" he has done to put the once-BIMARU state on the rails of development. He is citing the examples of J Jayalalithaa, Naveen Patnaik and Mamata Banerjee, who won the election impressively for their respective party in their respective states despite the NaMo wave.Nitish is hurt. He deserved as good if not better than Jayalalita, Patnaik and Mamata. But the consumer is always right, the voter is always right. That is one of the laws of politics.
Bihar and UP make up the Hindi heartland and by definition are the most contested states in the country. That is not true of Tamilnadu, Orissa, and West Bengal. It is like real estate in the city center is more expensive than in the outskirts.
Nitish ditching Modi did not go well with the voters. Nitish made it sound like he would accept Advani for the PM post, but not Modi. Why would that be? Is it because Advani is secular? Really? The Ram Mandir Rath Yatra Advani? Advani as PM would have given India its traditional "Hindu rate of growth," something below 5%. Modi is a better modern technocrat. To say the BJP was okay, but Modi was not sounded like words coming out of a confused mind.
The better proposition would have been to claim he was better than Modi, and to have waged a national campaign to that end.
If Nitish had swept Bihar with 35 out of its 40 seats, then Modi would still have been Prime Minister. The NDA would still have had a majority.
It is not like Nitish lost to something or somebody minor. Modi only waged the most brilliant election campaign India has seen to date. The contest was for the top job in Delhi. Modi was running. Nitish was not running. And so Modi won because he was the only one running for the top job. Not even Rahul was officially running.
Now the best option for Nitish is to engineer a JD(U)-RJD-Congress alliance in Bihar and also a SP-BSP-Congress alliance in UP. And shoot for 2018. If the JD(U), RJD, SP, BSP, and Congress can sweep Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, they can have Delhi. But it is not just about alliance building. It is more about development, that thing that Nitish knows a ton about. The only way you can beat Modi is by outdoing him on development. Alliance building alone will not do the trick.
The center of gravity in Indian politics still lies in the Hindi heartland.
Expressing personal hurt is not going to work. Jayalalita, Patnaik and Mamata did not wage frontal attacks on Modi. Nitish did. But it came across as impulsive, rather than a thought out plan to offer a credible alternative.
Uttar Pradesh: SP + BSP + Congress
JD(U) + RJD Could Sweep Bihar
Uttar Pradesh: SP + BSP + Congress
This election might bring the JD(U), the RJD, the SP, the BSP and the Congress under one umbrella. And if that happens, the Hindi heartland is back on rebel ground.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)