Watching closely the developments that have taken place in Bihar, with Nitish Kumar trashing the BJP to enter into an alliance with RJD and Congress and other partners of the Grand Alliance on Tuesday, leaders close to Nitish believe that he will be in the coming months projected as the anti-BJP Opposition’s prime ministerial face in 2024 polls. As the first step, he will be announced as the convenor of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
Nitish and all his cabinet colleagues, minus 16 BJP MLAs, who tendered their resignation, are likely to take oath on Wednesday at the historic Gandhi Maidan in Patna. After meeting the Governor, Nitish said that seven parties—JDU, RJD, Congress, three left parties and HAM—were coming together to form the new government.
According to JD(U) party leaders, the BJP–JD(U) alliance fell apart when Nitish came to know about a Maharashtra-like “Operation Lotus” that the BJP was trying to execute to remove him by using the former JD(U) leader and Union minister Ramchandra Prasad Singh, who was considered his confidante.
The evidence of this conspiracy, JD(U) leaders said, would be made public soon.
Many Bihar-based JD(U) and BJP leaders told The Daily Guardian on Monday that an audio conversation in which Singh was purportedly heard talking to a BJP heavyweight at the Centre. The two leaders were discussing on how Singh was going to break the JD(U) from within and dislodge Nitish from the government, with help from the BJP.
The said conversation, according to the sources, took place sometime around in March–April this year. Singh, who had taken oath as a Union minister in July 2021, had to resign last month after Nitish decided not to nominate him for a second Rajya Sabha term. The unannounced visit of Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan to Patna on the night of 5 May during which he met Nitish and left early morning next day too was likely undertaken in view of this conversation.
Significantly, till Monday noon, Bihar-based BJP leaders were assured that Nitish will not break the alliance and the meeting of the JD(U) party leaders he had called on Tuesday was just a political posturing to seek more ministerial berths in the Union cabinet and more autonomy in running the state. However, two JD(U) leaders had told The Daily Guardian on Sunday that the alliance was going to end as Nitish had made up his mind. One of the leaders had then quipped, “Gaadi kaafi agey nikal chuki hai (The tussle has reached a point beyond redemption).”
Senior leaders like Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nand Kishore Yadav and Sushil Kumar Modi, who know the state and party workers in and out, with whom Nitish shares a very cordial relation, have been pushed to the side lines post the November 2020 polls by the emerging group of Union ministers Bhupender Yadav, Nityanand Rai and state chief Sanjay Jaiswal. As a result, there was no BJP leader left in Bihar or in Delhi who Nitish could trust and this played a vital role in deteriorating the relation between the two erstwhile alliance partners.
None of these senior leaders was aware of the developments taking place in Bihar all these times.
Ultimately, the BJP had to field Prasad in Patna to mount an attack on Nitish on Tuesday night. He “reminded” Nitish that it was because of the BJP that he reached the political stature he had attained. He claimed that the allegations that BJP was trying to break the JD(U) were baseless.
According to insiders, some discussion on JD(U), RJD and Congress coming together again took place in May when the Leader of Opposition in Bihar Assembly Tejashwi Yadav and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, along with other party leaders, had gone to the United Kingdom for an event. This came after Nitish had raised eyebrows among the BJP circle by attending an Iftar hosted by Lalu Prasad Yadav’s family in Patna in April.
However, what has come as a surprise is that the BJP leadership was caught unawares.