After nine months of professed ‘renunciation’ of office, Nitish Kumar has secured his ‘re-anointment’ as the Chief Minister of Bihar. The much awaited showdown between Nitish Kumar and Jitan Ram Manjhi eventually fizzled out rather tamely, as Manjhi tendered his resignation just a little before the scheduled floor test in the Assembly. The support extended by the BJP remained an unused cheque, with its future validity remaining an open question. Nitish Kumar has time till the middle of March to prove his majority.

Kumar now says his decision to resign and hand over power to Jitan Ram Manjhi in the wake of the rout of the JD(U) in the Lok Sabha election of 2014 was an ‘emotional’ one. Being the calculating and pragmatic politician that he is, Nitish Kumar is not really known for taking ‘emotional’ decisions. Indeed, the decision to install Jitan Ram Manjhi as the stopgap Chief Minister of Bihar was anything but an ‘emotional’ gesture. It was a shrewd political move aimed at killing several birds with one stone.
By making Jitan Ram Manjhi the Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar had insulated both his party and government from the immediate impact of the huge defeat suffered in the Lok Sabha elections. He projected himself as a leader who was ready to shoulder responsibility for the defeat. And most significantly, he wanted to convey the message that he was serious about the mahadalit discourse initiated by his government, hoping to claim every credit for ‘sacrificing’ his own seat of power for a leader coming from the most oppressed and marginalised Musahar caste.

But as Jitan Ram Manjhi began to test Nitish Kumar’s calculations with the steady assertion of his new found authority and unmistakable emergence from Kumar’s shadow, Nitish Kumar began to panic. The BJP, the party that habitually patronised defended every massacre of mahadalits in Bihar, discovered great political merit in the symbolism of Jitan Ram Manjhi and got ready to outplay Nitish Kumar in the game he had started with the Manjhi card. But more than anything else, it was perhaps the Delhi election outcome which limited the BJP’s options and made sure that the Bihar political drama ended in a rather anti-climactic denouement.

Jitan Ram Manjhi has been a politician of the old Congress school who later switched over to the Janata Dal. He comes from the Gaya-Jahanabad belt of Bihar which witnessed heinous massacres of the rural poor all through the 1980s and 1990s. Manjhi never really spoke out for the dignity, rights and survival of the oppressed people in this turbulent period. Following the political tradition of Jagjivan Ram and Ram Vilas Paswan, and unlike someone like Karpoori Thakur, he never really sympathised with the oppressed poor’s battle for social dignity and emancipation.

As Chief Minister, he had the chance to address the basic agenda of the oppressed people. A CPI(ML) delegation met him and asked him to reopen the massacre cases in which the culprits have all been acquitted by the High Court, reinstitute the Amir Das commission whose disbanding had emboldened the Ranvir Sena to resume its campaign of anti-dalit anti-women violence and initiate measures to implement the recommendations of the Land Reforms Commission. Manjhi did not show any concern for these basic questions of justice, on the contrary he began to hobnob with the BJP, the biggest patron of social injustice and oppression.

Will Manjhi now seek reconciliation with Nitish Kumar to return to the Janata Parivar or will he float a new party and toe the Ram Vilas Paswan line to jump on to the BJP bandwagon? The early indications are he is keeping his options open. Let us leave these speculations to Manjhi who alone can determine his own future political course. What is most important is to reassert the agenda of people’s rights, justice and dignity in this new political juncture. Nitish Kumar must be held accountable for betraying the trust the people had reposed in him over his promises of development and good governance.

Towards the very end of its tenure, the Manjhi government took several decisions addressing some of the long-standing demands of Bihar’s most deprived and neglected sections of workers and employees. Pressure must be mounted on Nitish Kumar to respect and implement all those decisions. Recent developments have made it abundantly clear that whether it is the Janata Dal or the BJP, both are interested in using Manjhi only as a pawn and the real concerns of Manjhi’s community figure nowhere in their scheme of things. The communist banner of class struggle must be held high at this juncture as the real vehicle for the political assertion of the oppressed people.

Box matter

Landless Poor Demonstrate in Bihar

Nearly one lakh landless poor demonstrated at over 200 regional centres in Bihar on the issue of dwellings and land for farming, following the call given by All India Agricultural Labour Association (AIALA) and Shehri Gareeb Morcha (Urban Poor Front). Angrily raising slogans of ‘Give us land not announcements’, the protestors demanded that they be given homestead land, papers for land occupancy, and occupation of the land for which they have been issued papers. In the course of the demonstration, nearly 1 lakh applications were given across the state in which the question of allotting nearly tens of thousands of acres of land for which papers have been issued. The Manjhi government offered false assurance of homes and farming lands to the poor. While several announcements pertaining to land distribution are being made on papers, in actual the situation is the exact opposite where on an increasing rate the poor are being displaced even from whatever little land they do have for living and agriculture. In the survey report brought by CPI (ML) it had been revealed that nearly sixty percent of people in Bihar were landless. Had the JD (U) government implemented the land reform recommendations then nearly 21 lakh acres of land marked by the committee could have been recovered by the state government and distributed to the landless for accommodation and doing agriculture. Protesting against the false promises of the state government, thousands of people even demonstrated in the cities on the question of land reforms.

The various AIALA leaders leading the demonstrations declared that they will continue to expose the false assurances of the government and intensify the movement to force the government to implement its announcements.