Analysing the complex equations of Bihar’s critical political scenario at the present moment, it looks as if the state’s Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has taken the midway in tackling the issue of the alleged involvement of Deputy CM and Lalu Yadav’s son Tejaswi Yadav in land-for-hotels scam for which he has been booked by the CBI as Nitish neither wants to allow instability to creep into the state politics nor does he want to sacrifice his corruption-free image.
The decision to provide Tejaswi Yadav with a time frame of 4 days to prove himself clean of the charges of corruption was taken probably because, on one hand, Janata Dal (United) chief Nitish Kumar desperately wanted to cling on to his ‘zero tolerance’ attitude for corruption and on the other hand he had to take into account the fact that Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is the major party of the coalition government, which is currently in function, with as many as 80 MLAs in the 243-seat Bihar assembly where the other partners JD(U) and Congress have 71 and 27 MLAs respectively.
Nitish, who holds the repute of showing the door to his own tainted ministers, would have suffered a major loss of goodwill had he not taken a significant action against Tejaswi. At the same time, a direct eviction notice to Lalu’s son would have surely taken back RJD from the government of ‘mahagatbhandhan’ which would have rendered instability to Nitish’s chair as 122 MLAs are required to form the government in Bihar and if even Congress stayed back with RJD, the alliance would have still fallen short by 24.
Now, what if Tejaswi finally fails to wash off the stains of corruption and gets sacked as the Deputy CM? The answer is pretty simple. RJD will walk out of the coalition. But then, will the government fall? The answer is no as BJP and the other parties of NDA are all set to lend Nitish Kumar the outside support if he removes Tejaswi. Even if Congress also takes its support back, Nitish will still be able to continue as the CM as NDA have 58 MLAs in Bihar out of which 53 belongs to BJP. So a JD(U) NDA alliance will mean that the new coalition will be formed with a total of 129 MLAs, 7 more than the figure of the majority.
Nitish Kumar, who has refrained from making any comment publicly regarding the Deputy CM, is probably playing a safe strategic game by striking the perfect chord in terms of the probability of ruling Bihar either with RJD or BJP led NDA.
