NEW DELHI // Barely a year after Nitish Kumar quit as chief minister of India’s Bihar state, he will be sworn back into the post on Sunday – a development that is another setback for the ambitions of prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Mr Kumar’s Janata Dal United (JDU) party based its campaign during last summer’s general election on a fierce opposition to the BJP and its then prime ministerial candidate Mr Modi.
But Mr Kumar resigned in May when the BJP swept into parliament and Mr Modi became prime minister, with his JDU winning only two seats in all of Bihar, the country’s most impoverished state. He had, at the time, completed four out of five years of his second term as chief minister of the state.
“With folded hands, I apologise to the people of Bihar. Never again will I take such a step,” Mr Kumar told reporters on Friday, referring to his resignation. “I am ready to lead from the front.”
Mr Kumar's apology echoed that of the Aam Aadmi Party's Arvind Kejriwal, who resigned as chief minister of Delhi in January 2014 and was then returned to the position earlier this month. Mr Kejriwal's contrition was a main theme of the AAP's campaign for Delhi's assembly elections, in which it swept to victory against the BJP.
Mr Kumar had resigned as a way of taking moral responsibility for the JDU’s poor performance in last year’s parliamentary elections. In his place, he installed Jitan Ram Manjhi, another JDU legislator.
Last month, Mr Kumar had asked to return to the chief minister’s post, in order to prepare his party for the state elections later this year.
Mr Manjhi refused to give way, however, and was expelled from the JDU, which is wholly under Mr Kumar’s control and has 110 members in the state assembly.
Despite this, Mr Manjhi tried to claim that he could cobble together the numbers to prove his majority in the 233-member assembly. In this, he had the support of the 87 legislators of the BJP, which was keen on keeping Mr Kumar – who is a longtime rival of the BJP and a fierce critic of Mr Modi – out of power.
But on Friday morning, half an hour before Mr Manjhi’s majority was scheduled to be tested on the floor of the house, he announced his resignation. He told reporters that he feared violence within the assembly during this heated vote, and that some of the legislators supporting him had been threatened with harm if they voted for him.
The return of Mr Kumar to the chief minister’s position is a setback for the BJP, which is seen as having backed the wrong horse in this internal JDU tussle when it could well have stayed neutral.
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
