PM race: Modi has upper hand, but Nitish is not giving up yet

He kicked off a debate on who should hold the country’s top job at a time when there was almost no talk of the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate. He rattled off what qualities such a candidate must have, explained in detail who is fit for the job and sought declaration of the NDA’s leader well in advance, shrewdly recommending his name for this post, but when it came to formal declaration of the leader, Nitish Kumar lost out to arch rival and his Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi. Surely, Nitish hates Modi for that, but he has accepted defeat yet. Nitish Kumar: 

Still in the race. AFP “There was a wave against corruption, scams and high inflation in the current government, and these could have been factors unifying all opposition parties. But BJP spoilt this chance by putting a controversial figure as a PM candidate. Now the country is headed toward a hung parliament, and only BJP will be responsible for this,” Nitish said in an interview with Bloomberg on November 13. Of course, what he left unsaid is he still has a chance to stake his claim for the top job and that he is trying hard at it. “He (Nitish Kumar) is definitely in the race for the prime ministership. He has the ambition, and this is one of the reasons why he broke alliance with the BJP, risking his government. His main motive, in my opinion, is to be the rallying point of anti-BJP outfits in case no party gets the majority after the elections,” explained Prof Nawal Kishore Chaudhary, a senior professor of Patna University.

 Nitish’s recent moves reinforce this perception. He is competing with Modi in just about every matter. There are at least five areas where this competition is visible. He unveiled a model of the world’s tallest Hindu temple last week in the presence of the Shankaracharya of Dwarka, Swaroopanand Saraswati Maharaj. The unveiling of the temple – Virat Ramayan Mandir – dedicated to Lord Ram comes barely a fortnight after a grandiose project to build the world’s tallest statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by Modi in his home state. While the statue, to be called the ‘State of Unity’, would be 697-feet tall, the temple in Bihar would be 405-feet high. On completion, it would be twice the size of the Hindu temple complex at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. But the BJP says there is just no comparison between the two projects.

 “There should not be any comparison between the two projects. While the construction of Ramayan temple has nothing to do with the Bihar government, Patel’s statue in Gujarat is the brainchild of Narendra Modi and is sponsored by the Gujarat government,” said senior BJP leader and former Bihar deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi. On 30 October, Nitish had joined the anti-communalism rally organized by Left parties in New Delhi, revealing his national ambition to lead a conglomerate of regional parties by exhorting them to work together to promoting communal harmony in the country. A total of 14 parties, including some constituents of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, had taken part in the rally. It was widely described as the preliminary building block of the Third Front. A clear hint about a possible Third Front was given by Nitish who said that his Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and other parties should ponder how to mobilise “democratic forces” to defeat “communal forces”.

 “There is no new front here but we will have to think how the democratic forces can be united based on issues,” he had told the rally. After Modi gave the slogan of “toilets first, temples later”, Nitish went a step forward, declaring that persons not having toilets would be debarred from contesting the panchayat and urban body polls in future. In order to implement this idea, Nitish has announced bringing amendment in the existing laws soon. Both leaders have been involved in a competition over respective development models. While Nitish claims his ‘development model’ is the best suited to the entire country, Modi goes on publicising his ‘Gujarat model’ which he claims will push up the economic growth. 

“Nitish’s economy model is as good and as bad as the model of Narendra Modi and Manmohan Singh. All the three models are corporate-centric, based on neo-liberal economic policy,” opines Chaudhary, also an economist. Yet another area where Nitish is competing with Modi is the social media. The former has revived his blog, two years after he had completely stopped blogging. “I am glad to be back here again. It feels great to share my thoughts with people living in different parts of the world,” Nitish wrote in his blog.

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