Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar's anti-Narendra Modi eruption should not have surprised any one, least of all his partnerin-government , the BJP. His hawkish secular posturing, which derailed the BJP's national executive meet in Patna last week, is part of a meticulously planned election strategy on which Kumar has been working from the day he was sworn in as chief minister five years ago. In a few months from now, when Bihar votes for its next government , the great Nitish gambit will be put to test and he will emerge either as a master strategist to rival the handful of chief ministers who have won a second successive term, or go down as a gambler who played risky politics with Bihar's complex caste equations.
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The BJP's confused response to the humiliation Kumar heaped on it in the middle of a high-profile party gathering underlines how rusty its political antenna has become. The signals were all there. Kumar had an agenda for Bihar and was working to a plan, with or without the BJP. The saffron party failed to read his lips. For the past four-and-a-half years as chief minister , Kumar has moved methodically to create a social base for himself by attempting to craft a new coalition of caste and community interests beyond traditional hegemonic groups like the Brahmins and Bhumihars , and more recently the Yadavs and the Paswans. Shaibal Gupta, who heads a Patna-based thinktank called the Asian Development Research Institute, calls it a "coalition of extremes" that extends from the upper castes at one end to the MBCs (most backward castes) and Maha-Dalits at the other.Read full article here
