In Bihar, the Congress must be an honest broker

The coalition will survive if the party gives CM Nitish Kumar the respect he deserves

The rumblings within the alliance in Bihar are getting louder. But is a temblor inevitable? It’s hard to tell. For it’s risky to be clairvoyant about complex alliances. They mostly collapse when social pacts on which they rest wither away. On the face of it, a major chunk of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s support base isn’t hostile to his alliance with Lalu Prasad’s RJD and the Congress. The campaign for disbanding it is led by the middle and upper classes, besides vocal sections of the civil society that keep harping on the RJD chief’s tainted image. Pragmatism demands that Nitish Kumar keeps his options open for the 2019 polls. But for him it will be a quantum leap to walk out of the ruling alliance whose term ends in 2020, a year after the next general elections.

What’s currently on display is brinkmanship between two different temperaments: Lalu Prasad is an overbearing extrovert; Nitish Kumar is a man of few words. Besides opposite personalities, they differ on the alliance’s approach to the BJPruled Centre. The CM is too matured to be going all guns booming against the BJP regime. He needs New Delhi’s assistance to deliver on his promises in the state. That realism compounded after he imposed prohibition in Bihar, which punched a big hole in the state’s earnings.

It isn’t surprising then that the JD(U) leader is even-handed in his approach towards the Centre and his allies in the Opposition. He did come across as standing with the BJP on demonetisation, GST and Ramnath Kovind’s candidature for the presidency, but his stand was well-argued and did not impinge on ideology. The coalition’s future could be safe if the Congress, plays an honest broker. It must give Nitish Kumar the respect he deserves. There isn’t a leader in the Opposition camp with his credentials to speak on corruption — or on the growing agrarian crisis as former union minister for agriculture.