The outcome of the by-elections to 18 Assembly seats in Bihar has come as a shock to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar whose social engineering — which so far stood him in good stead — seems to be under pressure. The outcome also indicates that the state could be heading towards a triangular contest with the Congress showing signs of revival as it snatched two seats from the NDA.

A combination of extremely backward castes (EBCs), Mahadalits, Dalit Muslims and upper castes saw Kumar break the RJD chief Lalu Prasad’s seemingly invincible Muslim-Yadav votebank and hand over the worst-ever defeat to the Bihar strongman in the last Lok Sabha elections. However, of late, policies loaded in favour of the extremely backward have alienated a large section of not only the upper castes but also of the OBCs. To this, what has added to Kumar’s woes is an infighting in the JD(U) arising out of the fact that most of the RJD turncoats got party tickets in the bypolls.

According to JD(U) poll managers, what proved detrimental to the party was tabling in the Assembly recommendations of the D Badopadhyay (the man responsible for land reforms in West Bengal) Commission on rights of “bataidars” (share croppers) just before the bypolls. Though the Chief Minister ensured that the recommendations were dumped by referring them to a committee, wide publicity by the local media had done the damage for him. It cut both ways, with landed castes fearing loss of their land to tenants and the landless getting upset over putting the proposals into cold storage. In Bihar, the upper castes and OBCs account for bulk of the agricultural land.

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