Nitish Kumar is essentially working out the nuts and bolts of a policy initiative that was electorally fine-tuned in the last assembly election. The victorious coalition was possibly the broadest social coalition, incorporating extreme social groups from the elite to the very subaltern.

He is functioning with several handicaps. He has no advantage of history, unlike in many southern and western states in the realm of growth, nor any developmental icons. He does not have a well-oiled party organisation, like the CPM in West Bengal, which can act as a social shock absorber or foot soldiers for implementing governmental programmes. The absence of a corporate sector and a development oriented civil society is another major constraint in re-branding the state. Thus the success of the developmental strategy here rests entirely on the bureaucracy which falls short on both capacity and commitment. However, these handicaps get partly compensated by a so far non-hostile central government. P. Chidambaram’s visit to Bihar, his first to a Hindi heartland state, was a political coup for Nitish Kumar. Even within the state, the NDA is functioning quite cohesively. Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi has played a decisive role in this cohesion. He is also co-architect of several tax reforms.

The task of rebuilding Bihar, however, needs not just cohesion within the NDA, but a broader consensus. Bihar has never pursued a cohesive and inclusive agenda of development. This was primarily due to the absence of a viable, forward-looking and inclusive state structure. Further, feudal patterns of appropriation came in the way of the formation of an authentic elite. The foundation laid in the fifties by the then ruling elite determined the subsequent trajectory of underdevelopment. In recent times, while society got increasingly democratised, the elite of the state gave up ‘ownership’. The functioning of the state nosedived further.

... contd.