Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s longest serving chief minister, filed his nomination papers for the Rajya Sabha on Thursday. This amounts to his de facto resignation as the chief minister of the state.
The next chief minister will perhaps be from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the senior partner in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the state. Kumar moving on as Bihar’s chief minister is one of the most important milestones in the state’s political history since independence. What did Nitish Kumar’s 20 plus years mean for the state, its politics, economy and society? Here are three charts which answer this question.
HT’s database of chief ministers has 23 unique chief ministers in Bihar from its first, Shri Krishna Sinha to Nitish Kumar. Kumar alone, in his ten stints in office, spent 7,232 days as the chief minister of the state (up to March 5), which accounts for 28% of total person days of Bihar’s chief ministers. Even at the national level, Kumar’s person days in office ranks third among chief ministers from major states (those with at least 10 Lok Sabha seats). The top two in this ranking are Naveen Patnaik of Odisha (who served for 8,860 days) and Jyoti Basu of West Bengal (who served for 8,534 days). (See Chart 1)
Kumar’s political dominance in Bihar rested on a coalition of extremes
Nitish Kumar did not have a polarising ideology such as Hindutva or communism. He did not have a formidable caste base like other Mandal politicians such as Lalu Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav or Mayawati. His politics was premised on the alchemy of reconciliation with a subtle othering of his predecessor Lalu Yadav’s formula of what was then an extremely formidable Muslim-Yadav combination. The NDA under Kumar thrived on an alliance of upper castes and lower OBCs and Dalits. The latter were neglected by Lalu’s politics. The former, Lalu alienated and dethroned. This is where Kumar’s alliance with the BJP helped. His party, the Janata Dal (United) retained its social justice character while outsourcing the upper-caste courting primarily to the BJP. This was most evident in the 2015 elections, when the JD(U) joined ranks with the RJD and the BJP was left with largely just upper caste support.
The dynamics of the alliance show in the caste-composition of the Bihar assembly which has seen a large increase in the representation of non-Yadav OBCs and upper-caste MLAs compared to the Lalu years. (See Chart 2)
The poverty of Sushashan (good governance) under Nitish Kumar
While social-engineering formed the bedrock of Nitish Kumar’s invincibility in the state, its rhetoric was always good governance. When Kumar took over as the CM in 2005, the bar for governance and development was really low. Law and order, roads, overall economic growth were largely in disarray. Data speaks for itself.
Bihar faced a lost decade and a half in terms of economic growth under the Lalu regime. Kumar really made a difference here and Bihar is among the best performers in terms of growth in the post-Nitish era. But higher growth did not make Biharis richer than their peers in the rest of country. They continue to be among the poorest in terms of per capita GSDP and average consumption levels. That Kumar’s last election victory came on the back of a cash transfer to women in the state was the biggest indictment of the upward mobility efficacy of the acceleration in per capita GSDP growth under him from 2005 to 2025. (See Chart 3)