Bihar is no stranger to being at the center of a tectonic shift in national politics fuelled by turbulent regional forces. On Tuesday, a day filled with high drama, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar severed ties with ally BJP and embraced the Mahagathbandhan or grand alliance, bringing the spotlight on Bihar and its complex matrix of politics.
From the landmark Bihar movement led by students in the 1970s that emanated from Patna to the stopping of Lal Krishna Advani's Ayodhya rath yatra by then chief minister Lalu Yadav in Samastipur, these events have set off a chain of reactions that resulted in major ruptures in the realm of national politics, throwing ruling parties out of seats of power or leading to rising of unexpected and at times unstable alliances.
The Bihar movement, which eventually came to be known as the JP movement as veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan spearheaded it, had a ripple effect from Patna to Delhi and the echoes of his fiery speeches at Gandhi Maidan in the Bihar capital had reverberations in Ramlila Maidan in the national capital. Narayan's Bihar movement during the turbulent 70s eventually led to the Emergency from 1975-77. He exhorted college and university students in the state to throw themselves into what he had envisaged as a massive churn of Indian politics against corruption. Under the firebrand JP, the agitation in Bihar took the shape of a Sampoorna Kranti or total revolution and the initial demand for resignation of the then Ghafoor government in the state ultimately turned into a larger demand for the dismissal of the Indira Gandhi government.
After the Emergency was over and general elections were held, Congress was ousted and a Janata Party-led government came into power with Morarji Desai as the prime minister. The JP movement has had such a personal and emotional impact on many that Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav, Sushil Kumar Modi, and Sharad Yadav, all of whom were engrossed in students politics back then, often describe themselves as "product of the JP movement".
Both Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar, who perhaps bonded during the student movement, have had 'friend-turned-foe-turned-friend' moments in their careers, which also impacted both regional and in turn national politics. RJD and JD(U), both descendants of the Janata Dal party, play a crucial role when it comes to stitching power alliances to form a government.
And as Kumar returns to the Mahagathbandhan, from which he had walked out of in 2017 post the 2015 elections, many have also begun to speculate if the move will have ramifications on the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Many student leaders in Patna.
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