ERY Nitish Kumar A Veritable Political Footballer of the Decade

ERY Nitish Kumar A Veritable Political Footballer of the Decade

Written by

SOROOR AHMED

Published on

July 21, 2022

In the game of football, teams often draw different strategies to overcome the rival. If the opponent team is so-so, but has one player of extraordinary calibre, efforts are made to mark that individual player. This happens with many teams. In the recent years France under Zinedine Zidane, arguably all time great footballer like Pele of Brazil and Diego Maradona of Argentina, was one of them.

In such a situation the rival team sees to it that the ball does not go to that extraordinary player. Once that objective is achieved, the whole team can be overcome and goal(s) can be scored. A couple of players of the rival team try their best to check his movement as they have been assigned this job by their coach and captain. But the great players often overcome this challenge.

Now come to the political football going on in the state of Bihar, whose chief minister has become the darling of the media simply because he gives advertisement worth crores to them every year and because he has come to power with the support of the upper caste votes and the BJP.

Nitish Kumar was never a good football. Had he been so, he would not have been in the politics. But in the field of politics he is playing the role of a perfect footballer. Ever since coming to power, he is trying his level best, either to allure Muslims or confuse them. He wants to show to the world that though he is in alliance with the BJP, he is secular in outlook and takes care of Muslims.

He knows that the Muslim community in his state is like a below-the-standard football team. Just keep the so-called leaders, especially the religious ones, and Urdu Press engaged, that is, in good humour and then let the rest of the players do their tricks, that is, score as much goal as they can. He has taken to himself the task of marking these so-called Muslim opinion-makers, small time clergies, part-time politicians and turncoats. Mind it these Muslim leaders are not like Zidane, Ronaldo, Romario, Zico, Baggio, etc., who would break the web around them to assure victory for their respective teams. The community leadership in this case gets trapped by Nitish Kumar himself. In the form of goodies, awards, advertisements, and false promises and assurances he had kept them bogged down.

With the chief minister astutely performing this work, the rest of the team has been allowed to score freely as there is hardly anyone left to resist the onslaught. By rest of the team, one means the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which in the last two months and a half organised two massive shows in the state. This is not to speak of non-stop campaign in the name of ban on cow-slaughter, the so-called oust-Bangladeshi campaign, Go to Village movement, and agitation against the Centre’s decision to open a branch of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the Muslim dominated pocket of the state.
Ever since Nitish’s coming to power on November 24, 2005 Sangh Parivar leaders have made a beeline to the state. In fact, the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, was to attend the swearing in of Nitish. However, he had to cancel the programme at the last moment as in that case the whole strategy would have backfired. Less than a month after Nitish’s take over, Pravin Togadia stormed into the state. Since then dozens of them have came and went back, giving inflammatory speeches against Muslims and Lalu Prasad who, in their words, indulged in Muslim-appeasement. On some occasions even the Central Government has been targeted.

As if that was not enough, a couple of years ago Nitish Kumar publicly welcomed the then RSS chief K Sudarshan at a function in Patna and even invited him to his official residence. That was something never dreamt of in Bihar, where during the Lalu-Rabri Raj some Sangh Parivar zealots were even literally deported by the state administration from the Patna airport itself.

But now the scene is quite different. With Mohan Bhagwat, an old Bihar hand – he is not from the state, but has the experience of working here – taking up the leadership of the Sangh, all attention has been shifted to the state. The RSS wants to make up for the lost time, that is, 15 years of the rule by Lalu Prasad and Rabri Devi.

The RSS held its first national executive meeting in the recent memory at Rajgir in Nalanda district between October 9 and 11, 2009. All the top brass – the Bhagwats, the Togadias, the Singhals etc. – attended it. Then they turned their attention to the state capital, Patna, where they held a two-day massive show of strength. Once again Mohan Bhagwat was the chief attraction at the Christmas day rally in local Gandhi Maidan. Among those who took part wearing khaki shorts was the deputy chief minister of the state, Sushil Kumar Modi. Inter alia Bhagwat decried the minority status to Muslims, stating that a community with 15 per cent population cannot be called so.

The tragedy is that apart from the opposition Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal and Lok Janshakti Party of Ram Vilas Paswan, no Muslim leader dared to condemn the state government. And when one Abu Qaiser of the Muslim United Front, once the darling of Nitish Kumar, issued the statement trying to expose the chief minister, hardly any newspaper of Patna dared to carry it.

Frustrated, he faxed his statement to a couple of Hindi dailies that have their editions outside Patna. It is now that he realised the fascist nature of the present regime. But that was too late as by now it has consolidated itself.

There is no dearth of Muslims who would argue that the RSS is no more an issue for them. A same set of people used to say this in Gujarat before February 27, 2002 and in Orissa, before August 2008.