JD(U) sheen off, why for Bihar’s NDA voters it is Modi in 2024, not Nitish

For the large part of Nitish Kumar’s 19-year rule in Bihar, his leadership has been identified with an efficient administration that restored law and order in the state, built road infrastructure, empowered girls, women and disadvantaged sections of the society with schemes, carefully designed. Credited with identifying women as a separate constituency in the country – long before it became the flavour of many a party – Nitish also enforced prohibition in the state in 2016.

That, too, was a hit with many women at the receiving end of abuse and distress because of their spouses’ alcoholism.

However, a stagnating growth, lack of job opportunities at home, administrative corruption, poorly implemented prohibition, crumbling cities beyond the capital, and his own ideological flip-flops are dimming the halo around Bihar’s Vikas Purush.

This was visible in the 2020 Assembly polls, when Nitish’s JD(U) was reduced from over 70 seats in the Assembly to just 43 and now in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, it’s dimmed further.

While voters, cutting across caste lines, flag his “good work,” they report a sense of fatigue with his long reign, frustration with his flip-flops, and impatience with his inability to spur Bihar to the next level. Across the 16 seats JD(U) is contesting, those voting for the NDA are clear: they are voting for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, not for Nitish or his candidate.

Among voters, there is special criticism reserved for prohibition, specially from OBCs, EBCs and Dalits, the caste groups that constitute Nitish’s core base.

“Look, I am a poldaar (daily wagers who lift weight). If I don’t get a drink after the day’s work, I will not be able to sleep in the night. But we are the ones facing the police crackdown, the rich