With Nitish poised to jump ship again, a saga of his flip-flops on alliances with BJP, RJD

The stage seems to be set for Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal (United) supremo Nitish Kumar, 73, to return to the BJP-led NDA again. If Nitish switches sides, this will mark the fourth time in just over a decade that he would do it.

Nitish’s shift would deal a severe blow to the ruling Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) in Bihar as well as the Opposition INDIA bloc at the national level.

The first time Nitish, the eight-term Bihar CM adept at the game of political survival, took his party to the Opposition camp was in June 2013 when he severed ties with the BJP on the ground that the NDA should have a leader with a “clean and secular image”. At the time, it had become apparent that then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi would be the NDA’s Prime Ministerial face for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and that the NDA would have no space for the Bihar CM’s political ambitions.

Nitish then gave a call for “Sangh-mukt Bharat” and went on to declare that “mitti mein mil jayenge, BJP ke saath wapas nahi jayenge (I would prefer to be reduced to dust rather than going back to BJP)”.

Two years later, in the run-up to the Bihar Assembly elections held in November 2015, Nitish joined hands with arch rival Lalu Prasad-led RJD and the Congress and some other smaller parties to form the Mahagathbandhan that won 178 seats out of the state’s total 243 seats. Subsequently, Nitish again took over as the CM.

The JD(U) chief who often talks of the “3Cs” of crime, corruption and communalism was, however, accused of dropping one “C” (communalism) for another (corruption). In the end, corruption allegations against the RJD’s Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav led him to break up with the RJD in July 2017.

Nitish then again forged an alliance with the BJP and formed their