Dear Reader,

On April 15, the BJP reached a milestone in Bihar, installing its first Chief Minister in the State, Samrat Choudhary. Soon after taking the oath, Choudhary touched the feet of Nitish Kumar and later visited his official residence. A smart move by the new occupant of the top job.

Samrat, a Hindi word meaning “king”, is an auspicious name for a Chief Minister. But the coronation of the new Bihar Chief Minister was a low-key affair. Neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor Amit Shah attended the oath-taking ceremony, nor were Chief Ministers from other BJP-ruled States invited to share the stage.

Every attempt was made to ensure that no message went out that the BJP was celebrating the exit of Nitish Kumar, and that the Nitish cohort did not feel that there had been a power shift. The BJP understands that Bihar, often called the caste cauldron, is not Uttar Pradesh, and that “Kamandal” (Hindutva politics) is not big enough here to keep the “Mandal” (OBC politics) inside it. Here, the Mandal—rather Mandal II, which empowers intermediary castes—is primarily with the Janata Dal (United), even though the BJP’s subaltern Hindutva pitch has made some inroads.

And so the BJP took over Bihar quietly, with no small measure of trepidation about what lay ahead. Despite the nearly 20-year rule of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), “Bahar” (prosperity) eludes Bihar, while “Palayan” (migration) remains more the norm than the exception. Added to this is the fact that there is no longer a Nitish Kumar to carry the alliance forward on the shoulders of his goodwill.

But this is how the BJP has quietly captured power in States where neither the RSS’ reach was massive nor the saffron party’s Hindutva politics had strong traction. But alliances with socialist and caste parties have always helped the BJP widen its net, and the history goes back to the 1960s.

When the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra Party, and the Socialist Party came together to field a single candidate in four Lok Sabha byelections in 1963, the results were spectacular. Three of them—J.B. Kripalani, Rammanohar Lohia, and Minoo Masani—won; and even though the Jana Sangh’s Deendayal Upadhyaya lost, the camaraderie continued.

In Bihar, socialist leaders like Karpoori Thakur worked closely with the Jana Sangh and helped it gain a foothold in the State by joining a non-Congress coalition—the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal—in 1967. The Jana Sangh had by then joined hands with socialists and communists not only in Bihar but also in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh.

This formed the bedrock of the 1971 pre-electoral Grand Alliance, which gathered the Jana Sangh, Swatantra Party, Congress (O), Praja Socialist Party, and Samyukta Socialist Party, a precursor to the formal formation of the Janata Party in January 1977, when the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Bharatiya Lok Dal, Socialist Party, and Congress (O) merged to contest the 1977 general election against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. They later parted ways, and the BJP was formed in 1980, but the expansion of the saffron party began then and continued.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Dalit-led Bahujan Samaj Party first joined hands with the BJP in 1995 and then again in 1997 and 2002, giving the BJP a certain acceptability among Dalits.

Currently, the BJP in Uttar Pradesh is allied with parties of socialist background and leanings in western Uttar Pradesh: the Rashtriya Lok Dal, headed by Jayant Chaudhary, the grandson of former Prime Minister and farmer leader Chaudhary Charan Singh; a faction of Apna Dal in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a party founded by Soneylal Patel in 1995 to fight against casteism and for social justice; the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP); and the Nishad Party, all commanding considerable clout among their respective caste constituencies.

In Bihar, even before Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan (then in the Janata Dal) became part of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1999, Nitish Kumar, as leader of the Samata Party, had hitched his wagon to the BJP after the party’s formation in 1994 and contested the 1996 and 1998 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar together, helping the BJP get a strong foothold in the State. That George Fernandes, Nitish’s senior in the party and a veteran with strong trade union roots, was also part of the alliance gave the saffron party a major boost at the time.

Paswan, who formed the Lok Janshakti Party in 2000 and quit the NDA in 2002, returned to the BJP alliance in February 2014, in a move akin to breaking the untouchability of the Narendra Modi-led BJP—this after Nitish Kumar, ending a 17-year-old relationship with the BJP, had walked out of the NDA in 2013.

But the BJP, just as it had welcomed Paswan after a gap of 12 years, kept its doors open for Nitish and let him rejoin the NDA fold twice after he had switched to the RJD-led opposition alliance. Amid these comings and goings of friends turned foes and foes turned friends, the BJP silently kept making inroads among Dalits and oppressed classes. And now it has a Chief Minister of its own, hailing from the oppressed caste of the Kushwaha or Koiri.

After Yadav and Kurmi, Kushwaha is the third most prominent OBC grouping. The Koiri community has in the past been inclined towards radical socialist politics, having produced the firebrand leader Jagdeo Prasad, known as the “Lenin of Bihar”. But the BJP has also kept another prominent Koiri leader, Upendra Kushwaha, in good humour, earlier making him a Union Minister and now placating him with a Rajya Sabha seat after he lost the 2024 Lok Sabha election. His Rashtriya Lok Morcha—which evolved from the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party and Rashtriya Lok Janata Dal—has been part of the NDA, helping the BJP gain acceptability among the agrarian Koiris.

The BJP similarly benefited in Karnataka from its alliance with Ramakrishna Hegde’s Lok Shakti in the late 1990s, and it gradually ate up the space of the entire Janata Parivar in the State. In 2006, it came to power by aligning with another Janata Parivar offshoot, the Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S). In 2008, the BJP formed a government on its own in the State, the first by the saffron party in south India. The JD(S) is currently an NDA ally in Karnataka. Deve Gowda’s son, H.D. Kumaraswamy, is Union Minister of Heavy Industries and Steel in the Modi government.

In Haryana, when the BJP fell short of a majority to form a government after a hung Assembly in 2019, the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP), headed by Dushyant Chautala, great-grandson of Chaudhary Devi Lal, came to its rescue and enabled the BJP to form a government. Five years later, the BJP terminated its alliance with Dushyant Chautala’s party in March 2024. Chautala first lost the Deputy Chief Minister’s post and then was routed in the Assembly election.

Earlier, the BJP had also aligned with the Indian National Lok Dal, another Janata Party offshoot headed by Devi Lal’s son Om Prakash Chautala, in the Lok Sabha election of 1999 and the Haryana Assembly election of 2000. They came together again in 2009. Currently, the INLD and JJP are on the margins, and the BJP has gained at their expense.

Naveen Patnaik, son of former Janata Dal leader Biju Patnaik, founded the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in 1997 and aligned with the BJP for the 1998 Lok Sabha election. In 2000, the BJD-BJP alliance formed a government in Odisha with Naveen Patnaik as Chief Minister, dislodging the Congress that had ruled the State for a long time. The BJD-BJP alliance returned to power in 2004 as well, but broke apart in 2009 in the wake of communal violence against Christian minorities in 2007 and 2008. Over the next three elections—2009, 2014, and 2019—Patnaik won on his own, but the BJP gradually replaced the Congress as the principal opposition force and finally came to power in 2024, defeating the Patnaik-led BJD.

Like Nitish Kumar’s party in Bihar, the BJD too has been a one-man show for two decades, and like Nitish, Patnaik too appears to be receding from the picture.

The two States once ruled by Janata Party offshoots are now in the BJP’s kitty.

The trend of socialist parties powering the saffron surge, particularly in light of the BJP’s fierce opposition to the words “socialist” and “secular” in the Preamble of the Indian Constitution, is interesting. What do you think?

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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