The Bihar assembly elections will perhaps be announced in a month or so. In 2020, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the schedule on September 25. On Monday, September 1, the opposition alliance of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Congress and other smaller parties will hold a rally in Patna to protest against ECI’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in the state. The rally will mark the culmination of a campaign across 20 districts in the state by the opposition, including the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi. The fact that the Opposition has invested so much behind the SIR issue suggests that it will be central to its campaign against the now two-decade-old Nitish Kumar regime – he has changed coalitions but retained chief minister-ship barring a brief self-imposed interlude post-2014 – in the state. This edition of the column will make an argument that the Opposition’s SIR obsession is likely irrelevant to the coming assembly elections, and perhaps even counter-productive to its own prospects.

Unless things change between now and the elections, Nitish Kumar will be the chief ministerial candidate of the incumbent National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Bihar. At 74, Nitish Kumar is not really old for a politician, but anybody who has followed his public appearances will agree that he has been keeping indifferent health for some time now. This makes it possible that even in the event of an NDA victory, he will either not be appointed as the chief minister after the results or will be replaced by someone else, not necessarily from the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U), sooner rather than later.

Nitish Kumar’s departure from Bihar’s political landscape is more than a watershed event. Even if one were to set aside the debate over his........

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