The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

The first phase of the Bihar assembly elections is over. The second and final phase will take place on November 11, and the results will be declared on November 14. As the dust settles, Bihar once again stands between memory and fatigue. Its politics has never been about mere elections; it has been about remembering who we were and forgetting just enough to survive who we have become.

Among those who mastered this delicate balance stands Nitish Kumar, the most enduring political figure in Bihar’s modern history.

To call him a Chanakya, as admirers do, is to mistake survival for strategy. To call him a betrayer, as critics insist, is to ignore the cruel arithmetic of Bihar’s politics. The truth lies somewhere in between—the story of a man who learnt to bend so that he could never be broken.

The Inheritance Of A Long Battle

To understand Nitish Kumar’s political grammar, one must travel back nearly a century, to 1933, when three castes—Yadav (Ahir), Kurmi, and Kushwaha—joined hands to form the Triveni Sangh. It was a rare alliance against the entrenched Savarna Samantvad that had defined Bihar’s social order for centuries.

The Sangh’s founders, Yadunandan Prasad Mehta, Jagdev Singh Yadav, and Shivpujan Singh, did not speak the language of capital or governance; they spoke of dignity and representation in a world that refused to see them. For the first time, Bihar’s backward and marginalised communities began to believe they could own politics, not merely serve it.

That inheritance travelled down generations, through the idealism of Karpoori Thakur, through the slogans of Jagdeo Babu, until one day it reached a man named Lalu Prasad Yadav. As Sankarshan Thakur so evocatively documents in Subaltern Sahib: Bihar and the Making of Lalu Yadav, this was more than a political rise; it was the coming of age of a people long denied their share of power. Thakur situates the Lalu moment as a social upheaval rather than a mere electoral shift, a turbulent, chaotic assertion that sought to rewrite who had the right to rule.

It was within the afterglow, and disillusionment, of that assertion that Nitish Kumar emerged.

Lalu’s Moment: The Shout From Below

When Lalu Yadav rose to power in 1990, he didn’t arrive on the strength of manifestos or modern economics. He arrived like a rupture, the laughter of the poor echoing in the Assembly. His government gave voice to the mocked and the invisible. He looked the landlords in the eye and taught his people to do the same.

For all the chaos of his rule, often caricatured by the English-speaking press as jungle raj,........

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