I’m surprised that you’re surprised that Nitish Kumar has won the trust vote in the Bihar Assembly today. What were you thinking? Such a buttery operation as executed over the last three days and he wouldn’t have made sure he already had all the ayes he needed? I was surprised that you were surprised when he cut loose from Lalu Yadav and hooked up again with the BJP on Tuesday. Wasn’t everyone already saying since Nitish-Lalu jointly swept the Bihar Assembly election in November 2015 that their (not-so) Grand Alliance isn’t going to last? Do you remember if even once you’ve said to yourself, “Yes, these guys are good for five years and evermore”? No, you didn’t. Be honest. In your heart of hearts, you always feared someday they’d probably get sharp and knife each other. Of course, you didn’t imagine it would happen this way. That the good prime minister will become the third angle of the triangle so smoothly and quickly. Well, Narendra Modi did and here we are.

Nitish is a tough cookie. Even though they started out in politics together he’s way wilier than Lalu. Lalu became a bride quite young — chief minister at 41! And that, too, by his own smarts, not planted by some high command — and therefore showed all the follies of power-drunk youth that soon make success evanescent. Nitish has grown very differently, once seeming destined to be a lifelong bridesmaid chalking up one political humiliation after another for years before reaching where he has. Never underestimate a man who’s won the job the hardest way, and at the reasonably mature age of 54. You have obviously forgotten but he hasn’t and won’t ever, that the first time he became chief minister in 2005 he lasted only a week before pulling out because he couldn’t get all the ayes he needed. That was the biggest humiliation he ever faced; it made him a laughing stock for nine months before, mercifully, he won the October 2005 assembly election fair and square in partnership with the BJP. He’ll be damned if he’s ever going to let himself fall short of the ayes again, unless he’s lost the popular vote.

It’s funny that you now call him an opportunist. What was he when within weeks of the BJP smashing its way through the 2014 Lok Sabha election, an election that Nitish’s JD(U) fought alone and lost miserably, he jumped onto Lalu’s yacht and began singing songs of the seas with him? I mean, come on. The man had condemned Lalu for nearly a decade-and-a-half. He hated Lalu plain and simple. He had aggressively pushed for Lalu’s conviction in the fodder scam. (Lalu, too, hated him, as it became more than clear to me when I sat face-to-face with Lalu in Ranchi prison nearly four years ago after he was convicted in the fodder scam. If Lalu could kill he’d would have killed Nitish right then, I thought.) Did you call Nitish an opportunist when he allied with Lalu at that time?

There’s another way of measuring opportunism. Nitish has never once allied with the Congress — ever — the party he has fought all his political life. How’s that for principles? No, I’m not a Nitish groupie. I am an unbiased political analyst — regardless of which politician or party I loathe more than the other — and so should you be. On the other hand, Lalu, who rose from the anti-Congress mass agitation of the early 1970s and became chief minister in 1990 on the ashes of the Congress in Bihar, went to Sonia Gandhi’s house in 2004 and publicly said she should be prime minister. He was Manmohan Singh’s railway minister for five years before his party badly lost the 2009 Lok Sabha election and was thereafter ignored by the Congress.

Plus, also look around. I mean, can’t you see how vindictive Modi is being with Mamata Banerjee in next door West Bengal? Of course, Modi can’t do anything to Mamata — at least, not now — because she’s got a crushing a majority in her assembly, and has a million-strong cadre with claws sharpened in blood and gore of the violent Bengal politics over two decades. And the BJP in West Bengal is more a daydream than reality. The situation in Bihar is quite the opposite. Nitish doesn’t have Mamata’s brute majority, and he knew that he had to act fast or the BJP could launch a dirty game of buying out MLAs from both his and Lalu’s RJD.

 As for Nitish’s cadres, they are virtually non-existent. His political base is nothing more than a mishmash coalition of some factions of the other backward classes (OBCs). He himself is a Kurmi, an OBC that has merely 6% of Bihar’s votes. That is why he’s always needed a crutch, unlike Mamata who, for the time being, needs no one. That is why Nitish has marketed himself as a man of “good governance”, exactly like Modi did during his reign in Gujarat, because neither belongs to a politically and/or numerically dominant caste, unlike Lalu and even Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh.

Besides, Modi has been single-mindedly going after Lalu by piling on one corruption charge after another. Did Lalu really expect Nitish to save his skin? How? And why? The cardinal principle of politics is you got to save your own ass. Lalu has failed to do that. That Lalu had been so complacent all along shows that the old warhorse has perhaps aged. A politician who once was known for masterstrokes appears now afflicted by the political equivalent of Parkinson’s. Exactly why should Nitish have continued with Lalu when Lalu’s political capital was haemorrhaging by the hour?

 If we have to talk about opportunism, then do remember that politicians only represent the best and the worst in all of us. All of us are by now virtually divided into two blocks: one that supports the BJP and the other that doesn’t. The former was sad when Nitish-Lalu won the Bihar assembly elections defeating the BJP and is happy now. The latter was happy when they won the assembly election and is beyond grief now. Has either set of people thought that neither alliance — JDU-RJD until Tuesday, JDU-BJP now — was, is and will ever be moral and principled? As a citizenry we appear only to believe in shortcuts that lead alliances of our liking to power, by hook or crook, ideologies and principles be damned.

Lastly, please don’t talk to me about Lalu being a die-hard secularist. That’s blah. Lalu owed his political rise to the Jayaprakash Narayan-led anti-Indira Gandhi mass agitation that had its virtual epicenter in Bihar. It is recorded history that the RSS, the BJP’s puppeteer, provided the numbers all the way from the street protests to the leadership in that agitation. Has Lalu ever disavowed his role in, or even expressed regret for, legitimising the RSS in Indian politics? Just once Lalu stopped L. K. Advani’s rath yatra nearly three decades ago and he’s become your secular hero for the rest of his life? That’s insane. And if you think that Lalu has never — ever — allied with the BJP, well, so hasn’t Mulayam. But you don’t exactly think Mulayam as a committed secularist, do you? (In any case, to say that neither allied with BJP is wrong. They both supported Prime Minister V. P. Singh’s government, they even belonged to V. P. Singh-led Janata Dal, when the BJP supported the party at the Centre. Lalu never objected to that.)

Like I said, Lalu was UPA’s railway minister — a cabinet post — during 2004-09. Did he once raise the temperature against the BJP while being in the government? Did he ever seek justice for the Muslims victims of the RSS-BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal violence of 2002 in Gujarat? He was immensely powerful at that time, with 25 members in the Lok Sabha. Yes, he did get the Banerjee committee from his railways to prove that the Godhra train fire was probably not the handiwork of the Muslims from outside the train. But anything else besides that? No, he didn’t. He never demanded that the Babri Masjid trial of L. K. Advani, Murali Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati be fast-tracked. He never demanded the implementation of the Srikrishna Report that named Hindu right-wing politicians in Maharashtra for violence against and killings of Muslims.

Look, politics is cynical and so should be its analysis to be honest and meaningful. Lalu — like Mulayam, like Sharad Pawar — hasn’t ever openly allied with the BJP because he’s got a strong caste base in his state, just as Mulayam has in UP and Pawar has in Maharashtra. He and the BJP are competing to grab the same pot of third-party voters. Where’s the scope for them to team up?

Lastly, that Nitish has tied up with the BJP today doesn’t mean he’s going to stay hitched for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He’ll wait and see how the wind blows for Modi at that time. If, by some chance, Modi faces massive headwinds, then it won’t take Nitish a minute to run back to Lalu’s embrace. And, you know what? Lalu will hug him and kiss him and take him back like a long-lost lover.

 Yeah, that’s how cynical politics is.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @ajitsahi.

[opiniontag]