On March 5, 2026, Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s longest-serving chief minister, announced he would join their ranks. The man who once remade a broken state had finally run out of road and STEAM. His exit was dressed up as a voluntary transition. It was anything but.

To understand what Nitish Kumar built, you must first understand what he walked into. In 1990, Lalu Prasad Yadav rode the Mandal Commission wave to power, constructing a political machine on the twin pillars of Yadav loyalty and Muslim support. His message - that the backward castes had finally arrived - was electrifying. His governance was catastrophic.

By the late 1990s, Bihar had become a byword for state failure. Kidnappings for ransom ran into the thousands annually. Roads crumbled. Schools existed mostly on paper. The phrase “jungle raj” - coined by critics but accepted even by many Lalu supporters - captured the texture of daily life: arbitrary, dangerous, ungoverned. When Lalu was jailed in 1997 on fodder scam charges, he installed his largely untested wife, Rabri Devi, as chief minister - a move that struck much of India as breathtaking in its brazenness.

GDP growth in Bihar during the 1990s was among the lowest of any major Indian state. Migration to Delhi, Punjab, and Maharashtra accelerated. The state’s educated class left in droves. Bihar had become the cautionary tale that Indian politicians invoked when arguing for strong central oversight of state finances. It was into this wreckage that Nitish Kumar stepped.

November 2005. After a hung assembly earlier that year, fresh elections handed the National Democratic Alliance - Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) allied with the BJP - a working majority. Nitish Kumar was sworn in as chief minister on November 24. He was 54 years old, a product of the socialist movements of the 1970s, a protégé of George Fernandes, and, crucially, the anti-Lalu.

The contrast was deliberate and relentless. Where Lalu had governed through patronage and spectacle, Nitish governed through procedure. Within months, he launched a crackdown on organised crime. Police officers who had operated with impunity under the previous government found themselves transferred or prosecuted. Kidnapping rates, which had peaked at over 3,000 reported cases a year in the late 1990s, fell sharply.

Infrastructure followed. Bihar’s road network - ranked among the worst in India - began visibly improving. Power supply, still erratic, became somewhat less so. The state’s annual growth rate climbed from near-stagnant to double digits by 2010, drawing comparisons to the so-called “Bihar turnaround.”

Nitish earned his nickname - “Sushasan Babu,” the good governance man - through genuinely substantive early achievements. His Mukhyamantri Cycle Yojana, which provided bicycles to girls attending school, became a nationally discussed model for boosting female enrollment. Panchayati raj institutions were strengthened. Women were given 50% reservation in local body elections.

The 2010 assembly elections were a landslide: NDA won 206 of 243 seats, one of the most decisive mandates in Bihar’s history. At that moment, Nitish Kumar appeared not merely a successful chief minister but a potential national figure. He would never again stand on ground so solid.

June 2013. Narendra Modi was appointed BJP’s election campaign committee chief, a move widely understood as his coronation as the party’s prime ministerial candidate. Within days, Nitish Kumar walked the NDA out of the Bihar government.

The official justification was secularism - Nitish could not, he said, remain in alliance with a man he held responsible for the 2002 Gujarat riots. His critics offered a sharper reading: Nitish believed he himself had a claim to national leadership, and Modi’s rise foreclosed it. Whatever the motivation, the break was clean and total.

2015. In perhaps the most startling reversal of his career, Nitish formed a “Mahagathbandhan” - grand alliance - with the very man he had spent fifteen years defining himself against. Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s great political nemeses, stood together on the same platform. The alliance won 178 seats. Nitish became chief minister again, this time propped up by RJD legislators.

The optics were almost comically contradictory. Nitish had built his entire brand on opposing jungle raj. He was now governing with its architect.

July 2017. Barely 20 months into the Mahagathbandhan arrangement, Nitish Kumar cited corruption allegations against Lalu’s son and deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav as grounds for walking out. Within 24 hours, he had reformed the government - this time with the BJP. The speed of the manoeuvre was remarkable; the furniture in the Bihar secretariat had barely been rearranged.

The BJP, which had spent two years in opposition nursing its organisational strength in the state, accepted the alliance and Nitish’s chief ministership. But the terms had shifted. In 2005, Nitish had been the dominant partner. By 2017, the BJP’s national ascendancy under Modi made it the senior force in every coalition it joined.

August 2022. Nitish Kumar resigned as chief minister, walked out of the NDA again, and joined the opposition INDIA bloc - presenting himself as a potential national opposition leader. He was sworn in as chief minister with RJD support once more. Within the INDIA alliance, there was talk of Nitish as a convener figure, a bridge between regional parties and the Congress. It lasted less than 18 months.

January 2024. Nitish Kumar returned to the NDA. This time, the BJP received him with quiet satisfaction rather than enthusiasm. He had become predictable: a man who would leave, and then return, because he had nowhere else to go.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the NDA won 30 of Bihar’s 40 seats. Nitish delivered - but the credit was absorbed into the broader Modi wave. In the Bihar assembly elections of November 2025, the NDA swept to power again, and Nitish was sworn in for a record tenth term. It felt less like a triumph than a formality.

The most important political story in Bihar over the past decade was not Nitish Kumar’s pivots. It was the BJP’s methodical construction of an independent organisational base in a state it had historically treated as JDU territory.

Through the late 2010s and into the 2020s, the BJP recruited aggressively among upper castes, non-Yadav backward communities, and urban voters. It developed its own cadre of Bihar legislators who owed their careers to the party, not to Nitish. By 2024, JDU held 12 Lok Sabha seats to BJP’s 12 - parity, in a coalition that had once been Nitish’s to command.

With 40 Lok Sabha seats, Bihar is indispensable to national arithmetic. Any party that controls Bihar’s government controls the framing of those contests. For the BJP, tolerating an unpredictable coalition partner - one who had defected twice and whose health and political clarity were increasingly questioned - was a calculated risk that no longer needed to be taken. The Rajya Sabha offer was elegant: honourable exit, national platform, guaranteed sinecure. Nitish accepted.

Eight BJP names are now circulating for the chief ministership: Deputy CMs Samrat Choudhary and Vijay Kumar Sinha, Union minister Nityanand Rai, and several others. If Bihar gets a BJP chief minister - and it will - it will be the last major Hindi heartland state to do so. Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan: all are now BJP-governed. The party’s march through the cow belt will be complete.

For Nitish Kumar’s son, Nishant Kumar, speculation about a deputy chief minister’s role is circulating. It would be, if it materialises, the dynasty card played a generation late - and under BJP supervision rather than JDU control.

The Rajya Sabha is not where careers are made. It is where they are preserved behind glass. Nitish Kumar deserves credit that history should not be obscure. He took a state that had become synonymous with governance collapse and made parts of it work. Crime fell. Schools functioned. Roads were built. For Biharis who lived through the 1990s, the improvement was real and felt.

But governance achievement and political longevity are different things, and Nitish eventually confused them. He believed that because he had been useful, he was indispensable. The BJP understood something he did not: in coalition politics, indispensability has an expiration date.

His four-decade career produced one durable lesson. In Indian politics, a regional leader who makes himself available to all sides eventually belongs to none. Every pivot Nitish made was logical in isolation. Cumulatively, they left him without a fixed address - a man who had governed everywhere and stood for nothing predictable.

Bihar’s next chapter will be written by the BJP, in its own hand, without a co-author. Whether it produces better governance, worse governance, or simply different governance is the question Bihar’s 130 million residents will now live with. Nitish Kumar will watch from the Rajya Sabha. It is a comfortable seat. It is also, unmistakably, a distant one. (IPA Service)

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