Chanakya Redux

Nitish Kumar’s tenth ascent to power marks not just personal endurance but the remaking of Bihar’s political economy.

Patna: Chief Minister Nitish Kumar embodies the peculiar mix of durability and opportunism that defines much of Indian state politics. Admirers cast him as a ‘modern Chanakya’ while critics deride him as a relentless shape-shifter. Both readings miss the more telling point which is that Kumar has become the architect of Bihar’s long, hesitant transition from a basket case to a state with the rudiments of order and growth.

A product of the JP Movement of the 1970s, he lost more elections than he won in his early years, but outlasted most of his contemporaries. His break with Lalu Prasad Yadav in the mid-1990s and his partnership with George Fernandes and the BJP gave him his first coherent platform. When he first took charge in 2005, Bihar was a byword for criminality, broken roads, and a state apparatus hollowed out by patronage. His initial years in office, unusually stable by Bihar’s standards, brought sharp improvements in law and order, modest economic recovery, and a technocratic seriousness rare in the state’s politics.

His social policies were equally calculated. His wager on women through reservation in panchayats, bicycle schemes for schoolgirls and the strengthening of self-help groups shifted Bihar’s political arithmetic. Prohibition, whatever its distortions, cemented his grip on female voters. Incremental attention to extremely backward classes, Dalits and Mahadalits helped him build a coalition broad enough to survive repeated realignments.

Those realignments have been many. He has aligned with the BJP, broken with it, allied with the RJD, abandoned it, and returned to the BJP fold more than once. Ideology has rarely been the driving force; staying in office to push what he sees as necessary administrative reform has. The 2025 mandate, delivered under the NDA banner, underscores his continuing relevance in a state still marked by demographic pressure, chronic underinvestment and fragile institutions.

His achievement is neither mythical nor miraculous. The gap between Bihar and faster-growing states remains wide; the state’s dependence on central transfers is acute; and outmigration continues unabated. Yet the Bihar he governs today is not the one he inherited. Schools function more predictably, roads have multiplied, and welfare delivery, though still patchy, is less capricious.

A tenth term offers a moment to judge his legacy less by hagiography than by hard outcomes. If he is to earn the Chanakyan comparisons, it will be by using his unmatched longevity to push Bihar beyond incrementalism and towards serious investment, institutional strengthening and a labour market that does not send its young to distant cities in search of dignity.