29 July 2017.
The alacrity with which Nitish Kumar first resigned as the CM of the Grand Alliance government in Bihar and then returned to the BJP fold to be sworn in as the head of an NDA government, all in less than twenty hours, can only be described as a political coup in Bihar. The very basis on which the people of Bihar had voted the GA to power was to stop the BJP from coming to power in the state, and this now stands overturned. Nitish Kumar has enabled his old long-standing ally to grab power in Bihar through this political coup. The CPI(ML) legislature party leader in Bihar, Com. Mahboob Alam met the Governor and clearly conveyed the Party’s opposition to inviting the JDU-BJP combine to form the government in utter violation of the November 2015 mandate. But the coup has been executed. We strongly condemn it and we insist on fresh and early elections for the people to give their verdict.Nitish Kumar seeks to justify his action on the anti-corruption plank. But from the treasury scam in his previous term to the degree scams during his ongoing term he himself had been presiding over a string of scams. The BJP too has been guilty of major corruption cases in Bihar and other states as well as at the Centre. And this betrayal of mandate itself constitutes an act of political corruption of Himalayan proportions. This political coup will go down in Bihar history as a veritable ‘mandate scam’ where midway through his term Nitish Kumar has changed the very meaning and direction of the 2015 mandate.
The return of Nitish Kumar to the NDA fold in 2017 effectively means the installation of a BJP-dominated government where Nitish Kumar will have to remain permanently at the BJP’s mercy. Even during his previous partnership with the BJP in Bihar from 2005 to 2013 when there was no BJP/NDA government at the Centre and the Sangh Parivar was not on the kind of all-out offensive that we are experiencing today, his government loyally served the Sangh-BJP agenda. The disbanding of the Amir Das commission and the dumping of the Land Reforms Commission report were two key indicators quite early on. The loud cries of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ during the swearing-in programme have made it amply clear that this time round the Nitish government will be a puppet regime in the hands of the Sangh-BJP establishment.CPI(ML) MLAs have voted against the ‘confidence motion’ moved by the Nitish Kumar regime. Those who have betrayed and stolen the mandate have no right to seek the confidence of the Assembly. The JDU-BJP regime may have manages the numbers, but it has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people who had voted so overwhelmingly against the BJP. Since the 1857 war of independence, Bihar has all along been a leading centre of struggle for freedom and democracy, social justice and communal harmony. Today when the BJP poses such a massive threat to democracy with its agenda of communal polarisation and social oppression, the people of Bihar will be in the frontline of anti-fascist resistance. The battle against the illegitimate regime of Nitish Kumar will be intensified on every platform to drive the fascist forces out of power.
