Nitish Kumar biography: Great paltu of Indian politics (till he could palat no more)

From my house to the main road, I come across many Bihari migrants. They run hair-cutting salons, sell ice cream and dosas by the roadside, and, on their omelette carts, allow customers to drink surreptitiously.

Every Bihar election, we have the same conversation.

Who is winning?

“Nitish is coming back,” they say.

Why? “Because he has done great. And nobody wants jungle raj to return.”

But if that is the case, why are you still miles away from home? I ask.

“Kya karein, rozgaar nahin hai.”

That contradiction defines Nitish Kumar.

He was, by every measurable standard, Bihar’s best Chief Minister since Independence. He paved roads, lit villages, put teachers in classrooms and girls on bicycles. He broke the back of a criminal ecosystem so deeply entrenched that people had simply stopped expecting it to end.

And yet the barbers kept cutting hair in other people’s cities. The dosa vendors kept cooking other people’s dinners. The men on the omelette carts kept pouring quiet drinks for others.

The Bihar that Nitish Kumar built was just enough to keep him in power. He needed Bihar to be better than Jungle Raj, but not good enough to outgrow him. The gap was his political business model.

And that distinction is where the story of Sushasan Babu ends and the story of Paltu Ram begins.

THE BOY FROM BAKHTIARPUR

Kambakht ishq! You may have heard that phrase without actually knowing what it means. In Persian, bakht is luck, and kam is less.

Nitish Kumar was born with bakht as his yaar.

Some sixty kilometres east of Patna, along the banks of the Ganges, lies Bakhtiarpur. It is a small, unremarkable town whose name translates as “a place of good fortune”. It was here, on March 1, 1951, that Nitish Kumar was born into the household of Kaviraj Ram Lakhan Singh, an ayurvedic practitioner.

Munna, as he was known at home, completed his schooling in Bakhtiarpur and then made the short but life-defining journey to Patna, where he enrolled at the Bihar College of Engineering. In 1972, he graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. But the pull of something larger, something more electric than any grid, proved irresistible.

In the 1970s, Nitish Kumar entered politics during the JP Movement. By 1989, he had become Secretary General of the Janata Dal in Bihar. That same year, he was elected to the 9th Lok Sabha, his first entry onto the national stage.

In 1990, he was appointed Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Co-operation in VP Singh’s government. Re-elected to the 10th Lok Sabha in 1991, he continued his steady, if not spectacular, rise.

All through this period, Bihar’s dominant political figure was Lalu Prasad Yadav. Nitish and Lalu, at that point, were comrades in the Janata Dal family.

In 1994, refusing to remain in Lalu’s shadow, Nitish Kumar made his first great leap. Together with George Fernandes, he broke from the Janata Dal and co-founded the Samata Party. Just two years later, he did what most socialists of his generation found philosophically difficult: he allied with the BJP. The calculation was clear, the BJP offered a national platform, electoral strength, and, crucially, a route to power that bypassed Lalu.

RISE OF SUSHASAN BABU

Through the 1990s, Nitish Kumar lost elections, won elections, lasted seven humiliating days as Chief Minister in 2000 before the numbers collapsed under him, and went back to Delhi to wait. He finally came to power in November 2005 and changed Bihar.

Bihar in those years was a place where the state had effectively abdicated. Kidnapping for ransom was an industry with a hierarchy that reached right to the top of political power. Upper-caste militias and Naxalite groups fought turf wars that consumed entire villages. Roads were so poor that parts of north Bihar were cut off for months during the monsoon. Companies refused to invest. The educated left.

Nitish did something his predecessors had considered impossible, or perhaps inconvenient: he prosecuted powerful people. Gangsters with known political affiliations discovered that their affiliations no longer provided immunity. Officers who had learned to look away were transferred or charged. For the first time in a generation, the machinery of the state began to function as it should. Jungle Raj ended.

Bihar’s GDP growth rate, which had languished in the low single digits, rose to double digits. Between 2005 and 2012, Bihar was among the fastest-growing states in India, expanding at over 11 per cent annually. It was a low base, yes, but the direction had changed.

Bihar was not transformed, let that be said clearly. It remained among the poorest states in India. The job market remained thin. The best and the brightest still left. The structural problems, lack of industry, dependence on agriculture, entrenched caste hierarchies, had not been broken.

But within those limits, what Nitish Kumar did between 2005 and 2010 was the closest Bihar had come to good governance.

He was named the best Chief Minister in the country. The 2010 election verdict, 206 of 243 seats, sealed his legacy.

That was Sushasan Babu.

THE LADIES’ MAN

If Sushasan Babu had a political constituency he genuinely cared about, it was women.

The girls’ bicycle scheme arrived in 2007 and became the image of a changed Bihar. Nearly a million bicycles in the first year alone. Enrolment of girls in secondary schools rose sharply. Dropout rates fell. In a society where women’s movement had been policed by custom and fear for generations, the bicycle was quietly radical.

It was followed by a scholarship scheme for girls who cleared their Class 10 exams, a uniform scheme, and a dress allowance. Then came Jeevika, the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project, which organised rural women into self-help groups and gave them access to credit, training and markets.

In April 2016, he banned the manufacture, sale and consumption of liquor across Bihar, the most sweeping prohibition in any major Indian state since Gujarat.

Prohibition led to bootlegging, hooch tragedies and brutal crackdowns. Years later, BJP MLA Bhagirathi Devi alleged that Nitish had a habit of consuming ‘ganja’ (marijuana) and that he never came to the state assembly without a ‘chilam’ (pipe).

But his decision was hailed by women. They danced in the streets, literally. There were gatherings, songs, and, in some villages, the public breaking of bottles.

For Nitish, it was the largest mobilisation of women’s political support, a base that backed him across electoral cycles.

THE GRADUAL DESCENT

Nitish Kumar became Paltu Ram the way a man becomes an addict, gradually, then completely, betraying himself with decisions that were costly, but justifiable.

The first justification was Lalu Prasad Yadav. They had been comrades in the Janata Dal family, products of the same JP movement, inheritors of the same Lohia legacy.

When Nitish broke away, he said it was about principle, the direction of Bihar. But it was also about the fact that Lalu would never share the chair.

The second victim was ideology. Having spent his entire political life in the socialist tradition, shaped by men who regarded the RSS and the BJP with genuine suspicion, Nitish allied with the BJP in 1996. The justification was coalition arithmetic, national politics, and the practical demands of opposition unity against Congress.

But it was also the only route past Lalu. The Vajpayee years were good to him. He got the Railways twice. He gained national visibility. He got, eventually, Bihar.

The third justification was Narendra Modi. And that is when he spiralled into an avatar that would define him, Paltu Ram.

PALTU RAM ARRIVES

When the BJP began projecting Narendra Modi as its 2014 prime ministerial candidate, Nitish broke the alliance with the BJP with much fanfare, wrapping his exit in the language of secularism and democratic values.

It was his most celebrated betrayal, the one that made liberal India briefly embrace him. He was doing the right thing, they said. He was drawing a line. But behind the move was electoral calculation: Nitish did not want to lose the Muslim vote.

In Bihar, JD(U) contested 38 seats. It won two. Its vote share collapsed from the high twenties to around 16 per cent. The Muslims Nitish had tried to protect as a vote bank had read the national mood better than he had. They voted tactically for whoever could defeat the BJP in each constituency, often the RJD or the Congress. They did not reward Nitish for breaking with Modi. They simply went where the numbers made more sense.

Meanwhile, the Extremely Backward Castes and the Mahadalits, the other pillars of Nitish Kumar’s electoral architecture, shifted towards Modi. Nitish had spent years building a coalition on the foundation of governance and caste arithmetic. Modi made governance aspirational and caste arithmetic less decisive. The foundation of Nitish Kumar’s politics was flattened.

After this, his life became a football field, and Nitish became the ball in everyone’s game.

THE MANJHI EPISODE

In May 2014, days after the election results, Nitish stepped down as Chief Minister, citing moral responsibility for the defeat. He handpicked his successor: Jitan Ram Manjhi, a Mahadalit leader from the Musahar community, one of Bihar’s most marginalised groups. The choice was seen as a masterstroke of social engineering.

But Nitish was going nowhere. Manjhi was meant to be a placeholder, someone who would keep the seat warm and maintain the optics of Mahadalit representation.

Jitan Ram Manjhi had other ideas. He began making his own statements, appointments and political overtures. He announced schemes without consulting Nitish. He began, in the language of Patna’s political watchers, to act like a Chief Minister, not a puppet.

Nitish grew impatient and insecure. In early 2015, he moved to replace Manjhi. What followed was a week of extraordinary political theatre: Manjhi refused to resign, claimed he had the numbers, and reached out to the BJP for support.

Manjhi called a trust vote. Nitish had no option but to reach out to Lalu. With the support of the RJD, Nitish returned as Chief Minister in February 2015. The episode established what would become a pattern: Nitish had shown exactly how he treats people the moment they stop being useful.

THE ILLUSION OF MAHAGATHBANDHAN

The 2015 Bihar Assembly elections produced one of the most remarkable political spectacles of the decade: Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav, two men who had spent twenty years fighting each other, sharing a stage, a symbol and a slogan.

The Mahagathbandhan brought together JD(U), RJD and Congress in a coalition held together entirely by the shared necessity of stopping Modi’s BJP from winning Bihar.

It worked, spectacularly. The alliance won 178 of 243 seats. Nitish was Chief Minister again. But Bihar now had, effectively, two power centres. Nitish held the administration. Lalu held the votes.

For two years, Nitish endured the arrangement. But he was waiting for the right opportunity to switch sides again.
In July 2017, the CBI filed chargesheets in a land-for-hotel deals case, naming Tejashwi Yadav. Nitish Kumar demanded that Tejashwi resign from the Cabinet pending the investigation. Lalu Prasad Yadav refused.

On July 26, Nitish resigned as Chief Minister. In less than 24 hours, he had been sworn back in, this time with the BJP.

He had his justification ready: that he would not surrender to corruption, that it was impossible to govern with a tainted minister. But Bihar had also watched him spend two years accommodating Lalu’s ecosystem before discovering, with exquisite timing, that it was incompatible with his principles.

WINGS CLIPPED, NITISH FLIES AGAIN

In 2015, he had brought 71 seats to the Mahagathbandhan’s table. In the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections, JD(U) won 43 seats. The BJP won 74. For the first time, Nitish Kumar’s party was the junior partner in its own government. He was Chief Minister with the BJP’s consent.

Nitish said nothing publicly. He accepted the diminished numbers, returned to the chair, and continued to govern. In August 2022, he made his trademark move.

Nitish told his legislators that he had been driven against the wall, that the BJP had tried to weaken his JD(U). The justification carried familiar phrases: principle, betrayal, the impossibility of continuing.

THE FINAL GAMBIT

On August 9, 2022, he resigned as Chief Minister, withdrew JD(U) from the NDA, and by the same evening had staked his claim to form a new government with the RJD, Congress and the Left, the same coalition he had abandoned in 2017 over Tejashwi’s corruption case. Tejashwi, the tainted minister whose refusal to resign had been the stated reason for the last break, was now his Deputy Chief Minister.

He then went further than anyone expected: he convened the entire national opposition, the INDIA bloc, in Patna, sat at the head of a table of seventeen parties, and positioned himself as the architect of the anti-Modi coalition.

It was clear to everyone that Nitish now wanted to be Prime Minister. But the dream lasted, as these things do with him, exactly as long as the arithmetic supported it.

By late 2023, Nitish made his assessment. The BJP was going to win the 2024 elections. The INDIA bloc was not going to form a government. And even if it did, he was not the automatic choice for the top job. In January 2024, he went back to Narendra Modi.

Ironically, INDIA had been warned. In December 2023, the BJP’s Bihar handle posted a video of Nitish Kumar’s ally Lallan Singh on what was then Twitter: “I know he has 32 teeth in his stomach. Who knows it better than me? But don’t worry, I will perform a surgery and pull them out.”

In Bihar’s political parlance, ‘stomach in teeth’ is a metaphor for a man who deceives.

THE NAME THAT STUCK

By this time, a joke had circulated in Bihar: “Parties change, alliances change, but Nitish Kumar’s address at 1 Anne Marg [the CM residence] never changes.”

By this point, a nickname had turned into a brand: Paltu Ram, literally “the turner”.

The label was first crafted by Lalu. “Satta ka laalchi hai Nitish Kumar. Paltu Ram hai,” he said in August 2017 after the Mahagathbandhan collapsed.

The more betrayed called him a chameleon. Others coined Kursi Kumar, the man who will do anything to keep the chair.

Each betrayal followed the same script. There was always a reason, always a grievance, always a press conference at which Nitish Kumar looked like a man who had arrived at a painful decision after much reflection.

The first betrayal shocked people. The second made them raise an eyebrow. By the third and fourth, Bihar had simply incorporated his switching into its political weather forecast. Nitish became a seasonal pattern, something you could watch, endure or suffer.

What he could not see, or would not, was that every return made him weaker. He did not realise that the BJP under Modi and Amit Shah collects allies only until they can be replaced. Even if he did, he walked down that path, for reasons known only to him.

WHISPERS OF ILLNESS

There is a version of Nitish Kumar’s decline that is purely political. But there is another version, more uncomfortable to write about, that is simply human.

In September 2023, at a janata darbar, a man from Kishanganj came forward to complain about a land dispute. Nitish Kumar heard him out, then turned to an aide and asked him to call the Home Minister. There was a pause. Nitish himself was the Home Minister.

It was logged as a faux pas. These things happen. But they kept happening.

During a debate in the Assembly, Nitish gave a graphic account of the act of copulation, explaining in crude terms one method of family planning.

On other occasions, he was seen making strange faces and playing with microphones and screens on his table.

The feet-touching became its own category of embarrassment. Since April 2024, on at least five occasions, Nitish went down on his knees at public events to touch the feet of Prime Minister Modi. The Prime Minister, visibly uncomfortable each time, stopped him. He was also seen attempting to touch the feet of politicians and officials junior to him in age and rank.

The man who had once made district magistrates sweat through weekly video conferences was now prostrating himself before people who reported to him.

In December 2025, at an appointment letter ceremony, he pulled the hijab away from the face of a Muslim woman doctor while handing her letter, as officials on stage reacted with visible awkwardness.

Each incident, in isolation, was explainable. Taken together, they told a different story: Nitish was unwell. His party, predictably, insisted he was healthy and capable.

But the man who governed Bihar through personal intervention was gone. What remained was the name. The chair had held him long after he could hold the chair.

THE PALTU WHO HIT A DEAD END

The 2025 Bihar elections wrote the ending. The BJP and JD(U) contested on the slogan, “2025 se 2030, phir se Nitish.” But whispers of Nitish being the temporary face of the alliance were louder than the slogan.

The BJP won 89 seats. JD(U) won 85. The Opposition was decimated. There was no room left for another U-turn, numbers favoured the BJP, even if Nitish flirted with the idea of another switch.

In March 2026, the ladder Nitish Kumar was climbing was pulled. Not dramatically. Not with a confrontation or public humiliation. Just a Rajya Sabha nomination, a departure ticket that everyone understood meant the BJP would now govern Bihar.

This time, the justification was that he wanted to serve Bihar from Delhi as a member of the Rajya Sabha. Nobody took it seriously.

The truth was bitter. The man who had climbed every available ladder, betrayed every available ally, and survived every available crisis was moved, gently but unmistakably, upstairs.

SUNSET BOULEVARD

Paltu is a denigrating adjective. But it implies freedom of movement, endless optionality, a man who can always find another door. And for most of Nitish Kumar’s career, that was true.

He moved between Janata Dal and Samata Party, between Samata Party and JD(U), between JD(U) and BJP, between BJP and RJD, between RJD and the INDIA bloc, between INDIA and back to the BJP again. Each switch was, in its moment, an expression of free will.

But the irony is tragicomic. The man who once resigned on principle over a train crash ended his tenure as Chief Minister not on his own terms, but as a would-be Prime Minister eased into the Rajya Sabha.

Nitish Kumar’s story is ultimately one of opportunism, until there are no opportunities left.

Bihar will remember Sushasan Babu with genuine affection and gratitude. It will try to make sense of Paltu Ram with a weariness born of frustration.

Sushasan Babu was a mathematical certainty. Paltu Ram will remain a historical mystery.

The migrants on my road will have a new name to calculate in the next election. They will wait for someone who can take them home for good — not someone who builds a new political home every few months.

- Ends

Tune In