Is Nitish’s Empire Sinking?

The grand alliance, brokered on the common fear of Narendra Modi sweeping away its member parties in the assembly polls, splintered before taking off. Now with the elections just a little over a week speculations are that the main partners Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar will not bother if they hurt the chances of each other’s candidates. Each has 100 constituencies from where their candidates will be fighting, and both want to better than the other. It means that they will have to sabotage candidates of each other. The motives are strong. Lalu wants his son to become chief minister. Nitish wants to avoid defeat at any cost. He realises that if he loses badly he will be politically finished forever.   He must be a nervous wreck—although politicians are thick-skinned—after Modi, Modi was raised by the crowd he was addressing. Later, they showed slippers and shoes. He must be ruing his announcement that he would resign if Modi was chosen chairman of the election campaign committee. RSS ignored him and he had to resign. It means he has no cadre.