Is genie back in bottle?

Euphoria over lapping Nitish Kumar in the saffron camp has a subtle hint of faultline in the great Narendra Modi script.

THE BJP chief Amit Shah idolizes India's greatest political strategist Chanakya and Hindu revivalist Veer Savarkar. Chanakya believed in a strong and rigorously trained army to expand frontiers of the kingdom and also to ward off foes. Savarkar envisioned homogenous Hindu society, and mostly undertook covert operations in pursuit of his goals. Shah believes that he's a blend of both the historical icons. 

Fired by his expansionist burst of adrenaline, Shah is eyeing to win Odisha and West Bengal. He even thinks that Kerala too will be in saffron kitty at not so distant time. The saffron flag is fluttering all across the North-east. Team Amit Shah is camping determined to uproot Manik Sircar government in Tripura. 

Yet, the saffron expansionist zeal was piped to give Nitish Kumar

lease of life to rule Bihar. Fresh from delivering morbid shock to rivals in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP seemingly acted as the henchmen of Bihar chief minister to help him shed the secular skins. From splashing documents of land deeds dating back to 1990s, Nitish's Sherpa and Bihar BJP's sole anchor Sushil Kumar Modi had been a man on a mission. Suddenly, he had all the revenue records to link Lalu Prasad clan in quid pro quo land deals.  One may wonder what the duo had been doing with the same set of records in their possession during NDA reign in the state during 2005-13.

Central investigating agencies, the CBI and ED, true to their wont of being more loyal than the king, hunted several locations to add thrill to the political drama. Lalu Prasad, convicted for corruption and barred from contesting election, was again certified corrupt along with all his clan members.           

Nitish Kumar and his Sherpa Sushil Kumar Modi delivered the alibi for another dramatic and thrilling swapping of places in the state politics. Kumar is a politician without a party as noted by the historian Ram Chandra Guha. And Sushil Kumar Modi has of late been a politician dumped by his party. Their umbilical cord helps both to remain relevant in the Bihar politics. 

That Nitish Kumar could have been a challenger to Narendra Modi had been proven a pipe dream in the course of political events after the 2014 verdict. That Modi with Kumar in saffron camp is running away with the 2019 poll is, thus, a convenient spin to a story palatable to the people. 

Despite being the deputy chief minister of Bihar for more than seven years, Sushil Kumar Modi had failed to win Amit Shah's approval to become chief ministerial face of the party in the 2015 state elections. Still, he slogged and logged highest number of manhours to stall the Mandal backlash. Shah, the Chankaya of BJP, schemed from the Chanakya hotel in Patna only to flounder and subsequently sink his party to the humiliating loss in the state. Only a year ago, the BJP had been unstoppable in Bihar, with the party led alliance winning 33 out of the total 40 Lok Sabha seats.

Sushil Kumar Modi had been slighted in the run up of the 2015 Bihar polls and thereafter, with team Amit Shah experimenting with new set of nondescript leaders to stage a comeback in the state. That Shah despite being on a whirlwind intensive tour of several states to deepen the foothold of the BJP failed to make his presence felt in Bihar in the last two years made it evident that he had not yet recovered from the 2015 drubbing.

With the BJP ship adrift on the high sea of Bihar, Sushil Kumar Modi had only to strike at the right time to take full control of the party in the state, and that could have been possible only if his aka, Nitish Kumar, was back on his side. 

The Bihar chief minister had teamed up with the BJP to put the genie of social justice in the bottle in 2005. Lalu Prasad, who has been the sole custodian of the politics of social justice in the state, hurtled to the wilderness in the next one decade. 

Time seemed to have been ripe for writing political obituary of the messiah of Mandal. But his nemesis only uncorked the bottle to

give him another day to live in 2013. Once out of the bottle, the king of "MY (Muslim-Yadav)" proved his mettle becoming the largest party after the 2015 verdict. Back in power with two sons -- Tej Pratap and Tejashwi Prasad, Lalu Prasad was remote controlling bureaucracy and gaining political strength each day. 

Time to put the genie back into the bottle had come again. And bottle was readied, but only the time will tell if the genie actually went inside. That saffron juggernaut prostrated before Nitish Kumar is indeed all to see at a time when Amit Shah is seen unstoppable.