For much of the 1990s, Nitish Kumar was the man on the margins of Bihar’s political theatre. He was an engineer-turned-politician, watching his one-time mentor Lalu Prasad Yadav dominate the stage. Lalu had become the first backward-caste leader to enjoy uninterrupted power in the state, and his wife Rabri Devi extended that supremacy after corruption charges forced him out. Through these years, Nitish played the long game.Those who knew him in the early years often described him as Lalu’s “younger brother”, someone who had risen with him under socialist icon Karpoori Thakur. But Nitish was doing something quiet and transformative: carving out a political constituency of his own among OBC Kurmis and the extremely backward castes (EBCs), who felt dwarfed by the expanding influence of the Yadavs. It was from this carefully built social base that he would eventually challenge — and dethrone — the man he had once followed.
A career forged by setbacks
Nitish’s early life hardly suggested a spectacular political ascent. Born in 1951 in Nalanda’s Kalyan Bigha village to a father shaped by the freedom movement, he grew up reading socialist literature and absorbing Lohiaite ideas of caste justice. But when he entered electoral politics during the Janata wave of 1977, he faltered. Twice he lost from Harnaut to independent candidates. Twice he wondered if politics was even worth pursuing.
The breakthrough came only in 1985, when he finally secured the resources to run an effective campaign and won Harnaut on a Lok Dal ticket. From there, the rise was steady: a Lok Sabha victory from Barh in 1989; a junior ministerial position in the VP Singh government; and a retained seat in 1991. Nitish was now part of the national conversation, but Bihar remained unfinished business.
The break with Lalu and the first bid for power
In 1994, unable to reconcile with Lalu’s growing dominance, Nitish split to form the Samata Party with George Fernandes. It was an act of political self-assertion that would reshape the state’s caste equations. Yet his early attempt to take charge in Patna was short-lived: his first stint as Chief Minister in 2000 collapsed within a week for lack of numbers.
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Still, Nitish had begun staking claim to a different imagination of backward-caste politics — one that brought Kurmis, EBCs, and eventually upper castes (via the BJP) into the same tent. If Lalu had centred the political aspirations of Yadavs, Nitish would offer an alternative for everyone outside that hierarchy.
2005: The election that remade Bihar
The decisive shift arrived in 2005. The February polls produced a hung assembly; the October election upended everything. Lalu’s RJD fell to third place. Nitish’s JD(U), in alliance with the BJP, surged to power. He entered the Bihar Legislative Council and began what would become one of the longest chief ministerial tenures in Indian politics.In the years that followed, Nitish cultivated the image of “Sushashan Babu” — the leader who delivered what Bihar had historically been denied: functioning roads, basic infrastructure, girls’ education schemes, and relative law and order. The contrast with the RJD’s “jungle raj” reputation only strengthened his persona as a reformer.
The pragmatist who broke and mended alliances
Nitish’s politics has always been defined by the alliances he is willing to make and equally willing to abandon. In 2013, after Narendra Modi emerged as the BJP’s national face, he severed ties with the party. The 2014 Lok Sabha drubbing forced introspection; he resigned and installed Jitan Ram Manjhi as Chief Minister.
Soon after, he stitched up an improbable reunion with Lalu in the Mahagathbandhan. The “Bihari DNA” campaign powered their sweeping 2015 win, with Tejashwi Yadav as Nitish’s deputy. And yet, within a few years, the alliance unraveled. Nitish returned to the BJP-led fold — where he remains today.
A constant in a state defined by shifts
Nitish Kumar’s legacy cannot be understood through ideological labels. He has been socialist and anti-Congress, ally and adversary of Lalu, partner and critic of the BJP, architect of welfare politics and practitioner of tactical silence. But what runs through his journey is an instinctive grasp of Bihar’s social coalitions — from the old Triveni Sangh legacy of Kurmis, Koeris and Yadavs to the modern OBC-EBC-upper caste configuration that powered his ascent.
In the end, Nitish is less the story of a single ideology and more the story of Bihar itself: layered, pragmatic, shaped by caste equations, and constantly recalibrating. After decades of shifts and re-alignments, he continues to sit in the Chief Minister’s chair — the one position he once watched from a distance as his “older brother” Lalu held it for years.
Where Lalu once dominated Bihar through charisma, Nitish has endured through calculation. And in that contrast lies the real story of how he became the state’s most durable political force.
