Patna: On August 24, as Nitish Kumar sought the trust vote in the Bihar assembly for the formation of the state’s new Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) government, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the establishments of the three Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) lawmakers.The Mahagathbandhan is composed of seven political parties, including Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) [JD(U)], Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD, Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular), the Congress and the socialist and communist parties.The raids were typical of the manner in which the CBI, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Income Tax Department (I-T) have been used to target non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) parties across the country since Amit Shah took office as the Union minister for home affairs.It is easy to establish that these agencies are used by the BJP as a weapon against its opponents. The saffron party has about 400 members of parliament in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and 1,300 members of legislative assemblies (MLAs) in the 12 states under its rule. But no BJP lawmaker has been investigated by these agencies in the nearly eight years of the party’s rule at the Centre.Moreover, the Central agencies’ interest in pursuing cases against non-BJP leaders such as Mukul Roy of the Trinamool Congress and Hemant Biswas Sharma of the Congress faded soon after they shifted their loyalties to the BJP.By now, the belief that India’s Central agencies are being used by the BJP in “Operation Lotus” – the party’s quest to form governments in all the states – has gained traction. As Lalu Yadav’s son and Bihar’s deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav says, the saffron party’s policy is, “Jo darey, usey darao, jo bikey, usey kharid lo (Frighten the ones who fear and buy those who are up for sale)”.Eknath Shinde plays chess in a Guwahati hotel, June 24, 2022. Photo: PTIMost recently, Operation Lotus toppled the Shiv Sena-led Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition government of Maharashtra. Earlier it was successfully conducted in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Goa and Assam, bringing these states into the BJP fold. But two states so far have survived Operation Lotus: Delhi and Bihar. And of the two, Bihar is the one most likely to survive it again in the future, thanks to Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav.‘Operation Flop’According to sources in the Mahagathbandhan government in Bihar, the BJP’s plan for Operation Lotus in Bihar was to use R.C.P. Singh, once a Union minister and then Nitish Kumar’s trusted aide, to do with the JD(U) MLAs what Eknath Shinde had done with the Shiv Sena MLAs in Maharashtra: split their loyalties.After that, Singh was to split the vulnerable 19-member Congress legislature party, swallow the Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular)’s four MLAs and combine them with the 77 BJP MLAs in the Bihar assembly to topple the Nitish-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government that was composed of the JD(U) and the BJP.The BJP’s strategy, sources told The Wire, also involved using the Central agencies to frame Lalu, Tejashwi and others in their family and party in the ‘land-for-job’ scam.But unlike Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, Mukul Roy of the Trinamool Congress in Bengal and Hemant Biswas Sharma in Assam who were “silenced” by the BJP’s “misuse” of the CBI, ED and IT, Nitish and Tejashwi launched a counter-attack on Operation Lotus.Also read: Developments in Bihar Have Made Opposition Politics a Lot More InterestingSpeaking as defiantly against the BJP as his father does, Tejashwi said: “The BJP has three sons-in-law – the CBI, the ED and the I-T department; it sends its sons-in-law to its opponents’ doors.”Meanwhile, Nitish said: “They [the BJP] do nothing. They only do publicity through their favoured media. They usurped our model of supplying electricity and pipe water in every home by using their pliant media.”The holdoutNon-BJP politicians in Bihar can afford to stand strong against the BJP and its Operation Lotus due to the fact that, despite being part of the Hindi heartland, Bihar’s larger society has never accepted the BJP, its militant Hindutva and its unabashed minority bashing.In conservative states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the BJP easily occupied the non-Congress space soon after the party came into being in the late 1980s. The saffron party took a little longer to achieve its goals in Uttar Pradesh.First, the party’s progenitor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had to chip at caste issues to wean the Other Backward Classes away from the ranks of the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party and the non-Jatav Dalit castes from the Kanshi Ram-led Bahujan Samaj Party. Next, BJP leader Yogi Adityanath, now the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, began using anti-Muslim rhetoric and instituting anti-minorities policies to polarise the population. Finally, the Narendra Modi government at the Centre provided weaker sections of society in the state with generous benefits, thus carving out a sizeable vote bank for the BJP.But Bihar has a different history with the BJP. In the early 1990s, when BJP leader L.K. Advani travelled across the country his Ram Rath Yatra to establish his party’s biggest election plank, the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, Lalu Yadav had him arrested.Also read: With the Bihar Political Coup, the BJP No Longer Looks InvincibleOver the three decades since then, while the BJP has made inroads into Bihar, it has only been able to participate in the state government since it allied with Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) in 1996. Even then, the saffron party and its fellow Sangh Parivar organisations were not permitted to penetrate the state’s larger social base.Operating with the socialist model of Ram Manohar Lohia and Karipoori Thakur, Nitish empowered the extremely backward castes, the Mahadalits and the women, and guarded the minorities against RSS activists masquerading as gau rakshaks (cow protectors) and targeting Muslims after the ascendance of Narendra Modi as prime minister. The Bihar chief minister has his flaws, but largely he has delivered fair, just and reasonably good governance despite his alliance with the BJP.Because he has been working with the BJP since 1996, Nitish has developed an insight into the Sangh Parivar’s functioning. Thus, he has never let the likes of BJP leaders Giriraj Singh, Ashwini Choubey and lately Amit Shah’s ‘crony’ Nityanand Rai gain acceptance in the state beyond their castes and their committed RSS-BJP cadres in Bihar.Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar. Photo: FileMoreover, neither Lalu nor Nitish compromised on the basic values on which they grew tall in politics. At the beginning of his political career while a student at the Bihar College of Engineering in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Nitish was inclined towards communism. He had a brief dalliance with Naxalite politics too. At the same time, the RSS and its student organisation, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, provided Nitish with information on the RSS.“But the more I read about RSS the more I disliked it,” Nitish had shared with me in a private conversation in the 1990s. Eventually, Nitish adopted Ram Manohar Lohia as his role model and participated in the Bihar movement under Jayaprakash Narayan’s tutelage.In 1995, when Nitish parted ways with Lalu Yadav and formed his Samata Party, he aligned with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation led then by Vinod Mishra. When that did not work, George Fernandes, the president of the Samata Party then, counselled Nitish to join the BJP-led NDA.Lalu is not known to be bitter towards his political opponents. But the late George Fernandes was the exception to this rule. When I interviewed Lalu for his biography Gopalganj to Raisina, Lalu told me that George Fernandes had “brainwashed” Nitish. Lalu and Nitish had shared a strong bond till then, but George broke this bond.Given the background of the state and its tallest leaders – Lalu and Nitish – it has been hard for the BJP to grow in Bihar in the manner in which it has grown even in states like Karnataka and Maharashtra.Points of cautionThis does not mean that the RSS and the BJP will never find a place in Bihar. Thanks to the doggedness with which it propagates its ideology, the RSS has developed an uncanny knack for deploying its cadres in key positions at higher educational institutions and commissions.For example, the Manmohan Singh government granted two central universities to Bihar, one in Gaya and another in Motihari, due to the efforts of Nitish Kumar. However, the RSS has now taken over these universities. Their key journalism and mass communication departments are headed by hardcore RSS operatives.It is also believed that RSS cadres have been placed in the Bihar Public Service Commission and several higher education establishments in the name of the BJP’s “quota” in Bihar. Bihar’s Mahagathbandhan government needs to take a hard look at all these institutions.The new government must also work out a policy to deal with agitation and unrest in Bihar. Images such as that of an unemployed young man being brutally assaulted on the streets of Patna while participating in a demonstration on August 22 would be abominable in the context of Mahagathbandhan’s rule.The deputy chief minister has ordered a probe against the magistrate who ordered the lathi charge. But it must not stop there. Tejashwi must ensure that the culprit is punished and both the chief minister and the deputy chief minister should ensure employment to the unemployed as they had promised. The deputy chief minister has already given Patna’s ‘Graduate Chaiwali’ her stall back. He must take the time to do similar things for other people. It is these small things that will create a big difference between the BJP and the Mahagathbandhan.Bihar’s Grand Alliance has shown opposition parties all over the country the way to confront and defeat the BJP. In Bihar itself, given the enormous size of its voter base, the Mahagathbandhan is set to make the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and the 2025 Bihar elections difficult for the saffron party.“I have got calls from leaders of non-BJP parties from across the country. They are excited at our decision to ally. I will work towards uniting the opposition parties,” Nitish said, perhaps signalling the beginning of the end of what some Bihar politicians call ‘Moditva’.Nalin Verma is a senior journalist, author and professor of journalism and mass communication at Invertis University, Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh.