Nitish Kumar was the first anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader to meet Arvind Kejriwal and express his unalloyed support for the latter on the Union government’s ordinance negating the Supreme Court’s verdict that empowered the Delhi government to deploy Group I officers in the National Capital Territory (NCT).“The Delhi people have given him [Kejriwal] a strong majority. He is doing a very good job. Can the Centre stop work being done by the state government? This is shocking…we stand by him,” the Bihar chief minister and Janata Dal (United) leader said.He then asked, “How can you take away the rights of an elected government? What the Centre is trying to do after the SC’s order is odd…parties across the country should unite so that they [Centre] can’t manipulate the Constitution to their advantage.”Now the Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convenor – known for his unilateral style – has shown respect for collectivism.“I appeal to all the opposition parties to oppose the unconstitutional ordinance which has been brought to nullify the SC’s order. If the entire opposition comes together to fight against it, there will be no BJP in 2024…if we succeed in defeating it in the Rajya Sabha, it will be the semi-final for 2024 [general elections],” Kejriwal said, adding that he would meet his Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) boss Sharad Pawar and others to solicit their support.Seizing the opportunityThe Bihar chief minister squandered no time in meeting Kejriwal and extending his support to him. Other than his deputy and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejaswhi Yadav, the Bihar chief minister also took his JD(U) national president Lallan Singh and RJD spokesman Manoj Jha to amplify his support for Kejriwal.The Congress, along with parties based in Jammu and Kashmir, are unhappy with Kejriwal because he supported the Union government’s dilution of Article 370 and on several occasions acted in a manner that created the perception that he had ideological similarities with the BJP.Sources close to Nitish said that the Bihar chief minister counselled Kejriwal to mould himself in the “broader framework of the Constitution based on the Gandhian socialism, secularism, equality, justice and respect to all castes, creeds and faiths” against the BJP’s militant Hindutva.Nitish was also learnt to have also counselled Kejriwal to shun his “anti-Congress rhetoric” and use his “flair and eloquence to attack the Hindu supremacists and adhinayakvadi [dictatorial] forces”.At the same time, when he met the Congress brass – Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and K.C. Venugopal – the following day on May 23, the Bihar chief minister tried to convince the grand old party to speak against the ordinance that had not just attempted to usurp the elected Delhi government’s powers, but had cocked a snook against the apex court and subverted the Constitution.In the process, Nitish worked diligently to break the ice between Kejriwal and the Congress. He has succeeded to a great extent in the context of Mamata Banerjee and the grand old party. After the Karnataka elections, the Bengal chief minister has talked about “supporting the Congress where it was strong”.The Congress, in all likelihood, will work with other opposition parties to vote against the Bill that the Centre is bound to introduce to replace the ordinance nullifying the order of the five-member constitution bench of the apex court.Issues of primacyAt this point, Nitish is learnt to have emphasised consensus-building among opposition parties on issues and not seat-sharing arrangements, so that they can build a sustainable narrative against the BJP.For example, in Nitish’s interpretation, what Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah describe as a “double engine government” is actually a ploy to topple non-BJP governments from the states and snatch their powers.His consensus-building project also focuses on the BJP’s proclivity to fiddle with federalism, which is part of the Constitution’s basic structure.An instance of this proclivity is the BJP delaying the election to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) for a long time to disallow the AAP from winning it. However, the AAP eventually trounced the BJP in the MCD polls. The Centre, operating through the Lieutenant Governor (LG), has simply refused to recognise the very existence of the AAP government.Maharashtra chief minister and Shiv Sena rebel Eknath Shinde. Photo: Facebook.The same thought process goaded the BJP to topple the duly-elected governments in Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka in 2018, as well as in Maharashtra in 2022.The Bihar chief minister is also emphasising the BJP’s denial of job quotas to the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the Other Backward Classes (OBC) in proportion to their population.The Congress to a great extent has adopted sharing jobs and resources among the OBCs, STs and SCs in proportion to their population as its policy, with Rahul Gandhi talking about it at Kolar in the run up to the Karnataka polls. Other regional parties are most likely to reach a consensus on the issue.Moreover, Nitish wishes most of the parties to engage the people and carry out sustained movements in their respective regions against price rise, unemployment, corruption, misuse of the central investigating agencies and also misuse of public funds for publicity and propaganda.Emotive issuesNitish is believed to have understood that the BJP had no way out other than banking on emotive issues.“Hijab, halal, love jihad, Bajrang Bali, ending the reservation for the Muslims – the BJP used all the tricks in Karnataka but lost heavily,” said a senior JD(U) leader, adding that “Nitish knows that the Hindutva party will do the same in the 2024 polls for they have no options”.In keeping with the perception that BJP leaders, including its Union ministers Giriraj Singh and Aswhini Chowbey, welcomed the godman Dhirendra Krishna Shastri in Patna recently – where Shastri talked about establishing a Hindu rashtra – Nitish criticised this event and described it as “unconstitutional”. RJD cadres have threatened the godman, saying he would be arrested in Bihar the way L.K. Advani was in 1990 if Shastri stoked communal frenzy.But Nitish apparently wishes for the like-minded parties not to get locked against the BJP on religious issues, and instead build their narrative around the real issues that bedevil the people at large.Nalin Verma is a senior journalist, media educator and independent researcher in social anthropology.