Nitish Kumar is one of the greatest hoaxes going around in Indian politics. He turns ‘secular’ when it suits him. The very next day you might find him sleeping with the BJP without batting an eyelid. He even does not mind stabbing a political partner in the back if it suits him to survive in power. He did it with Laloo Prasad Yadav twice and even ditched Narendra Modi once. He is a survivor whose politics revolves around surviving in power.

When it suited Nitish to take on Laloo Prasad, he marketed himself as Susashan babu or a good administrator. Bihar was then sick and tired of the Laloo-Rabri misrule. It was a period when kidnappings and pot-holed roads of Bihar were making national headlines. The upper-caste establishment, both in Patna as well as Delhi, too, wanted to get rid of Laloo Prasad who had turned too big for his boots for the system.

Fodder scam came handy for the system to replace Laloo. Yet someone was needed to fill Laloo’s vacuum. Nitish was ready to play ball with anti-Laloo forces. But he needed a label to market himself that he did with media-support which sold him as Susashan babu. Nitish who had lambasted BJP for the Babri mosque demolition both inside and outside the Parliament jumped to form an alliance with saffron forces in Bihar to come to power in 2005. Ambitious Nitish was now Bihar chief minister taking on Laloo Prasad who was his one-time close friend as well as political comrade in arms.