Digvijaya Singh says Nitish Kumar may quit NDA before 2019 polls

India वोट Kar | October 4, 2018

Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh said on Wednesday that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar could once again switch sides and leave the BJP-led NDA before the next Lok Sabha election. Speaking to a news channel in Patna, where he was on a private visit, Singh, who once led Madhya Pradesh as chief minister, claimed Kumar could not survive out of power.

Singh’s remarks

Singh said the JD(U) chief might walk out if Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity fell before the election. “It takes only 24 hours for Kumar to make a volte-face,” he said, noting that the polls were six months away. When asked if Kumar would be welcome as a Congress ally, he replied that politics is the art of the possible.

Singh, a Rajya Sabha member who was the Congress in-charge for Bihar until C P Joshi took over in 2013, also described agitations by upper caste bodies against reservations and the SC/ST Act as a plot to cover up the Modi government’s failures. He did not answer directly when asked about recent posters in Patna that listed the castes of Congress figures such as Rahul Gandhi, and said the Ram temple issue was raised whenever elections approached and forgotten once results were out.

Background

In 2013 Kumar broke off a 17-year relationship with the BJP, and a year later he joined the Congress and Lalu Prasad in a grand alliance. In July last year he quit that alliance and resigned as chief minister, citing his conscience, as the BJP, then in opposition, attacked his government over corruption cases against Tejashwi Yadav, the deputy chief minister at the time. He returned as chief minister a day later with BJP support. Yadav, an RJD leader, has said the grand alliance’s doors are closed to Kumar.

Singh’s comments come amid reports that NDA partners in Bihar are struggling to agree on seat sharing for 2019. The NDA includes the BJP, the JD(U), Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP and Upendra Kushwaha’s RLSP, while the RJD, the Congress, Jitan Ram Manjhi’s HAM and Left parties are working together in opposition.

What happened next

In the 2019 Lok Sabha election the BJP won 303 of 543 seats. Nitish Kumar was Chief Minister after the 2020 Bihar Assembly election, in which the JD(U) won 43 seats.

Originally published on 4 October 2018. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.