From JP movement to Advani rath yatra: How Bihar has influenced nat'l politics!
New Delhi: Bihar is no stranger to being at the centre of a tectonic shift in national politics fuelled by turbulent regional forces.
On Tuesday, a day filled with high drama, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar severed ties with ally BJP and embraced the Mahagathbandhan or grand alliance, bringing the spotlight on Bihar and its complex matrix of politics.
From the landmark Bihar movement led by students in 1970s that emanated from Patna to stopping of Lal Krishna Advani's Ayodhya rath yatra by then chief minister Lalu Yadav in Samastipur, these events have set off a chain of reactions that resulted in major ruptures in the realm of nation politics, throwing ruling parties out of seats of power or leading to rise of unexpected and at times unstable alliances.
The Bihar movement, which eventually came to be known as the JP movement as veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan spearheaded it, had a ripple effect from Patna to Delhi and the echoes of his fiery speeches at
Gandhi Maidan in the
Bihar capital had reverberations in Ramlila Maidan in the national capital.
Narayan's Bihar movement during the turbulent 70s eventually led to the Emergency from 1975-77. He exhorted college and university students in the state to throw themselves into what he had envisaged as a massive churn of Indian politics against corruption.
Under the firebrand JP, the agitation in Bihar took the shape of a Sampoorna Kranti or total revolution and the initial demand for resignation of the then Ghafoor government in the state ultimately
turned into a larger demand for dismissal of Indira Gandhi government.
After the Emergency was over and general elections were held, Congress was ousted and a Janata Party-led government came into power with Morarji Desai as the prime minister.
The JP movement has had such personal and emotional impact on many that Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav, Sushil Kumar Modi and Sharad Yadav, all of whom were engrossed in students politics back then, often describe themselves as "product of JP movement". Both Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar, who perhaps bonded during the student
movement, have had 'friend-turned-foe-turned-friend' moments in their careers, which also has impacted both regional and in turn national politics.
RJD and JD(U), both descendants of the Janata Dal party, play a crucial role when it comes to stitching power alliances to form a government.
Many student leaders in Patna concurred that "this type of political crisis being seen currently is not new to Bihar" and "this instability" has impacted both regional and national politics.
Experts feel that big political leaders from Bihar have had a national aura largely, and that is also perhaps a factor due to which "what happens in Bihar, impacts India."
