Patna Graduates' seat poll: Is Janata Dal no longer United?

Former Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s party is called the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U). The initials still declare unity. Perhaps the reality, in some ways, does not.

Five months after Nitish left the chief minister’s chair, the JD(U) can name a poll candidate and little else. On September 23, it again chose chief spokesman and former minister Neeraj Kumar for the Patna Graduates’ seat in the legislative council, to be polled next month.

But Mokama’s bahubali MLA Anant Kumar Singh has vowed to sink Neeraj and is openly backing a rival, Dr Anuj Singh. Anant and Neeraj have been traducing each other and the party has yet to draw the disciplinary line. No show-cause notice or rap on the knuckles. A formation that once moved as a single command under Nitish now appears to sport “United” as mere branding.

The tussle between Anant and Neeraj is not all of it. Bihar politics is not short of personal vendettas. The deeper story is that the JD(U) cannot rein in either of them. The party has 85 MLAs in the legislative assembly, giving it the status of Bihar’s second largest party, after ally BJP (88 seats).

The JD(U) has a national president, a working president, a legislature party leader and a famous son in the cabinet (Nishant Kumar). What it does not seem to have is a writ that runs to rein in the strongman from Mokama.

As long as Nitish sat in the chief minister’s chair, the party looked united because power had an address. Dissent was absorbed, delayed or quietly punished. He remains national president, but the office is no longer fused with the machinery of government. He is less visible, less assertive in public, and even considered less able to end a tiff.

Eventually, it took BJP chief minister Samrat Choudhary—and not a JD(U) organiser—to throw his weight behind Neeraj. Choudhary recently called Neeraj a “political doctor” who might treat an ailing one. It was seen as the BJP backing a JD(U) candidate against a strongman MLA of the ally party. In effect, when the ruling partner has to certify your spokesperson, the family firm is already advertising for a physician.

Nishant, Nitish’s only son and seen as the heir apparent, is in the cabinet and in newspapers too. He has the surname and a portfolio, but not command. He so far lacks the public acceptance that turns a post into power. Second-rung JD(U) leaders—Shravan Kumar in the legislature party, Sanjay Jha as working president, Union minister Lalan Singh—have titles and letterheads. They can declare a candidate. Yet they cannot put Anant Singh on the backfoot. Arguments such as “internal democracy” seem like political philosophy when a party cannot stop one of its own MLAs from campaigning to defeat its own nominee.

The JD(U) knows, or behaves as if it does, that Anant cannot be disciplined in the ordinary way. He is a local sovereign. Punish him and you may lose Mokama; a slice of the Bhumihar belt too. Spare him and you tell every other strongman they can act as per will and take the party tag for granted.

Both Neeraj and Anant are Bhumihars from the Mokama-Barh region on the edge of Patna district. Anant, ‘Chhote Sarkar’ to his own ground, is the younger brother of Dilip Singh, ‘Bade Sarkar’ who held Mokama before him. Anant has won the seat as a JD(U) leader, as an Independent, as a Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) candidate from jail, and again as JD(U) nominee.

The police have, over the years, listed a thicket of cases against Anant—murder attempt, kidnapping, arms. In August 2019, they raided his ancestral house and said an AK-47 rifle, cartridges and grenades had been found. Anant was convicted and disqualified. The Patna High Court, in August 2024, set the conviction aside.

Anant now alleges Neeraj had him framed in the case. Whether the courts agree is one question. Whether Mokama believes ‘Chhote Sarkar’ can still move votes is another. But what is the question that the JD(U) is raising by doing nothing?

Neeraj is the other face the JD(U) likes to show the Patna Graduates’ constituency: spokesman, MLC, a fourth term seeker from the same seat. He is the man of statements, bytes, of television studios, and the official list.

Anant accuses Neeraj of working against him in four elections and of the 2019 arms case. Neeraj has demanded evidence and reminded the party that Anant has also spoken against health minister Nishant Kumar—and, he says, against Nitish himself. One politician has grip on the polling booth. The other on the party microphone. The JD(U) has chosen the latter for the upcoming election while leaving the former unrestrained.

The feud is not new. It was measured, with unusual clarity, in 2015. Nitish and RJD boss Lalu Prasad Yadav were then in alliance. The JD(U) denied the sitting Mokama MLA the assembly poll ticket and gave it to Neeraj. Anant fought as an Independent and took over 54,000 votes. Neeraj, the official candidate, got 35,657 votes and finished a distant second.

The lesson: in Mokama, the party’s nomination was not the same thing as the public’s permission. Anant has been reiterating that lesson ever since—through the RJD, while in jail, through a by-election won by his wife, through a return to the JD(U). The party absorbed him because it could not erase him.

So the legislative council poll is not a fresh quarrel. It is the extension of an old one. The Graduates’ electorate is not Mokama’s booth. It is still a test of whether an official candidate can survive a colleague who has already beaten the party symbol once.

A party with 85 MLAs ought to look like an institution. Ironically, the JD(U) at times resembles something else. Nitish is president and no longer the daily source of fear. Nishant is not yet heir in the only sense that counts in Bihar—that people obey before they are asked to.

The party’s second rung has organisational authority and not the public acceptance that turns authority into power. That is why Anant can badmouth the official nominee in front of cameras and still be part of the legislature party. That is why Neeraj can be “the doctor” in a BJP chief minister’s phrase and still need that outside blessing.

If a sitting JD(U) MLA can campaign against the party nominee and face no consequence, the “United” in Janata Dal (United) is already reduced to a slogan. The Graduates’ result will decide whether Neeraj keeps a council seat. But it will not decide whether the JD(U) still has a centre. That question is already on the floor, and nobody with a party post has answered it.