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Election time is prediction time for the cocky know-alls in our media. Some do it standing in studios against a backdrop of data, others speak to us from ground zero eating local delicacies and conversing with fellow eaters.

In the year 2024 most such folk labelled reliable and highly placed were of the opinion that the state of Bihar, under the coalition led by Nitish Kumar and his Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)), having discarded the INDIA guys and invited the BJP in, was about to win. Once again it would arise, awake and take flight under the ten-term CM sushasan babu, as Nitish was popularly known.

Nitish’s rise began when the Janata Party of Jayaprakash Narayan gathered and prepped a young crop of radical socialist leaders from backward communities to throw off the Congress. Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish, George Fernandes and Sharad Yadav then rose and shone both at the state and Union levels for long.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

But today that run appears as an aberrant episode in the political arena of 2026. Today they appear to be romantic resistance leaders who spoke vernaculars, wore mussed up kurta pyjamas and had dishevelled hair.

Suddenly parachuted into the vacuum created by the Congress’s defeat after the Emergency was suddenly lifted, they swore an oath at Rajghat to stay together and usher in real socialism and equality.

Soon it was obvious that the great ‘meeting of minds’ that the socialists’ godi media (yes, it was there) predicted aloud in vernacular papers was never really possible given the king-sized egos of older leaders. Soon, amoeba-like, the socialists began to divide and subdivide and formed new parties.

Of these, Nitish and........

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