There’s something rotten about Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar who under one stratagem or another has ruled India’s poorest and most illiterate state for 17 years. Even as the coalition of opposition parties grouped under the INDIA alliance are engineering an electoral strategy to field a common candidate in every constituency to ensure that the BJP doesn’t win General Election 2024 because of split opposition votes — a plausibly winning strategy — this worthy is throwing all sorts of spanners in the works. On December 19, at an inaugural meeting of the 28-party INDIA alliance, he “lost his cool” when an MP from Tamil Nadu requested an English translation of his rambling speech in Hindi. According to him, translation was unnecessary as Hindi is the national language.

Quite obviously, this aspiring prime minister is history agnostic. If acquainted with the basics of the Constitution, he would have known that English is the associate national language, link language of the country and also the language of the courts, business and industry. If he had the most elementary knowledge of post-independence history, he would have known that in the 1960s when Hindi was declared the sole official language of India, there was real possibility of Tamil Nadu seceding from the Indian Union. Moreover this duffer also imposed liquor prohibition in Bihar despite its disastrous history worldover which has unleashed a new crime and corruption wave in the state.

Also, at this very INDIA meeting when Mallikarjun Kharge, the unassuming Congress president, was proposed as the face of the INDIA alliance for General Election 2024, he walked out of the assembly. With leaders like these who have led the deliberately under-educated people of Bihar into prolonged and ruinous caste conflicts inside the INDIA alliance, its chances of uniting to halt the BJP juggernaut in General Election 2024 are dim.