‘Baharis’ oiled the wheels of campaign

Nitish Kumar puts winning strategy ahead of rhetoric; NDA does the same.

Last lap: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar campaigning in the Hayaghat Assembly constituency in Darbhanga district of Bihar on Tuesday. Photo: Ranjeet Kumar

An early theme in the just-concluded campaign for the Bihar Assembly polls was the insider-outsider dichotomy, of the “Bihari DNA” of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar versus the bahari (outsiders) namely, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah.

And yet, the election campaign machinery on both sides has been chock-a-block with people from outside the State, in what has turned out to be a campaign where both sides haven’t pulled any punches.

While the campaign may have pitted the Bihari against the

bahari , Mr. Nitish Kumar didn’t allow that to stop him from sourcing talent from all parts of the country. Payal Kamat from Karnataka, a graduate in Political Communications from the London School of Economics, has been helping the grand alliance’s ace strategist, Prashant Kishor, run its war room. Mr. Kumar’s extensive use of social media has been a departure for him, but completely up Ms. Kamat’s skill-set.

“Professionals from different backgrounds have joined Mr. Nitish Kumar’s campaign for the specific skill-set they bring to the table, their passion for electioneering and their undoubted faith in Mr. Kumar. A student of politics myself, being part of an election that holds the potential to alter the politics of India in the years to come was definitely one of the motivating factors — apart from learning from Prashant Kishor and putting my skills to use,” she told

The Hindu.

The NDA, on its part, not only has three senior men of the party — Union Ministers Ananth Kumar from Karnataka and Dharmendra Pradhan from Odisha along with party general secretary Bhupendra Yadav from Rajasthan — running the nuts and bolts of the campaign, but at least a 1,000 party workers, mainly sourced from Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat to add heft to the proceedings.

Since the ‘bahari’ versus Bihari taunt was a sensitive issue, none of the office-bearers wanted to be quoted on record.