Man in focus: Nitish Kumar, the soft-spoken hard hitter
Patna, Nov 08 (Punjab Mail) – He won’t hurry, not even on the day his alliance has pulled off a magnificent victory. When Nitish Kumar did show up for the media in Patna on Sunday, knowing that alliance partner Lalu Prasad had already hogged the limelight throughout the day, his face betrayed no excitement. It was only when the media requested a photo-op that he got up. The first smile came when he hugged Lalu.
Nitish is all about understatement—never flamboyant, never opinionated. “It’s just not in his nature,” his close aide Chanchal Kumar said once. He never speaks without thinking, and does not add to what he does not know.
He listens.
He listened as the mercurial Narendra Modi, the pushy Amit Shah and other effervescent Bollywood figures scooted in to rail about him and scoot. The 64-year-old engineer let Lalu Prasad defend him with raw wit and repartee, while diligently strengthening his own credentials as the man who would be chief minister.
He listened in to the silent majority in the countryside and in his carefully measured counters to Modi, he would ‘hit’ back, but always tempered and within himself.
Read | A victorious Nitish emerges as the face of a national alternative
Cool workaholic Nitish Kumar is the son of an Ayurvedic physician, and has had his hand firmly on Bihar’s pulse. His roadmap for the Bihar campaign would be ready before anybody else’s, and it was.
Yet, Kumar is known to be a man of strong likes and dislikes. His present partner in power, Lalu Prasad, once described him as having ‘aant mein daant’ (teeth in his belly). Nitish is unlikely to forget. The association with Lalu was his weak chink, but Nitish had his answer ready: Lalu had been with the BJP too, and in any case he is a socialist.