Timeline: Tracing Nitish Kumar's Love-Hate Relationship | Top points

New Delhi, Aug 08: By skipping the Niti Aayog meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday, Bihar chief minister and JD(U) supremo Nitish Kumar has yet again raised eyebrows and stirred speculations that things are just not all well between the Janata Dal (United) and the BJP.

But Nitish is famed for shifting alliances at the drop of a hat. Let us trace back at the love-hate relationship, of Nitish Kumar through the years.

• Nitish got the first taste of victory, after three successive defeats, in the 1985 assembly polls when he won from Harnaut as a candidate of the Lok Dal though the Congress swept the elections riding the tailwind generated by the assassination of Indira Gandhi the previous year.
• Four years later in 1989, Nitish entered the Lok Sabha from Barh even as fellow MP from Saran Lalu Prasad shifted to Bihar, taking over as the chief minister and scripting a spectacular success story which altered the state's political landscape. Kumar, one of the most articulate leaders of the Janata Dal, had fully backed Lalu in the keenly fought internal contest for chief ministership.
• The next decade-and-a-half saw Prasad's rise as one of the most powerful but controversial figures of his time who ruled the state by proxy, getting his demure homemaker wife Rabri Devi elected as his successor, when a charge sheet in fodder scam caused him to step down as the chief minister.
• In 1994, Kumar burnt his bridges with Prasad, floated the Samata Party with George Fernandes, and built his own political edifice brick by brick. The Samata Party joined forces with the BJP and Kumar made a mark for himself as an outstanding parliamentarian and was reckoned among the competent ministers in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cabinet.
• After a rift between Sharad Yadav, the then Janata Dal president, and Lalu Prasad, the latter broke away and formed the RJD. The Samata Party merged with Sharad Yadav's Janata Dal while continuing its alliance with the BJP.
• In 2000, Nitish was first elected to office when JD(U) was an NDA member. However, he resigned days after he took oath, but before he could prove his numbers NDA and its allies had 151 seats, Lalu Prasad Yadav's RJD had 159 MLAs both falling short of the required 163 seats.
• In the year 2003 - Sharad Yadav's Janata Dal merged with Samta party forming Janata Dal United, with Nitish at the helm.
• After the NDA lost power in 2004, a victory in Bihar held out the promise of a degree of redemption for the BJP-led alliance.
• In the polls held in November 2005, he came back to power as an NDA member. JD(U) was the majority seat winner with BJP ranking second. Attempts to wrest power from the RJD-Congress combine, then in power at the Centre as well, after the NDA fell short of a majority in the assembly polls of February, 2005, were stymied by Governor Buta Singh's controversial move to dissolve the assembly, without it having even been constituted, in the face of alleged horse-trading. This, however, proved a blessing in disguise for Kumar who was projected as the chief ministerial candidate in the elections that took place nine months later, and the JD(U)-BJP combine got a comfortable majority, bringing the so-called "Lalu era" to an end.
• In 2010, Kumar's party swept back to power along with its then allies, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and he again became Chief Minister. The alliance won 206 seats, while the RJD won 22. The period, however, also saw the end of "Atal-Advani era" in the BJP and Kumar, who could not fathom the potential of his then Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi, locked horns with him over the post-Godhra riots in the western state.
• Flaunting his secular ideology, Kumar had succeeded in preventing Modi, seen as a polarising figure on account of the Gujarat riots, from campaigning for the BJP Bihar in 2009 Lok Sabha polls and the assembly elections a year later, something that still riles Hindutva hardliners.
• He ultimately snapped his party's 17-year-old ties with the BJP in 2013 when Modi was anointed the BJP's campaign committee chief for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
• After parting ways with the BJP, he won a trust vote with the support of the Congress, but stepped down in 2014, owning moral responsibility for the JD(U)'s drubbing in the Lok Sabha elections, when the party returned with a dismal tally of just two.
• In less than a year, he was back as the chief minister, elbowing out his rebellious protégé Jitan Ram Manjhi with ample support from the RJD and the Congress, and came to be seen nationally as a potential challenger to Modi.
• The Grand Alliance that came into being with the JD(U), Congress and RJD coming together, won the 2017 assembly polls handsomely but came apart in just two years, after Kumar insisted that Lalu's son and deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav, whose name had cropped up in a money laundering case related to the time when RJD supremo was the railway minister, "come clear" on the issue. He abruptly resigned as the chief minister as the RJD refused to budge, only to be back in the office in less than 24 hours with BJP's support. Those who saw a "secular alternative" in Kumar felt let down and cried betrayal of "public mandate".

Nitish Kumar, though enfeebled by electoral reverses, is back in the hot seat, belying the prophets of doom.