With no formal degree from any management institute he has done what his predecessors could not do. Unlike Lalu Yadav, who during his prime would adopt rustic skill to communicate to the illiterate masses, Nitish has the knack to attract educated middle class to his side too. While the former had obsession for organizing rallies, maha-rallies and raillas the latter has mastered the art of utilizing various anniversaries and other occasions for his advantage. The March 22 Bihar Diwas celebration is one among them.

Lalu too used to go to masses and mix with them, but Nitish had perfected this art in a different way. He undertook more than half a dozen well-managed Yatras. Like Rajshekhar Reddy, who with the help of state-wide Yatra managed to come to power and become the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 2004, Nitish undertook Nyaya Yatra to storm into power in 2005. Vikas Yatra, Sadbhawna Yatra, Vishwas Yatra and many others follow after he became the chief minister.

There may be no dearth of people critical of lavish expenditure on the occasion of Bihar Diwas––and that too at the end of financial year when all the officials are supposed to be busy in the government offices––yet he has tried to inculcate the feeling of Bihari sub-nationalism, a trait which was missing among the common masses of the state. He had followed the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who after the 2002 riots undertook Vibrant Gujarat campaign and always talked of Gujarati Asmita to improve his image. Nitish keep talking of special status for Bihar.

For 98 years nobody was reminded of the Bihar Diwas. It was Nitish, who first took this up last year. He could have done it in 2012 by observing centenary celebration in a grand scale but he undertook it in 2010––the moment he hit upon the idea––as in politics two years period is too late. He branded Bihar successfully to win the 2010 Assembly election. Even before his victory in the 2010 election he managed to pose himself––at least in the eyes of several media pundits––as the likely candidate in the race for the Prime Minister in 2014. This notwithstanding the fact that his party, Janata Dal (United), still has to depend on the alliance partner BJP to stay in power in Bihar.

Several schemes and programmes taken up in the last few years have already been introduced or launched by other state governments yet his media machinery has projected them in such a manner as to show that all of them have been started by him. For example it is the Naveen Patnaik government, which first enacted the Orissa Special Courts Act, 2006 and even initiated action against corrupt officials.

Tamil Nadu distributed cycles and uniforms to school children way back in 2001 and several other states, including Jharkhand, followed it. Bihar took it up only a couple of years ago, yet Nitish virtually rode to victory in the Assembly election by highlighting this as a great achievement. Mind it Jayalalithaa lost the subsequent Tamil Nadu Assembly election even though she was the first to take up this scheme. In contrast so much was the goodwill created in Bihar that people failed to ask why is it that no blanket was distributed among the poor in the cruel winter by the Nitish Kumar government.

In the same way the Shivraj Singh Chauhan government in Madhya Pradesh was the first to introduce Right to Service yet people in Bihar think that their state is the first.

Nitish is a strong critic of the centrally-sponsored schemes yet he has succeeded in marketing their achievements in such a way that even his opponents have been rendered speechless. For example even hard-core Congressmen do not have guts to claim that the Nalanda International University, the IIT, the Cenral University of Bihar and off-campus branch of the Aligarh Muslim University are all the initiatives of the Manmohan Singh government and not of Nitish Kumar.
Herein lies the quality of good Public Relation man.

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