Good governance poster boy to political weatherman, many shades of CM Nitish

For Bihar, Nitish Kumar is many things. He is the young son of an ayurveda practitioner who was studying electrical engineering at the Bihar College of Engineering in the early seventies, and like so many of his contemporaries, got swept up in a great wave of socialist politics.

- Vijay Swaroop

He is the man that gave the state its counterfoil to Lalu Prasad, and framed his politics around "sushasan" (good governance). He is both social engineer, and political survivor; his political epitaph written many times over. And yet, like on Sunday evening, when the dust inevitably settles on another political maneuver in a storied but controversial career, for the past two decades, Nitish Kumar has nearly always been one, very important identity chief minister of Bihar.

Born in Bakhtiyarpur, a nondescript town on the outskirts of Patna in 1951, Kumar was in college in the early seventies; a time of great churn both in India and in Bihar, when the Jayaprakash Narayan movement against Indira Gandhi and the Emergency was building steam. He came from a generation of student politics that produced both Lalu Prasad and Sushil Modi, and by 1985, he won his first assembly elections from Harnaut, fighting on a Lok Dal ticket. He was already creating ripples, winning a seat in an election cycle swept by the Congress Five years later, he moved to Delhi as the MP from Barh.

It was the early nineties, and as the Mandal storm blew over the Hindi heartland, politics in Bihar saw the arrival of a new generation of leaders. If there was Lalu Prasad of the Janata Dal, Kumar sided with George Fernandes to float the Samata Party in 1994, the first iteration of what is now known as the Janata Dal(United).

The JD(U) grew from strength to strength, as did Kumar. He was first chief minister for seven days in 2000, but led his first full term as head of the state, in alliance with the BJP, in 2005.