Nitish Kumar quits his own coalition — and is Chief Minister again within a day

Nitish Kumar's JD(U) had fought the 2015 Bihar Assembly election in a “Grand Alliance” with the RJD and Congress, explicitly to defeat the BJP, and won a large majority. The coalition strained over the following two years, and came apart when the Central Bureau of Investigation named Tejashwi Yadav — the RJD leader Lalu Prasad Yadav's son and Kumar's own Deputy Chief Minister — in a corruption case; Kumar's demands that Yadav resign or explain himself went unanswered.

On 26 July 2017, Nitish Kumar resigned as Chief Minister, ending the alliance. He did not stay out of office long: within hours, he was in talks with the BJP, and on 27 July — the very next day — he was sworn in again as Chief Minister, this time heading a JD(U)–BJP government, the same NDA combination he had broken with two years earlier.

The switch gave Bihar its second change of ruling coalition without a fresh election in three years, and set the template Kumar would repeat again in the years that followed — realigning between the NDA and RJD-led coalitions more than once as Bihar's governments continued to reflect his own shifting alliances more than any single election result.