Lalu's Rise and Fall

This is an excellent piece of article that I received from rediff and I liked it so much, more because I had myself been a part of that ruined state of Bihar once, that I would like to reproduce the same here in my corner of the web. And despite this fact produced here our Prime Minister holds the gut to applaud and support Lalu.

November 22 is an important date in Bihar's electoral history. After 15 years of Lalu rule, directly and by proxy through his wife Rabri Devi, Bihar has now said enough is enough and shown the RJD the door.

The Rise and Fall of Lalu Yadav
Lalu Prasad Yadav is undeniably one of the most interesting and intriguing characters in Indian politics.
In his 15 years in power, directly or indirectly, he saw his state Bihar go from communal strife to communal amity to caste violence, underdevelopment to rabid underdevelopment.

It was a source of great wonder to the rest of India how Lalu ruled Bihar as the champion of minorities and the downtrodden, mastering the complex caste equations of vote bank politics. Can the Lalu conundrum ever be understood?

Here's a quick look at the highlights of the Lalu era in Bihar:

Lalu took to politics as a Patna University student, and was part of Jayaprakash Narayan's students movement. He won his first Lok Sabha election from Chapra in north Bihar in 1977, became Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly in 1989 and, a year later, became the Bihar chief minister, heading a Janata Dal government.
In the early days of power, Lalu the rustic was like a whiff of fresh air.

Those were the days of the Mandal Commission, and those were the days when Bihar was engulfed by riots in Bhagalpur and Hazaribagh, to name just two places.
After Lalu took over the state's reins, Bihar hardly saw communal violence again. It is one contribution even his severest critics cannot deny.

And his taking over the mantle was symbolic of the empowerment of the backward classes, reservations for whom were suggested by the Mandal Commission, leading to widespread protests throughout the country.

Caste equations were something Lalu was the master of. He carved the Muslim-Yadav alliance, and it was his key to power. A key he used to great effect.

In 1995, he swept the state elections, with an absolute majority of 165 seats in an assembly of 324. His main opponent and the new, rising force in Indian politics, the Bharatiya Janata Party, managed only 41.

Lalu's 1995 triumph was mainly the result of an event soon after he became chief minister. In 1990, BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani rode the crest of the Ayodhya Ram Temple movement by embarking on a nationwide Rath Yatra. It was seen as the ride of Hindutva forces, making the country's huge Muslim population uneasy.

On October 23, 1990, Lalu did what no state government could dare to. He had Advani arrested at Samastipur. It cemented Lalu's position as the protector of minorities, the champion of secularism. It was an image he would exploit in the years to come, by raising the bogey of communal violence to ensure the Muslim vote came his way.

In 1996, Lalu's named cropped up in a major scam unearthed by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. Millions of rupees had been embezzled from treasuries against the account of Bihar's animal husbandry department. The Opposition had finally found an issue to corner Lalu.

The Janata Dal was divided, and Lalu formed his own party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal.

When charges were framed against him in the fodder scam, it appeared as if Bihar's king had finally met his Waterloo. But in a political masterstroke, Lalu resigned as chief minister, and instead installed his wife and mother of his nine children, Rabri Devi as chief minister.

While Lalu spent short periods of time in jail, the real rise of criminals unfolded outside, in his state. Kidnapping became an industry, and in many ways Lalu's right-hand man Mohammed Shahabuddin signified all that was wrong with the state. Shahabuddin ran a parallel administration in Siwan even when he was in jail. He was one of the lieutenants who executed Lalu's strategy of dividing and ruling the masses and terrorizing the rich.

Shahabuddin became a Member of Parliament, even as there were arrest warrants against him. Meanwhile, Bihar continued to fare appallingly in every development index. Report after report slammed the state's complete lack of planning, complete lack of ensuring the basic minimum to its residents. But Lalu remained unperturbed, because his power was intact, if not growing.

As Sankarshan Thakur wrote, 'Ask Lalu Yadav [about the lack of development] and he may give you two kinds of responses.

'If he is on record, he will say, the Centre is "responsible for criminal neglect" of Bihar et al. If he is off record, and in a mood to talk, he will tell you development isn't an issue for him. "Development, development, what development? My constituency has lived in underdeveloped conditions for hundreds of years. Development is not an issue for them. Development is an urban middle-class demand, that is why the media keeps harping on it. "Hamra log development leke kya karega ji? Bekaar baat karte hain [What will my people do with development? You talk nonsense)]

Naxalites -- armed ultra-Left militants -- stepped in where the state feared to tread, and bloody battles between them and the upper caste Ranvir Sena became routine in the hinterlands of Bihar.

When Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar in 2000 and Shibu Soren made its chief minister, it gave Lalu two leverage points.
One, he now had a new excuse for the underdevelopment of Bihar: that the mineral and natural resource rich part of Bihar had gone to Jharkhand.

Two, he now had an ally in power in a neighboring state. An ally who was as against the BJP as he was.

Even as railway minister, Lalu sought to drive home the BJP's anti-Muslim image. Just before the Bihar elections in February, a railway enquiry committee declared there was no conspiracy behind the fire that engulfed the Sabarmati Express in Godhra in February 2002.

The Gujarat riots that followed the Godhra fire were sought to be justified as retaliation to the pre-planned attack on Hindu kar sevaks. The railway probe results debunked that theory, and fed to the belief that the riots were engineered by Hindutva forces, read the BJP. The message to Muslims in Bihar was clear: the BJP is your enemy. Vote for me, I will protect you.

One of the main problems of unseating Lalu, who enjoyed power without accountability, was the lack of genuine alternatives in Bihar. That began to change with kingmaker aspirant Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan entering the battle for Bihar anew. Paswan and Lalu had similar backgrounds: they were both products of JP's student movement, they were both self-avowed champions of the backward classes. But, Paswan was seen as close to the BJP, who the Muslim populace were wary of. Paswan was a minister in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. That gave him power at the Centre, but weakness in his home state.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Nitish Kumar, also a former Lalu co-traveller, had charted a fresh course, and was harping on the much neglected word in Lalu's Bihar: *development*

As Bihar went to polls twice this year, the chorus of 'remove Lalu, make way for development' had reached a crescendo. The champion of the downtrodden was appealing to the masses to give him one more chance. Just one example is enough to highlight what Lalu's era did to Bihar.

When Lalu found a groom for his daughter Rohini in Hichhan Bigha, the sleepy Bihar hamlet was transformed overnight, with power lines, telephone connections, new roads, water pumps.

After a year, all of it had disappeared, but for the cemented track that connected the village to the main highway. The cemented track was the only memory left of what the Lalu could have achieved, had he wanted to.

Now, out of office, perhaps he could find the time to mull over how, and where, he went wrong.