As Lalu Prasad Yadav tells the tale, the moment he heard of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat’s remark seeking a review of the reservation policy, he decided to jump in. Or, to quote him more precisely, “Hum jump kiyaa."
Lalu is in good form these days as the Janata Dal (United)-Rashtriya Janata Dal-Congress alliance has done well in the first two rounds of voting in the 2015 Bihar assembly election. After a hard day’s campaign, he has the energy to surround himself with followers and regale the odd visitor. He does an impersonation of Narendra Modi and says that he wants to give the prime minister a health advisory: Do not have so much “gussa” (anger) or an artery can burst. But the real target of his speeches has been the RSS. Lalu has been distributing copies of RSS ideologue MS Golwalkar’s book Bunch of Thoughts to highlight the Sangh’s anti-reservation ideology.
He talks of Brahminical designs and other pet themes. In Lalu-speak, behind the “muuchh” (moustache) on Bhagwat’s face lurks a Brahmin out to take away the rights of all the lower castes. “RSS ka Politburo Brahmin hai,” he says. The RSS is run by a politburo of Brahmins. “Gai, bhais, beef-weef, sab bakwas hai.” Cow, buffalo, beef is all rubbish.
The BJP’s attempt to present Lalu as a “beef-eater” has just not washed: after all as Lalu tells the story of his life, his family was engaged in the traditional Yadav business of selling milk and as a boy in the village he would go with his mother to sell milk. Indeed, in the days of the fodder scam, Lalu was frequently depicted as a bovine figure chomping fodder.
Two decades
I have known Lalu Yadav for two decades now. When I look back at his campaigns, the rhetoric has not really changed in these 20 years. The difference is that now there is a Twitter account on which Lalu’s quotes and thoughts are put out daily in 140 characters. But go through Twitter (where he has many enemies on social media) or attend a rally (where the crowds still love him), Lalu’s politics is still about highlighting the backward-forward social divide of Bihar. And yes, it’s also about going after the “fascists”, an English word that he has internalised. It has worked for him well this time with the RSS providing him the fodder to get going again, in an age when a criminal conviction disallows him from actually occupying office.
The first time in the mid-1990s, when I landed up to chase down a Lalu campaign, the man summoned me on to the roof of his campaign vehicle and announced my name loudly to the crowd: Musalman mahila, Dilli ki patrakaar (Muslim woman, Delhi journalist). I have little doubt that the name of a journalist from any of the higher castes would not have been announced unless he wanted to publicly berate one of the Patna scribes with whom he has a love-hate relationship.
Lalu came to power in Bihar in 1990 and very soon became the lodestar of the Mandal age when he stopped the rath yatra of LK Advani in September that year, on the last leg of its fiery journey from Somnath to Ayodhya. But a bleak period would begin for him in 1997 when corruption charges saw him go to jail “to fight upper caste conspiracy”. He installed wife Rabri Devi, mother of his nine children, as chief minister. The two jail stints were short but Rabri was in the chair (with short interruptions) from 1997 to 2005. In one meeting, she told me, “I will run away if made to fight elections.” Yet, there she was, obeying her husband, fighting election after election. Those were the years when Lalu, once seen as the great enabler for the poor, also made a mockery of electoral democracy.
I vividly remember a scene from the 1999 Lok Sabha campaign. In the midst of hard electioneering, Lalu needed some old-fashioned maalish (massage). He disappeared for a while and emerged all shiny and oiled. He then sat, feet-up, on a charpoy while a row of the state’s top Indian Administrative Service officers in hot black coats stood clutching their files. Lalu checked each file quickly before the chief minister (who would have been more comfortable fixing his dinner) would affix her signature. That was the establishment that ruled one of the country’s most populous states for quite a while. One could both laugh and weep at what was happening. Certainly, as a journalist one could not complain of getting no colour.
In that election the slogan was, “Yaa to gariib rehegaa yaa amir / ye chunaav nahiin ran hai” (either the poor will survive or the rich/this is not an election but a war). There were times when the anger and bitterness at being ensnared in the fodder scam would show through. He once told me: “Another husband wife would have died of heart failure after what they have done to us. We have fought back and Rabri is elected by the people. Why don’t these upper castes ever go to jail themselves as they have been ruling for years? You see the system will only catch backward people. I will show them.”
Bad loser
But eventually, it would be another “backward leader” Nitish Kumar who would show Lalu his place. In early 2005, when I travelled through Bihar, it became clear to me that Nitish would win the election. I wrote one of the early stories saying so. The price for that was a humiliating and nerve racking meeting with Lalu Yadav before the results came out. Just after another voting day, that must have gone badly for him, I was allowed to enter his home at night, with a fellow woman journalist from Delhi who was meeting Lalu for the first time. He did not look in my direction but started to talk about media ka ch*****, he used abuses involving mothers and sisters, throwing them up in the air, aimed at no one in particular and every one in general. And when he did address me it was to tell me that “bhoosa” (straw) had been filled in my brain. Broadly, he said the following:
Nitish won the election in alliance with the BJP but Lalu was still an MP in the Lok Sabha. So I spent the next year avoiding him in the corridors of Parliament that I regularly covered. Still, in 2006, when the UPA was in power and the media was called for an anniversary dinner at the residence of Manmohan Singh, I ran straight into Lalu. The charm was back. He took a hold of my hand and said: “Hum ko maaf kar do, hum se galti ho gayi” (forgive me, I made a mistake). There was nothing to do but smile and move on to the next Lalu story. That is why, when I trooped into his home last week, the first words were “yeh hum se jhagdaa karne aagayi” (she has come to fight with me again). I got my on-record quotes and off-record briefing about how he has told the Muslim community to calibrate the campaign without fatwas and overt religiosity.
Sense of empowerment
The Bihar I went to 20 years ago moved me to think more deeply about injustice and social inequity than any other place in India. My family has roots in some long-lost zamindari in the Awadh belt of Uttar Pradesh and a decaying village home remains, but the land ownership patterns of Bihar and the social divisions were in a different league altogether. Socially, it was said that if a Bhumihar or Thakur entered a railway compartment, a low caste would quickly give his seat. There was bonded labour in many parts of the state and there was no question of paying labour the minimum wages. After a hard day’s work, women would hold out the pallus of their saris and would be given some coarse rice as wages. People lived in sub-human conditions that visibly worsened as one went down the caste order.
Enter Lalu Yadav who did give people a great sense of empowerment (at that time his social base extended to the Dalits and Extremely Backward Class). The anarchy he presided over was, to my mind, a deliberate shake-down of the old order. The insults to the upper castes, the breakdown of old structures were part of his political and social strategy. The problem was that unlike what Nitish did later, or a Mayawati did in Uttar Pradesh, he did not put any structures in place. I remember how in the districts, the collectors would summon the landlords in legal cases by the day, while the naxalites would scare them at night. Both were given a free run by Lalu and some chaos was needed to bring down the old order. But there was no clear-cut plan or policy to distribute lands or to run any system. What happened consequently was that many of the old feudal elements transmuted into bahubalis or strong men who had their zones of influence even as new subaltern figures emerged as the dons of Bihar. Crime figures soared, law and order broke down, the criminals got all the contracts and tenders and even the minimal infra-structure that had existed collapsed.
The decade of Nitish rule has brought some order into Bihar but Lalu was a necessary step in the history of the state. He is still a formidable campaigner and holds his core vote with strength and energy. He is a very talented politician. He has no head for governance. He is also very much a family man, looking out for the future of his children, two of whom have entered politics. One of the jokes in Bihar is that if the alliance wins, Nitish will be the tutor to Lalu’s sons.
Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based author and journalist.
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Lalu is in good form these days as the Janata Dal (United)-Rashtriya Janata Dal-Congress alliance has done well in the first two rounds of voting in the 2015 Bihar assembly election. After a hard day’s campaign, he has the energy to surround himself with followers and regale the odd visitor. He does an impersonation of Narendra Modi and says that he wants to give the prime minister a health advisory: Do not have so much “gussa” (anger) or an artery can burst. But the real target of his speeches has been the RSS. Lalu has been distributing copies of RSS ideologue MS Golwalkar’s book Bunch of Thoughts to highlight the Sangh’s anti-reservation ideology.
He talks of Brahminical designs and other pet themes. In Lalu-speak, behind the “muuchh” (moustache) on Bhagwat’s face lurks a Brahmin out to take away the rights of all the lower castes. “RSS ka Politburo Brahmin hai,” he says. The RSS is run by a politburo of Brahmins. “Gai, bhais, beef-weef, sab bakwas hai.” Cow, buffalo, beef is all rubbish.
The BJP’s attempt to present Lalu as a “beef-eater” has just not washed: after all as Lalu tells the story of his life, his family was engaged in the traditional Yadav business of selling milk and as a boy in the village he would go with his mother to sell milk. Indeed, in the days of the fodder scam, Lalu was frequently depicted as a bovine figure chomping fodder.
Two decades
I have known Lalu Yadav for two decades now. When I look back at his campaigns, the rhetoric has not really changed in these 20 years. The difference is that now there is a Twitter account on which Lalu’s quotes and thoughts are put out daily in 140 characters. But go through Twitter (where he has many enemies on social media) or attend a rally (where the crowds still love him), Lalu’s politics is still about highlighting the backward-forward social divide of Bihar. And yes, it’s also about going after the “fascists”, an English word that he has internalised. It has worked for him well this time with the RSS providing him the fodder to get going again, in an age when a criminal conviction disallows him from actually occupying office.
The first time in the mid-1990s, when I landed up to chase down a Lalu campaign, the man summoned me on to the roof of his campaign vehicle and announced my name loudly to the crowd: Musalman mahila, Dilli ki patrakaar (Muslim woman, Delhi journalist). I have little doubt that the name of a journalist from any of the higher castes would not have been announced unless he wanted to publicly berate one of the Patna scribes with whom he has a love-hate relationship.
Lalu came to power in Bihar in 1990 and very soon became the lodestar of the Mandal age when he stopped the rath yatra of LK Advani in September that year, on the last leg of its fiery journey from Somnath to Ayodhya. But a bleak period would begin for him in 1997 when corruption charges saw him go to jail “to fight upper caste conspiracy”. He installed wife Rabri Devi, mother of his nine children, as chief minister. The two jail stints were short but Rabri was in the chair (with short interruptions) from 1997 to 2005. In one meeting, she told me, “I will run away if made to fight elections.” Yet, there she was, obeying her husband, fighting election after election. Those were the years when Lalu, once seen as the great enabler for the poor, also made a mockery of electoral democracy.
I vividly remember a scene from the 1999 Lok Sabha campaign. In the midst of hard electioneering, Lalu needed some old-fashioned maalish (massage). He disappeared for a while and emerged all shiny and oiled. He then sat, feet-up, on a charpoy while a row of the state’s top Indian Administrative Service officers in hot black coats stood clutching their files. Lalu checked each file quickly before the chief minister (who would have been more comfortable fixing his dinner) would affix her signature. That was the establishment that ruled one of the country’s most populous states for quite a while. One could both laugh and weep at what was happening. Certainly, as a journalist one could not complain of getting no colour.
In that election the slogan was, “Yaa to gariib rehegaa yaa amir / ye chunaav nahiin ran hai” (either the poor will survive or the rich/this is not an election but a war). There were times when the anger and bitterness at being ensnared in the fodder scam would show through. He once told me: “Another husband wife would have died of heart failure after what they have done to us. We have fought back and Rabri is elected by the people. Why don’t these upper castes ever go to jail themselves as they have been ruling for years? You see the system will only catch backward people. I will show them.”
Bad loser
But eventually, it would be another “backward leader” Nitish Kumar who would show Lalu his place. In early 2005, when I travelled through Bihar, it became clear to me that Nitish would win the election. I wrote one of the early stories saying so. The price for that was a humiliating and nerve racking meeting with Lalu Yadav before the results came out. Just after another voting day, that must have gone badly for him, I was allowed to enter his home at night, with a fellow woman journalist from Delhi who was meeting Lalu for the first time. He did not look in my direction but started to talk about media ka ch*****, he used abuses involving mothers and sisters, throwing them up in the air, aimed at no one in particular and every one in general. And when he did address me it was to tell me that “bhoosa” (straw) had been filled in my brain. Broadly, he said the following:
“The media ka ch***** have spoiled my image. They say Lalu is a joker. They still run after me night and day for comedy. There is an entire class of people who lost power because of me and they are out to get me. The media had joined hands with this class and is from this class. There is no use trying to change my image through denting or painting. They will send me to hospital and keep abusing me. They and you can all go to hell.”
Nitish won the election in alliance with the BJP but Lalu was still an MP in the Lok Sabha. So I spent the next year avoiding him in the corridors of Parliament that I regularly covered. Still, in 2006, when the UPA was in power and the media was called for an anniversary dinner at the residence of Manmohan Singh, I ran straight into Lalu. The charm was back. He took a hold of my hand and said: “Hum ko maaf kar do, hum se galti ho gayi” (forgive me, I made a mistake). There was nothing to do but smile and move on to the next Lalu story. That is why, when I trooped into his home last week, the first words were “yeh hum se jhagdaa karne aagayi” (she has come to fight with me again). I got my on-record quotes and off-record briefing about how he has told the Muslim community to calibrate the campaign without fatwas and overt religiosity.
Sense of empowerment
The Bihar I went to 20 years ago moved me to think more deeply about injustice and social inequity than any other place in India. My family has roots in some long-lost zamindari in the Awadh belt of Uttar Pradesh and a decaying village home remains, but the land ownership patterns of Bihar and the social divisions were in a different league altogether. Socially, it was said that if a Bhumihar or Thakur entered a railway compartment, a low caste would quickly give his seat. There was bonded labour in many parts of the state and there was no question of paying labour the minimum wages. After a hard day’s work, women would hold out the pallus of their saris and would be given some coarse rice as wages. People lived in sub-human conditions that visibly worsened as one went down the caste order.
Enter Lalu Yadav who did give people a great sense of empowerment (at that time his social base extended to the Dalits and Extremely Backward Class). The anarchy he presided over was, to my mind, a deliberate shake-down of the old order. The insults to the upper castes, the breakdown of old structures were part of his political and social strategy. The problem was that unlike what Nitish did later, or a Mayawati did in Uttar Pradesh, he did not put any structures in place. I remember how in the districts, the collectors would summon the landlords in legal cases by the day, while the naxalites would scare them at night. Both were given a free run by Lalu and some chaos was needed to bring down the old order. But there was no clear-cut plan or policy to distribute lands or to run any system. What happened consequently was that many of the old feudal elements transmuted into bahubalis or strong men who had their zones of influence even as new subaltern figures emerged as the dons of Bihar. Crime figures soared, law and order broke down, the criminals got all the contracts and tenders and even the minimal infra-structure that had existed collapsed.
The decade of Nitish rule has brought some order into Bihar but Lalu was a necessary step in the history of the state. He is still a formidable campaigner and holds his core vote with strength and energy. He is a very talented politician. He has no head for governance. He is also very much a family man, looking out for the future of his children, two of whom have entered politics. One of the jokes in Bihar is that if the alliance wins, Nitish will be the tutor to Lalu’s sons.
Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based author and journalist.
