By Ranjit Bhushan, Patna
PATNA: With less than three months to go for the Bihar Assembly elections, Union Railway Minister and chief of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Lalu Prasad Yadav, is sitting ebullient and pretty. Notwithstanding his maladroit cash-disbursing act near Patna that got him into the bad books of the Election Commission, Lalu has good reasons to be confident: on the eve of his party’s third attempt to form a government, his main rivals are in disarray; his votebank appears more or less behind him; his charisma is intact. The opposition votebank is fragmented far more than it was during the previous Lok Sabha elections. And, after two terms in office, the RJD is well in control of the state administration. The possibility that has left the realm of the unthinkable is that of Lalu’s potential as prime minister — the first from the hotbed of anarchism, Bihar.
Lalu knows that upward mobility in national politics is entirely dependent on his keeping his pocket borough intact. His experience of the 1997 general elections, when the RJD and its allies were routed by the erstwhile National Democratic Alliance (NDA), has made him wise enough not to consider taking anything for granted. His advantage is that not a single opposition politico has honed his wiles in Bihar for a very long time. Most of them migrated to national politics. They are, almost without exception, Central leaders. Lalu spends a lot of time in Patna, in close minute-to-minute contact with his people.
Among his competitors, Nitish Kumar is a powerful Other Backward Castes (OBC) politician; archrival Ram Vilas Paswan is an influential Dalit leader; the BJP’s lone whimper in the state, Sushil Modi, is now a Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (MP). Shatrughan “Shotgun” Sinha, the Bollywood exile and Rajya Sabha MP who could potentially pose a threat to Lalu, has no local backing, either by his own party, the BJP, or by socialist allies from the Janata Dal (United). United, they had been a serious challenge to Lalu; fragmented, they might find it difficult to dislodge the combine of Lalu and Bihar Chief Minister Rabri Devi.
Lalu’s Yadav-Muslim votebank has grown formidable over the years. His men are in key positions and his campaigning has begun in right earnest. Notice the number of new trains allocated to Bihar in the past months. Taking time out from his responsibilities in Delhi, Lalu has intensified his campaign in Bihar.
Since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power at the Centre, political events appear to be moving in Lalu’s favour. While his Union Cabinet colleague, Ram Vilas Paswan’s threat to upset the RJD applecart may have got him the headlines — “I am here to end the jungle RJD raj in Bihar. This is the beginning of the end for Lalu” — in actual terms, all it may mean is a further fragmentation of the anti-RJD vote.
To take on Lalu’s formidable repertoire, niggling votebank shifts won’t work. It wasn’t always this way: on the eve of the 1999 general elections, for instance, the BJP, with its upper-caste vote, was strong in the urban areas. Coupled with Nitish Kumar’s Kurmi votes, powerful in Central Bihar, and Paswan’s Dalit backing along with old Socialist votes, even Lalu was humbled from Madhepura by Sharad Yadav. Fade to 2004: the BJP is in tatters with virtually no important leader in Bihar after Sushil Modi left for the Lok Sabha, the JD (U) is a shadow of its former self with even Nitish Kumar worsted in his stronghold of Barh during the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, and Paswan seems all set to go it alone.
More than anyone else, it is Nitish Kumar who has read the writing on the wall. After years of bickering for supremacy in Bihar, which led to the virtual demolition of the NDA there, he has offered the olive branch to Paswan. Last month, he told reporters in Patna, “I would be happy to back Paswan for the chief ministership.” But Paswan, normally effusive about such alliances, has not exactly jumped at the offer. “There can be no truck with the NDA,” he said, “although I would like the Congress to join me in my battle.
“The attrition between Lalu and Paswan is intense and unforgiving. The exchange of words between them — with Lalu calling Paswan a “king of dacoits” and the latter describing Lalu as a “criminal mafia” — resulted in the pacifying intervention of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In Bihar, though, things are as hot as ever. Lalu’s great political move has been the neutralising of the really powerful socialist leaders in Bihar: Nitish Kumar is present, but as a shadow; the old Samata Party is now, in effect, with the RJD; Paswan is ploughing a lonely furrow, unwilling to talk to the BJP after quitting the NDA council of ministers for a variety of reasons; and a number of other local leaders have arrayed themselves openly against George Fernandes. Lalu seems to be the lone man standing.
There can be no doubt that Bihar is to the NDA what Uttar Pradesh (UP) is to the Congress: the best days of the Congress, in fact, coincided with the party’s decisive victories in UP. Similarly, the best of the NDA was on display when the coalition won (then undivided) Bihar decisively in 1998. Today, pending a miracle, the positions are reversed. Paswan has been presented as a Dalit leader, but, like all political compositions, he is hardly a monolith. Certain powerful sections of the Dalits in Bihar have traditionally opposed Paswan, and there is no reason to believe that it is going to change now. Says a political analyst, “Normally, an important OBC and upper-caste support is a formidable combination. After all, in a lot of places in Bihar, Dalits may not even be allowed to vote.”
The position of the Congress in Bihar is tricky, to say the least. Bihar-watchers say that, for the first time since 1989, the Congress is showing signs of revival in a state that it used to win comfortably in the past. Much of it can be attributed to the fact that the UPA government at the Centre is looking set to last. And the one man who knows this is Lalu Yadav. So, while he may be the staunchest of Congress allies at the Centre, under no circumstances is he willing to give the Congress more than a handful of seats.
With the fortunes of the Congress on the upswing, the last thing that Lalu wants is for it to do too well. He is well-supported in his machinatons by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which, while supporting the Congress, does not want it to have a bloated ego. Both the Left and Lalu have been brought up on a diet of anti-Congressism, and Lalu has announced that he will be fighting the elections with the CPI (M) in Bihar. While the emergence of the BJP has altered their tactics, their overall strategy, that of retaining their clout as powerful regional entities, has not changed.
The local Congress is not a whit amused: should it be allotted only 10 seats, as Lalu is now threatening, it is reportedly ready to go it alone. (There are indications that Lalu has given the Congress about a dozen seats.) When All-India Congress Committee (AICC) observer Buta Singh visited Bihar, he was met by several delegations of local Congress leaders who vented their spleen against the state’s ruling husband-wife tag team. Bihar Congress president Ram Jatan Sinha has openly been campaigning against the RJD. Privately, though, Bihar Congress leaders admit that even in today’s consensual coalition politics, decisions about the Congress are likely to be taken in New Delhi. “We have apprised the high command,” Sinha says. “They will take a suitable decision.” If preliminary indications are anything to go by, there is a good chance that the Congress may like to bargain —even if it is just a bit.
In a state that prides itself on its independent streak, where the biggest political dons have often bitten the electoral dust, Lalu’s magic — if he wins a third time — would be unprecedented. Some observers say that three-phase polling in Bihar could come as a dampener to Lalu’s efforts. The EC, meanwhile, is very keen on fully mobilising paramilitary troops to keep an eye on electoral malpractices. With the state allowing in poverty, underdevelopment, rampant crime and corruption, far removed from the joys of the IT and communications revolution, it’s hardly farfetched that what becomes a political mantra in one region of the country may have no resonance in another.