[Mr. Yadav’s rise to
power coincided with a critical juncture in India’s history. The grand old
party, Congress, was fast becoming history in the state, with Muslims deserting
the party after religious violence in Bihar under the party’s reign over the
state, and Congress was equally a mess in New Delhi as well. The country’s
economy was in shambles, as was Bihar’s, a state whose contribution to India’s
economy was one of the highest until 1970s.]
 |
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Lalu Prasad Yadav, former chief minister of Bihar,
during an election campaign in Barachatti, Bihar
on Nov. 15, 2010. |
My Bihar village of a few hundred is just a few miles from
Phulwaria in Gopal Ganj, where the populist leader Lalu Prasad Yadav was born.
The leader, who charmed everyone with his wit and simplicity, ruled Bihar for
almost 15 years starting 1990 –- seven years himself as chief minister, eight
years through his homemaker wife, Rabri Devi, as proxy.
Son of the soil, Mr.
Yadav’s rise was an achievement, something close to unimaginable for his
villagers, as equally for mine and many other villages around us, especially as
he was from a so-called low caste, Yadav.
Years later, in
October 2013, the same populist leader stood a sorry figure in a court, in the
neighboring state of Jharkhand, which was annexed from Bihar in 2000. Mr. Yadav
had been found guilty of
participating in a what was known as the “Fodder Scam,” which siphoned public
funds earmarked for animal husbandry, and he was about to be sentenced.
Requesting leniency
from the judge, who was a younger classmate from his law college, the
66-year-old politician pleaded, “I was the chief minister of Bihar for two
terms and a union railway minister. Please, consider awarding lesser punishment
to me.” (He received a five-year prison
sentence, which meant his political career was over, at least for
now.)
It was a far cry from
a leader my villagers adored, almost revered. Though he had ruled Bihar like a
king, he was loved and hated in equal measures by the people he governed.
He took on high and
mighty in bold letters. His other achievement was further erasing the word
“development” from the state’s vocabulary and adding “corruption,” rather
gloriously. Because of this, he was a source of both pride and ridicule.
But many Muslims, like
my villagers, and Yadavs still preferred him, as no major religious riots took
place in his kingdom. No one taunted any cowherd, at least to his face. Mr.
Yadav made an alliance possible between two distinct communities, many a times
at conflict with each other in past: the Yadavs, who have traditionally herded,
prayed and protected cows, and Muslims, many of them having a diet that
included cow meat as well.
In spite of all his
shortcomings, he turned out to be the unifying force in a highly fragmented
society like ours, and he would often say that even if he didn’t provide swarg
(“heaven” in Hindi), he gave the powerless sections swar (“a voice”).
I grew on the stories
of his rise, his humor, his further rise. But more than a chief minister of the
state, he was a character of folklore for us.
Lalu was “Lalua” for
us villagers, lovingly (Obama in Bihar becomes Obamwa, Hillary turns Hileriya,
all lovingly). In my village, one can have a “Lalua” haircut. One can crack a
Lalua-type joke, or a joke about Lalua itself. Smokers can get a “Lalua chhap
beedi,” a Lalua-brand beedi. Devotees can read the Lalu Chalisa, based on the
Hanuman Chalisa, a devotional hymn read by Hindus praising their god, Hanuman.
When Mr. Yadav visited
Pakistan in 2003, seeing the chief minister’s popularity, General Pervez
Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, jokingly asked if Mr. Yadav would like
to stand for elections in Pakistan.
Omnipresent Lalua
would feature even in a rebuke by our elders that we as kids had to face when
we misbehaved: “Idiot, you see that son of a charwaha [cowherd]. He has gone on
to become chief minister, and you? Even after all the facilities of a rajkumar
[prince]?”
Mr. Yadav’s rise to
power coincided with a critical juncture in India’s history. The grand old
party, Congress, was fast becoming history in the state, with Muslims deserting
the party after religious violence in Bihar under the party’s reign over the
state, and Congress was equally a mess in New Delhi as well. The country’s
economy was in shambles, as was Bihar’s, a state whose contribution to India’s
economy was one of the highest until 1970s.
The Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., was trying hard to make its fortunes those
days. Its leader, Lal Krishna Advani, was leading a rath yatra (chariot
pilgrimage) in 1990 to build a temple in place of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Mr.
Yadav, as chief minister of the state, stopped him from entering Bihar and
overnight became a hero among Muslims, who made up around 15 percent of the
state population and was considered an important voting bloc.
Around this time, in
my home, something was clearly bothering my grandfather, Dada. He used to write
us beautiful speeches praising the leaders of India’s independence and
reformers for our Republic or Independence Day functions in school, every year
without fail.
The speeches were
mostly called bhashan (the Hindi word for ”speech”) when my elder sister used
to present them. In the 1990s, when I grew up to repeat those speeches, they
came to be mostly known as taqreer (“speech” in Urdu).
Dada began adding a
few new names, like Maulana Mazharul Haque, Shibli Nomani and Allama Iqbal, to
the list of the leaders and reformers to be mentioned in my speeches, which had
initially included Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and which always talked about the importance of hubbul
watni (Urdu of “love for the nation”).
In retrospect, the
sudden assertion of his Muslim identity by my Dada was rather surprising. He
was a man who chose to remain in India after the partition of the country in
1947, who escaped death from a marauding mob in Kolkata that was looking for
anyone from “the other religion” to kill. He was a man who taught me to use
secular greetings like adaab (“respect”) for any new person, as you never knew
whether a person might not welcome a Muslim greeting like salaam.
It reminds me of
another story from the 1970s. My villagers had killed a stray nilgai, – or blue
bull, equally revered as cows in some parts – for meat. The neighboring Hindu
village had protested. Dada called a meeting of villagers, and as someone who
was a respected man in the area, he said to them that everyone’s faith should
be respected.
It was decided that no
cow would be slaughtered in my village from then onwards. Those who wanted to
eat beef were free to get the meat from licensed slaughterhouses a few miles
from my village. He guarded that unwritten treaty until he died in 2005. His
wish is still respected.
Normally a serious
man, Dada would have loved a few of the “Lalua” jokes, like this one:
Once Lalua went to
Amrika. President Bill Clinton, hosting him in a big hotel, asked him what
Mister Lalu would like to eat. Lalua said that he wanted to eat satua, as gram
flour is called in Bihar, which is commonly eaten in many parts of India. Not
able to arrange satua for Lalua, President Clinton felt very embarrassed that
he could not meet the demands of a guest from a small place like Bihar.
It was a subtle symbol
of challenge to the high and mighty, and my villagers would laugh heartily
every time they heard the joke, with the same intensity as when they heard it
the first time.
We didn’t have proper
schools or colleges around us. “Lalua’s” love probably made us ignore that. And
over time, it was taken as something very natural, that good colleges or
schools exist only in Patna, Aligarh or Delhi. As a result, students like me had
to travel to bigger cities for education. I came to Delhi in late 1990s, barely
a teenager at that time.
But while I was away
at school, it would sadden me to read Mr. Yadav’s fate in elections or the
corruption scandal that eventually caught up to him. As a kid, I thought it was
my duty to warn “Lalua” that what he was doing would take him nowhere.
I couldn’t find his
address (Google was still not known to many Indians then), so I wrote a letter
to the editor of a newspaper I subscribed to, suggesting that Mr. Yadav mend
his ways before his lantern, which served as his party symbol, was
extinguished. The rough version of the 15-paise postcard is still with me, with
few handwritten corrections. The “fair” version, as we used to call our final
draft during our school days, I sent to the editor. To my disappointment, the
newspaper never published it.
After the Fodder Scam
surfaced, Mr. Yadav could never possess the same power that he had held in the
1990s –- for good or bad. But my villagers always voted for the “corrupt Lalua”
– not the “nationalist” B.J.P., not the “secular” Congress.
(Neyaz Farooquee is a
journalist based in New Delhi. A more detailed version of this essay can be
found in his book “Unmaking of a Radical,” expected early next year. You can
follow him on Twitter at @nafsmanzer.)
