Bihar under Lalu & co had come to symbolise all that was reprehensible about Indian polity: Uninhibited caste politics, unabashed cronyism and family rule, unbridled lawlessness and violence and unchecked corruption at all levels. Things had plunged to such depths that calling it a jungle raj would have in fact made the inhabitants of the jungles angry. At least there, tigers still don’t eat fodder, whereas in Lalu’s Bihar anything was possible!
A sense of profound collective relief could be felt across the nation at the exit of Lalu, Rabri and all their cattle from the precincts of governance. If within months of a hung verdict, the people of Bihar have now delivered this kind of an emphatic vote, their frustration and anger could be well understood. And it appears as if the people of Bihar were not alone in their eagerness to see the back of Lalu. The mounting contempt for him amidst virtually all sections of the country peaked with the SC strictures on the unseemly dissolution of the earlier Assembly. Little wonder, the media is going to town on Lalu now. Of course, it had never been overawed by Lalu and had in fact indulged him all these days, not for his brand of politics but rather for his histrionics which made for interesting copy!
All the antics and buffoonery that Lalu routinely unleashed were in fact facades that hid a cunning, calculating and self-serving politician. When he was laughed at, he made even that look like some kind of an upper-caste plot and successfully converted victimhood into a virtue, with his deliberate uncouth behaviour almost always getting romanticised as that of a rustic maverick. In reality, Lalu was the personification of all that was evil and his politics was a potent cocktail of caste, communalism, corruption, clanishness and crime. And still he could last for almost fifteen years, because he had made the political and social scenario in Bihar so murky that only someone so vile like him could survive! But his fall now, notwithstanding, there are lessons to learn from Lalu’s tale, because some such sinister seeds are still rife elsewhere in the country.
No one exploited the post-Mandal caste conflagration as did Lalu, catapulting himself into power as some kind of a messiah. He was quick to realise that Mandal, instead of addressing the caste problem, had exacerbated it and so ventured forthwith to widen the divide. He cleverly rallied the gullible under-classes behind him by dangling dreams of emancipation before them. The fact that they remain dreams even today, while Lalu and his clan have visibly moved many rungs upwards explains why the very same underclasses have voted their ‘saviour’ out with a vengeance. But to believe that this would put caste politicians elsewhere in the country, on the defensive is a delusion. Well, expect them, in fact, to get more sophisticated!
If caste was Lalu’s launch pad in Bihar, it was secularism that he used as wool to pull over the eyes of his national backers. Quick on his feet again in gauging the communal polarisation in the country, he pitched his lot with the so-called secular camp, knowing full well the Cong-Commy combine’s anathema for Hindutva. He and his clan, lock, stock, barrel, cattle, poultry, fodder et al, became absolute fans of Soniaji while the Communists were kept in good humour with an occasional word here or there about the communal virus that the BJP is. This secular wool was so thick that even an ‘erudite scholar’ as PM Manmohan Singh praised Lalu no end during the run up to the polls. And that’s how all the seculars with secure blinkers turned a blind eye to Lalu’s misdeeds and in fact, collaborated with him, in the name of secularism, to even murder democracy by dissolving the House in February and invited severe judicial retribution.
But Lalu’s secular facade slipped a bit when Paswan, a fish from the same muck, muddied the waters even more by announcing a Muslim as CM if he was voted. Now, this raised the hackles of Lalu for whom the Chief Ministership was a conjugal obligation to Madam Rabri. And so blood and marital compulsions had the better of secularism and Lalu prevailed with projecting his wife. So much for Lalu’s secularism. But let’s remember, Lalu is not the last of such traders in secularism!
Another tragedy was the total subversion and subsequent breakdown of the Bihar bureaucracy, which actually kept pace with Lalu in ruining the State. The administrative steel frame was as much corroded by crime, caste and corruption as the politics. A Bihar, bereft of any credible institution worth the name, is a shameful example of what such collusion can cause. Lalu has been punished, but the babus remain. Can there be a better case for a rethink on babudom’s accountability?
In short, despite all the laughs that the nation had, Lalu’s reign was one comedy show that should have ended long back with no chance of a remake elsewhere, or a re-run in Bihar itself. Because, the joke was always on the people!
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