Laloo Yadav has inhabited an unlikely image these past couple of years. Some would even claim that he has substantively reinvented himself. This, after all, is the man who was thrown out of power in Bihar on charges of lack of governance. Today he is feted far and wide for how well he’s done in running the country’s largest public sector concern – the railways. I am not terribly convinced as to how much the well-being of the Indian Railways has to do with the ministrations of Laloo Yadav. The railways are a lumbering concern and shifts in policy take time to show results; it is quite likely that Nitish Kumar, his predecessor in Rail Bhawan and his regime’s successor in Bihar, had a hand in it too. But it would be unfair to take all credit away from Laloo Yadav; if he has gathered an efficient set of officers to run his ministry and lets them do the job, that’s sufficient cause for congratulation.

Laloo Yadav’s record in Bihar betrayed little evidence of his inclination to matters of governance. On the contrary, he systematically dismantled governance during his 15 years at the helm, either directly or through proxy. He discouraged ministerial excellence and bureaucratic initiative; he displayed a positive disinterest in governance and a dislike for those who tried to nudge him in that direction. Among the many reasons for his rupture with Nitish Kumar was this as well. Nitish wanted the government to govern and was ready to shoulder the responsibility while Laloo Yadav extended the Mandal revolution from the pulpit. Laloo Yadav thought Nitish meant to undermine him.

The defeat of November 2005 midwifed a new Laloo Yadav. And yet, his altered approach to governance is not the key change that has occurred in him; what has changed is his approach to politics and politicking. I was among those who believed that were Laloo Yadav to lose power in Bihar, he would paralyse any successor government. Convinced that he had some manner of divine right over Bihar (this sense was deepened when he pulled Rabri Devi out of his kitchen and installed her as successor) Laloo would be utterly intolerant of anyone else assuming power in the state.

Given his poll-eve temper, I assumed that he would rail and gnash at defeat, if not lead angered delegations to the Patna Raj Bhawan and even Rashtrapati Bhawan, complaining about electoral malpractice and worse. That he would lead sit-ins at Patna’s many hartali chowks, creating disruption and disorder. None of that happened. Happily, our democratic roots have proved stronger than our fear of authoritarian politicians.

Indira Gandhi moved quietly out of office following the defeat of 1977. Laloo Yadav withdrew quite as demurely after the drubbing of November 2005. Since then he has informed a remarkably level-headed opposition in Bihar. Ever since Nitish Kumar came to the helm, and despite having good cause on occasion, Laloo Yadav has not fallen to the temptation of playing obstructive opposition. That is not because he has lost the guts to do it, make no mistake. It is more that he has learnt a few things post defeat that we have yet to take comprehensive cognizance of. Laloo Yadav is practicing his hand at inhabiting an unlikely image – he is acting, of all things, responsible and patient; he is waiting his turn. Do not bet it will not come.

 

Laloo Yadav is, for a whole variety of reasons that range from his roots and his persona to his time and his politics, the kind of leader Bihar has never seen. Nor will, for a long time to come. He played out a role only he could have. His contribution to Bihar and to the socio-political dynamics of the state is not just undeniable, it is essential and it is deep. He gave social and political consciousness to a huge section that had remained arrested on the fringes – the Harijans, the backward of the backwards, the urban poor whose only caste was poverty. He was the first leader who made them feel a part of mainstream life, the first to give them a sense of self-respect, honour and worth.

In a very real sense, Laloo Yadav’s stunted backward revolution acted as a release valve on pent-up pressures that for hundreds of years had been building up in Bihar’s iniquitous and exploitative social structure. If he hadn’t arrived on the scene when he did, his north Bihar home-ground would probably have exploded into violence, like parts of central and south Bihar (now Jharkhand) did. He gave frustration political vent. And, in an era of sweeping communal turmoil, he gave the Muslims of Bihar a sense of security and a sense of being cared for. Muslims in Laloo Yadav’s Bihar were safer during the tumult of the 1990s than anywhere else in the country.

 

It is easy and convenient to blame Laloo Yadav for all that ails Bihar today; among the upper castes of Bihar, judgement day’s justice would be a manacled Laloo Yadav being dragged to the gallows. In their books he committed a great crime, a sin the upper castes will never forgive him for: he undid their hegemony and installed his own. He unleashed a caste war. He propagated corruption. He paralysed the administration. He let anarchy reign. All that is true in good measure.

But it is important to see all this in the backdrop of a few other little truths. Casteism in Bihar is not a Laloo Yadav-generated phenomenon. He was a product of it. Violence, political and otherwise, in Bihar much predates him. Electoral malpractice in Bihar is not a Laloo Yadav contribution; his constituency had for long been its victim. As for crime and the use of crime for political purposes, the Congress set that fashion long back.

And it isn’t as if the NDA is going to end it all and cleanse Bihar. Nitish Kumar did not flinch a whit from accepting the support of undertrial criminals while he was trying to secure a majority in the hung Assembly of 2000. And shortly after he finally gained power in November 2005, Nitish Kumar awarded a Rajya Sabha ticket to Mahendra Prasad, better known as King Mahendra – an upper caste Jehanabad moneybag not particularly unsullied of image.

 

For the record, King Mahendra had made his millions in the pharmaceutical business but not many believed his pile had come solely from Aristo Pharma. So why did Nitish Kumar oblige him? Because he had funded his campaign? Because he was a bhumihar who were staging a stunning comeback in the corridors of power? So much so that within the first month of Nitish’s rule, Biharis had begun to joke about his sushasan (good governance) slogans. It wasn’t ‘sushasan’, they said, it was bhushasan, governance by bhumihars.

King Mahendra wasn’t an exception. Several criminals had been fielded by the NDA as its official candidates. In a way what Laloo Yadav said during the campaign was right – the NDA was shouting jungle raj because Bihar under Laloo Yadav was not a jungle dominated by the upper castes; that was what the NDA wanted to recreate – a jungle where the upper castes hunted.

Laloo Yadav did accentuate caste rivalries, he did wage a caste war of sorts. But then, he did not begin the war. It had already been raging. Only, it had been an utterly one-sided war. The upper castes did the pillaging, the nether ones got pillaged. Laloo Yadav saw to it that it was no longer a one-sided war. He gave the other side the will and muscle to hit back. The history of the hunt had long been seen through the eyes of the hunter; Laloo Yadav gave the hunted the right to script their own story. It is true that eventually Laloo Yadav did little to alter or improve conditions in Bihar, even from the point of view of his own constituency. But then he had not arrived on Bihar’s centrestage as a remedy; he had arrived there as a reaction.

His mistake was to think that he was the remedy. His greater mistake was that he promised to be a remedy. He pretended to be what he was not, to perform a role he wasn’t equipped to. Laloo Yadav’s historic role ended at the height of the backward/subaltern assertion in Bihar – with their storming of the establishment, their capture of political power. Laloo Yadav could not take his revolt beyond that. He ran out of ideas and blundered into a desperate hole. Perhaps because he was forever meant to be a rebel. Perhaps because he was a misfit in the establishment.

 

All of that finally caught up with him in 2005. It wasn’t the first time the cry had risen over Bihar – Laloo Hatao. It wasn’t the first time Laloo Yadav had heard it. It seemed to bore him. Every time the slogan was raised, Laloo had been able to turn it upside down. So what changed?

I travelled widely in Bihar during the two campaigns of 2005 and what struck me as a sign of things changed or changing times was the stirring of resentment in what was classically Laloo Yadav constituency – the Muslims, in some pockets even the Yadavs.

These weren’t voices spewing from the BJP and its upper caste constituency. These weren’t voices loyal to Nitish Kumar or to Ram Vilas Paswan. These weren’t voices escaping from disgruntled pockets in the Congress either. The Congress hated having to dance to the bidding of Laloo Yadav’s little finger. It hated it even more that it could do nothing to reclaim rights over what had been the party’s exclusive realm for more than forty years. But much as it hated all that, the Congress was a toady and a tail, nothing more.

 

All of these were voices with stated positions, like Laloo Yadav’s own voice. If Laloo Yadav was telling you that he wasn’t about to go, the rest were telling you he was. No surprises in that. Laloo Yadav had revelled in such Laloo Hatao contests because most often he had the luxury of watching from the sidelines, applauding the armies against him into collision with each other. For all his undoubted brilliance as politician on the pulpit and political backstage, the truth about his victories since 1990 had essentially to do with arithmetic.

The index of unity against Laloo Yadav had always been poor. At the best of times his opponents had done an admirable job of keeping it low. Sometimes, as in the assembly elections of 1995, Laloo Yadav had to work on it a bit. In the years preceding that election, Laloo, then chief minister, split every party in the state including the CPI. In 2000, constituents of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) did it to themselves. Months before the assembly elections of 2000, a united NDA had succeeded in pulverizing Laloo Yadav’s Lok Sabha presence, reducing it to a mere seven seats. They went into the 2000 elections divided and Laloo Yadav (or should we say, Rabri Devi) sneaked through. In actual fact, Laloo Yadav had lost the assembly polls of 2000. He was able to retain power only because his opponents had lost it even more badly.

But in 2005, I heard strange voices emanating from strange quarters right across Laloo Yadav’s north Bihar homeground from Gopalganj to Purnea. They were voices of anger and discontent from among Muslims, often even Yadavs. ‘The man has merely taken from us election after election, he hasn’t given us anything.’

A senior Patna journalist, a Muslim and a self-professed Laloo fan, told me: ‘There comes a point when people want something concrete from a man who says he is there to uphold their cause. For decades, Laloo Yadav has sought and got Muslim votes, but what have the Muslims got? They remain among the most backward. Every time they are for something, they are told they have a secular space to live in, they should be happy there have been no riots and they are alive. That is ridiculous.’ He told me the story of a petition Muslim weavers from Bhagalpur had taken to Laloo Yadav. ‘They wanted power supply because their looms were idle most day and that was affecting their livelihood. Laloo just turned on them and said, "You have your heads safe on your shoulders, now you want power too?" That sort of thing rankles people.’

 

It did rankle them enough to deprive Laloo Yadav of a majority in the election of February 2005. His remained the single-largest party in the newly elected assembly but his numbers did not add up to enough. For the first time since he became chief minister way back in 1990, Laloo Yadav was unable to retain power. But, typically and cheekily, he had managed to stop the competition from getting there too. Even in defeat he had scored a victory of sorts over his opponents; if it was not to be him, it was not to be anyone else either.

President’s Rule had to be imposed. Paswan, touted by the media as kingmaker of that election, returned a poor tally even though the Congress had chosen to ignore Laloo Yadav and go with him. He obdurately refused to support Laloo Yadav’s claim to power, but that was the best he could do. He was a kingmaker without a king. Eventually, most of Paswan’s MLAs deserted him and joined the NDA.

Convinced somehow that he was mandated to rule Bihar – I will ride the upper castes for 20 years, he had claimed in 1990, and he had spent only 15 years in power – Laloo Yadav proceeded to run Bihar by remote control, through the offices of Governor Buta Singh. It was in that clinging that his loss lay best defined. Laloo Yadav was aware of the verdict on him; he was, typically, brazenly, trying to brush it aside. Hegemony had become a habit. He couldn’t countenance the thought of not ruling Bihar. He could digest the thought of someone else in the chief minister’s office even less.

Several times in those months that separated the elections of February and November 2005, he would resort to the bravado of the caged: ‘Of course, I am still running Bihar,’ he would brag, often rightly, during President’s Rule. ‘Of course my writ runs, isn’t that obvious to you?’ The perception that he was able to pull the strings he wanted pulled even when his party wasn’t in office probably hurt Laloo Yadav more than it helped; it drove the pro-changers more determinedly to the polling stations the second time around.

 

Laloo Yadav has long been gone. So long, it sounds almost fair that his assessment should only comprise accolades he has earned as minister for railways. So long that his detractors and adversaries can be forgiven for believing it is safe to count him out of power equations in Bihar. But before drafting his obituary – for which there is never any place in our kind of politics – cast a glance at what arrived in his wake. His own footsteps.

Laloo Yadav, the person, may have been ousted from centrestage in Bihar but his politics survives in the shape of his inheritor. The harijan and the extremely backward caste (EBC), the underbelly of the layered Muslim community, the ignored julaha and the potter of the egalitarian constituency of Allah. Nitish Kumar could not have become chief minister without them. The BJP, much as it would like to shy away, could not be celebrating without them. They are, quite classically, Laloo Yadav’s constituency – the underdog among dogs, who have discovered bark and bite, the forgotten who have insisted they be remembered, angry that Laloo Yadav had forgotten them.

 

Laloo Yadav left behind much to get maligned by – his utter lack of vision, his obdurate refusal to deliver for his mandate, his co-option into the politics of clans, his blind seduction by the trappings of power. He should have quit office the day the fodder allegation against him first surfaced and put it to the people. He chose, instead, to act as an animal caged by power. He clung to it. Then he transferred it to a proxy, his wife. He lost the people that day. He became a creature of power.

Even so, he retained much. Enough to keep powerful adversaries at bay for a good eight years, through three elections. Laloo Yadav is an entity like no other, stained yet sustained and enhanced by a strange alchemy of native charisma and courage. He lost the 1999 Lok Sabha election to the NDA combine; he bounced back in March 2000 to retain power for his wife and rubber-stamp. If politics is the art of the possible, Laloo has often proved its converse – he has achieved the impossible.

And he might yet again. Don’t write him off. Consider this: Fifteen years in power. Fifteen fairly besmirched years. Absence of governance, near-zero development, personal and political scandal, excessive nepotism, destructive populism, astounding chicanery. Yet, in his darkest hour, the man grabs 65 seats, the single-largest in any party’s kitty, and a respectable percentage of the vote. In his worst election, Laloo Yadav had netted 23 per cent of the vote as opposed to Nitish Kumar’s 20 per cent and the BJP’s even lower count. Others have been wiped out for much less. Remember Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh? Showboy of the developmental model, darling of the age? Or Digvijay Singh. There must be something that has not decimated Laloo Yadav even in defeat. Charisma? Constituency-building? Chutzpah? Or mere lack of effective competition?

The jury may be out on that a while, but one thing is for certain. Laloo Yadav gave Bihar’s underdogs a sense of being and self-respect that nobody hitherto had. It is true the EBC, or even the lesser among his own Yadavs, did not get too much that was tangible. But they got the right to hold their heads high. They were empowered with the sense to walk the village chowk sans fear. They achieved the confidence of the ruling. Laloo Yadav was there, their man.

 

In actual intent, Laloo Yadav may not have been the honest progeny of Karpoori Thakur. But in actual purpose, he achieved more. He changed the political order so fundamentally that even his adversary had to belong among the underdog. The BJP could not coast to power on its own in Bihar, it had to ride Nitish Kumar, bearer of the same socio-political constituency as Laloo Yadav. Who knows how long Nitish and the BJP can run together? Who knows if Nitish is not up to the promise, the original might stage a comeback. He is there. Keep the obituaries in abeyance and your eyes open.