Farewell, Lalu Prasad: End of the old school politician

So it’s over. Laluji’s long, colourful and less-than-illustrious political career has been sunk by the one crime that dogged him for 17 years. This is indeed a blow for a man who hoped Nitish Kumar’s break with the BJP would finally restore him to Bihar’s throne, or at least, inch him closer to it. The blow was delivered not by the conviction itself, or the jail time it promises — hurdles he has overcome in the past — but by a 40-something dynastic heir whose grandstanding has worked to Lalu’s greatest detriment. It is Rahul Gandhi who has destroyed Lalu’s Prasad’s future. And all it took was an ill-timed sound-byte to take down a man who has survived far greater setbacks. This is a sign of our times: a young, inexperienced politician employing a press conference to throw a seasoned politician to the wolves. Lalu’s exit clears the way for a Congress-JDU alliance, if not in the state, then certainly at the Centre, united by their opposition to Narendra Modi. Meanwhile, Lalu Prasad will be left to ponder his irrelevance in a Ranchi jail. [caption id=“attachment_1142175” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Lalu Prasad Yadav. AFP[/caption] The CBI verdict notwithstanding, the reality is that the era of the Lalus has long passed. He has already lost the battle of time to his nemesis, Nitish Kumar, who swept him aside in 2005 promising a new brand of Bihar politics built around development and progress. Lalu’s old-style electoral jaadu built around identity had lost its allure in a state hungry to become a part of ’new’ India. Caste still mattered, as did religion, but it no longer sufficed to keep a politician in power. Lalu, the son of a farmer, grew up in a mud hut, his politics shaped by an early life scarred by poverty and caste. In an Open magazine profile, his brother Mukund Rai’s paints an eloquent picture:

“We were born in different times. Upper-castes used to say, ‘What will you do after studying?’ They would tell us to rear cattle. There used to be a government school, but we were bonded labourers, and we lived in fear of upper-castes. In those days, it was not prajatantra (democracy). Those were the days of Rajas. They abused us, punished us for forgetting our place [in society]. They even ran a jail for us and our cattle. It was called Kanji house, and we would have to pay them, or work for them to get our cattle out of that jail.”

Much as his peers, Lalu Prasad scrambled to power on the coattails of centuries-old resentment, promising redress and reprieve, only to succumb to the allure of plunder. The greed bred by deprivation proved too great to resist for the new ‘raja of Bihar’. As Pankaj Mishra wrote of Indian politicians in The Temptations of the West,

“They all seek power that in societies degraded by colonialism often comes without a redeeming idea of what it is to be used for, the kind of power that, in most cases, amounts to little more than an opportunity to rise above the rest of the population and savor the richness of the world."

The “richness of the world” in this case was a Rs 900 crore fodder scam which would ultimately prove to be Lalu’s undoing. There are many other Lalus still in power, but they too will eventually fall due to circumstance or the law. The politics of patronage enabled a certain kind of blatant corruption that the 21st century Indian, eager for income not hand-outs, will no longer forgive. The age of rajas, be they upper or lower caste, is long gone. Even the Dalit queen with an Imelda Marcos fetish has now learnt that bitter lesson. There will be no new Mayawati statues in Uttar Pradesh, not even if or when she returns to power. The new school politician may be corrupt, even commit great crimes of misgovernance, but all will be forgiven as long as he embraces the electoral mantra: show me the development. The dead-end is nigh for Lalu Prasad despite desperate chatter in RJD circles of fighting on with that old standby Rabri Devi at the helm. But it will be hard to control a wife one no longer speaks to, an embarrassing fact Lalu confessed to Open: “I don’t talk to Rabri much. I just don’t have that kind of time. There’s a lot of work. Bihar ki ruthi janata ko manana hai (We have to mollify an upset populace).” Bihar’s janata is unlikely to be appeased by promises of a return to the bad old days of Rabri. Others speak of Lalu’s warring sons, the failed cricketer Tejaswi or college dropout Tej Pratap, best known for his gelled hair and BMW. But the dynastic baton grows ever more slippery in new India where a surname is no longer a guarantor of success. And yet it is one political heir’s eagerness to signal his preparedness for the throne that has exiled another political dynasty into the wilderness. Indian politics is rife with unintended irony. This is one more.