Lalu Prasad belongs to the first generation of Indian politicians with no experience of colonial rule, born as he was in 1948. He began his political career in the rough-and-tumble of student politics that gripped India in the troubled 1970s when economic growth was slow and inflation high. This coloured his language, style, oratory, and his rustic, if lumpen, brand of politics.
He first came to power in 1990 as the Chief Minister of Bihar after nearly two decades in the opposition, riding an anti-Congress wave to power. A milkman’s son replaced the state’s brahmin Chief Minister, thus becoming a symbol of hope for all low castes in Bihar. He was re-elected in 1995, but forced to step down in 1997 after being indicted for corruption in a case involving millions of dollars meant for a government programme to buy cattle fodder. Shrewd enough to understand that resigning from office could spell political oblivion, Prasad got his party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), to choose his unlettered and completely inexperienced wife, Rabri Devi, to succeed him as Chief Minister. Together, Lalu Prasad and his wife ruled for 15 years, a period during which Bihar continued to remain at the bottom of every socio-economic ranking in the country.
In 2004, a tired Lalu Prasad and a weakened Congress contested the parliamentary elections together and the RJD won 24 seats in the Lok Sabha (out of 40 in Bihar). On the national stage, he asked for, and got, the railway portfolio, the railways being by far the largest single enterprise in the country.
And Lalu Prasad took the country by surprise. He transformed the moribund organisation in a way that no one could have imagined! The same man who is single-handedly held responsible for the quagmire called Bihar managed to improve productivity and profits in the railways, and embarked on a massive investment and modernisation programme.
Currently, his capacity for political intervention has been restricted by the fact that his party was run by him, and not on any democratic principles. This was fine when the times were good and he could deliver. But now, when his party’s base is shrinking, Lalu Prasad’s greatest asset—his oratory and village bumpkin political style—have limited appeal in a scenario where his rival Nitish Kumar has introduced a new element: good governance.
Today he is trying hard to rope in a man who was a bitter enemy once—Ram Vilas Paswan, a dalit leader who has never seen eye-to-eye with Lalu Prasad. But these are difficult times, and Lalu Prasad realises that he needs every friend he can get. His ambitions, now, are limited. One more term as Minister of Railways, the marriage of his four daughters (out of his nine children) and he will be a content man.
©Business Standard. Excerpted from Business Standard Political Profiles: Of Cabals and Kings, by Aditi Phadnis. Published by Business Standard Books in 2009; available in bookshops and also on www.business-standard.com/books. For more details, contact vineeta.rai@bsmail.in
The book carries detailed profiles of: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, L K Advani, Pranab Mukherjee, Prakash Karat, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rahul Gandhi, Jayalalithaa Jayaram; Amar Singh, Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Raj Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Rajnath Singh, P Chidambaram, Jaswant Singh, Narendra Modi, Omar Abdullah, Ahmed Patel, Arun Jaitley, M Karunanidhi, N Chandrababu Naidu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Nitish Kumar, Om Prakash Chautala, Mamata Banerjee, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Singh Badal, Chiranjeevi, Vijayakanth, B S Yeddyurappa, H D Deve Gowda, Digvijay Singh, Murli Deora, Sushma Swaraj, Jairam Ramesh, A K Antony