Sunanda K Datta Ray: Shunted into a siding

WHERE MONEY TALKS/ What will happen if Laloo Yadav makes all India his constituency

Perhaps the most chilling sentence heard recently was Laloo Prasad Yadav's boast on TV that all of India is his constituency. Just imagine, all of India may soon become Bihar in the hands of the here-today-gone-tomorrow Mamata Banerjee's ebullient successor.

The railways have always inspired imagination and innovativeness. In the New World, British Columbia refused to join the Canadian federation until the Trans Canadian Railway had been built.

Here, an august Congressman who rose so high in the party hierarchy that he must remain nameless was said to have stopped a woman passenger at some wayside station, naturally in Bihar, when he was a lowly ticket inspector. "You're travelling without a ticket" he bawled.

"That will be a five-rupee fine!" Timidly, the woman untied the end of her grimy sari and produced the ticket she had bought with her hard-earned money.

The inspector glared at the scrap of cardboard, took it in his hand, held it up to the light, turned it over, scrutinised both sides, then produced his thunderous verdict. "This is a male ticket. Aren't you ashamed as an aurat to travel on a man's ticket? Fine ten rupees!"

Our Laloo is a man of principle. Indians may not have cast their votes in the recent election but voted their caste (as Bal Thackeray percipiently defines the world's largest democracy), but Patna's Mr Yadav has no time for his Lucknow namesake.

In fact, the new railway minister's hostility might explain why Mulayam Singh Yadav sulkily slunk away from Delhi. Laloo has never forgiven the other Mr Yadav's anger when the hand that rocks the cradle went public.

"If all of you want to join politics," Mulayamji mocked women, "who will make the chapaties?" He could also have lorded it in central politics if he had had the foresight to marry a Barfi Devi to run Uttar Pradesh for him.

But Laloo must be given full marks for swadeshi zeal. Murli Manohar Joshi's heart must have warmed to hear him vow that his trains would serve tea and coffee in earthen pots, and food on sal leaves.

None of your phoren-boren china in the shape of things to come, and let no one ask who owns those pottery works in Bihar or the endless miles of sal forests. Perhaps, in time, trains will also carry an astrologer. Or, maybe, drivers will double up as fortune-tellers and palm-readers. After all, safety is all in the stars.

Not for dyed-in-the-khadi swadeshi Laloo the style of Madhavrao Scindia who was a natural for the portfolio and at whose dining table I have helped myself to brandy and cigars from the little silver train that chugged round the edge.

Laloo probably looks at even air-conditioned first class sleepers with the jaundiced eye that a former West Bengal chief minister cast on the Calcutta Club.

Shown the stately edifice, a puzzled Ajoy Ghosh reportedly asked, "Do they need such a big building for drinking?" Laloo dismisses roads and electricity. "The people don't need good roads because they can't afford cars," he says. "And what's the point of giving them electricity? They're too poor to pay the bills."

Mahatma Gandhi's extension of that logic to trains would have delighted the royal Duke of Cumberland who objected to railways that would enable socialists to travel cheap and fast around Britain.

Another crusty conservative, the Duke of Wellington, feared the rumble would disturb the tranquillity of the playing fields of Eton. Laloo may never have heard of either duke or of Eton, but conservatives of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chargesheets.

Did not the Mahatma say, "Railways accentuate the evil nature of man"? They spread bubonic plague. They encourage desegregation. They enable rogues to visit places of pilgrimage (Ayodhya?) and create famine by allowing farmers to sell their grain in distant markets that pay more.

Ergo, it's a holy duty to pull the chain. If K. Hanumanthaiya promised a great leap forward on the permanent way, we can now expect a great leap backward on the impermanent way.

Gandhi's other claim that "good travels at a snail's pace "" it can, therefore, have little to do with the railways" is pregnant with lucrative possibilities.

If the great man thought speed sinful "" never mind Sarojini Naidu's gibe about the cost of smartening up all those third class compartments "" he must have regarded bullock carts as the ideal transport. Millions of carts will be needed to drag us into the new millennium. And with two bullocks per cart, that means billions of maunds of fodder.

All the figures that have been trotted out till now, in the courts, in the papers and, most recently, in the Bharatiya Janata Party's billious propaganda, will fade into insignificance as the new demand for fodder mounts and mounts, and the railways grind down in their rusty tracks.

Gandhi again "" "Railways, lawyers and doctors have impoverished the country so much so that, if we do not wake up in time, we shall be ruined."

Laloo is the railway minister. We heard him claim on television that he is also an advocate and knows the Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code.

Heaven forbid that he does not one day, like another resourceful Bihari chief minister, Jagannath Mishra, suddenly sprout a "Dr" before his name. Then, since all India is his constituency, we shall all be well and truly shunted into a siding.