{"id":188748,"date":"2013-09-05T16:05:32","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T10:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=188748"},"modified":"2013-09-05T16:05:32","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T10:35:32","slug":"the-abc-of-lmn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/the-abc-of-lmn\/","title":{"rendered":"Lalu, Nitish, Modi – Three Men And A Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lalu Prasad Yadav<\/a> | Narendra Modi<\/a> | Nitish Kumar<\/a>
\n<\/a>Lalu Prasad Yadav<\/strong> : The Avenger, or Maybe Not<\/span>
\nClaim to fame<\/strong> The original social engineer
\nCurrent status<\/strong> Domiciled in doghouse
\nAspirations<\/strong> To be back with a bang
\nChances<\/strong> Too many ifs and buts
\n

\"CS-Lalu\"
Illustration:<\/strong> Mayanglambam Dinesh<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nLalu Yadav is ecstatic. Lalu Yadav is panic-stricken. He sees the sun rise \u2014 finally! \u2014 after a long, dark night. He fears sunlight may never again shine on him. Confused? You would be, too, if you could smell the paint on the finish line, yet wonder if that\u2019s only a desert mirage. Everything in Bihar\u2019s current politics tells Lalu Yadav he will hit the jackpot in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, perhaps doing better than the 22 of Bihar\u2019s 40 seats he won in 2004, a record victory that had made him a kingmaker at the Centre. But everything in today\u2019s Bihar also tells him he is now a shadow of his past bombastic, larger-than-life self, a has-been whose magic spell is broken, perhaps forever.
\nFALL FROM GRACE<\/strong>
\nLalu Yadav ruled Bihar virtually unchallenged for 15 years from 1990, when he became the chief minister for the first time. After he was arrested in 1997 for alleged embezzlement, he made his wife the chief minister and ruled de facto. Yadav\u2019s opponents \u2014 the Congress, whose state government he had routed in 1990, the BJP, and his former socialist comrades \u2014 failed in repeated efforts to dislodge him.
\nUntil 2005. After a vote that year threw up a hung Assembly, another state election was called in 10 months. This time, Yadav\u2019s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) was summarily booted out. His one-time lieutenant, Nitish Kumar, whose Janata Dal (United) won in a coalition with the BJP, became chief minister. For Yadav, it got worse hereon.
\nIn 2009, the RJD massively lost the Lok Sabha battle, going down to four seats from 22. Yadav himself lost one of the two seats he contested. Three years later, the party clocked its worst defeat in the Assembly election, falling to 22 seats from the 54 of Bihar\u2019s 243 seats it had won in 2005. Next year\u2019s Lok Sabha election would be Yadav\u2019s first in nearly a quarter century when he is in power neither at the Centre nor in the state.
\nTHE BRIGHT SIDE<\/strong>
\nYadav\u2019s chances to revive his political career looked up in June when the BJP and the JD(U) ended their 17-year alliance. That coalition had won 32 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar in 2009 by combining upper-caste votes, who are 12 percent of Bihar\u2019s 82 million people and traditionally the BJP\u2019s bulwark, plus sections of the backward castes and the worst off among the Dalits, who together are more than a third of the state\u2019s electorate.
\nBut now that the 2014 joust looks every bit a triangular contest, Yadav believes the RJD is spectacularly placed to best the BJP and the JD(U). In their most recent face-off \u2014 the 2010 Assembly election \u2014 the JD(U) got 22 percent of the total votes cast to win 115 of the 140-odd seats it had contested. The BJP got 17 percent vote share to win 91 of the 101 seats it fought on. Together, the alliance scored 39 percent, a formidable performance.
\nBut the RJD was no pushover. It got 19.5 percent votes, barely three percent behind the JD(U) and ahead of the BJP \u2014 although over a higher number of seats. Yadav thinks the BJP and the JD(U) would be easy prey fighting singly. In 2009, the RJD was placed second on as many as 19 Lok Sabha seats, losing six of them by less than 30,000 votes. Two others were lost by 30,000-50,000 votes.
\nThe JD(U), goes the reasoning in Yadav\u2019s camp, would totter without the upper-caste votes of the Brahmins, Bhumihars, Rajputs and Kayasthas and the trader caste of the Vaishyas, who are counted among the backwards in Bihar but back the BJP. And the BJP would be similarly disadvantaged by the loss of the backward, Dalit and some Muslim votes that Kumar, himself a backward, had brought to the alliance.
\nOn the other hand, after the BJP-JD(U) split, Yadav expects his caste brethren, the Yadavs, who are 11 percent of Bihar\u2019s voters, to flock in ever higher numbers to the RJD. He expects the same from the state\u2019s 17 percent Muslims, a section of whom earlier voted for the BJP-JD(U) because Kumar promised and delivered a largely secular administration. As for the upper castes, the RJD spin points to the fact that three of its Lok Sabha MPs besides Yadav are Rajputs. Yadav plans on fielding a number of upper-caste folks as candidates in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Taking no chances still, Yadav has been publicly apologising for his strident anti-upper caste politicking over the past four decades, which worsened inter-caste relations in Bihar and fuelled caste wars.
\nAND THE ROUGH<\/strong>
\nBut then, there\u2019s the other side. Yadav emerged as a giant on Bihar\u2019s political firmament in 1990 by stringing together a political alliance of backward castes and the Dalits that ousted the upper castes from their decades\u2019 old leadership of the state\u2019s politics. Raising a slogan of MY \u2014 Muslims and Yadavs \u2014 he exhorted his supporters to literally wipe out the upper castes with the slogan \u201cBhura baal saaf karo\u201d, bhura baal<\/em> being an acronym for Bhumihars, Rajputs, Brahmins and Lalas (Kayasthas).
\nBut by creating sub-categories among the backwards and the Dalits, Kumar may well have stolen Yadav\u2019s place as the natural leader of all non-upper castes. In the first, Kumar excluded the Yadavs (and sundry others) as a sort of creamy layer, playing Santa Claus for the rest. These \u201cextremely\u201d backward castes (EBCS) account for 40 percent of all votes. In the second, of Bihar\u2019s 22 Dalit sub-castes, Kumar categorised 21 as \u201cmaha\u201d Dalits leaving out the dominant Dalit sub-caste of Paswan to marginalise Rajya Sabha MP Ram Vilas Paswan, who once had substantial political muscle but has been in the dungeon since losing in successive elections.
\nMoreover, no one in Bihar thinks that Yadav may actually provide good governance. The memory of Yadav\u2019s 15-year misrule that spawned massive crime, lawlessness and corruption still makes people apoplectic. Besides, most backwards are still sore because, during his rule, the RJD leader empowered only his brethren, the Yadavs, providing them with the bulk of government contracts while ignoring all others.
\nMost ominous is the 1997 criminal case against him pertaining to the embezzlement of Rs 950 crore from government funds for livestock fodder. If the judge, who is scheduled to rule this month, finds him guilty, Yadav\u2019s career may be over for years altogether. His wife, Rabri Devi, is already discredited politically, having lost both Assembly seats she fought in 2010. Two of their older sons have proved to be non-starters.
\nHis only hope may lie in Misa, their eldest daughter, a stay-at-home mom now being seen at RJD rallies. But voters know nothing of her and nine months may be too short a time for her to deliver politically. And Yadav can\u2019t imagine handing the party to a non-family politician.<\/p>\n
\n

<\/a>Narendra Modi<\/strong> : Pied Piper, But Leading Where?<\/span>
\nClaim to fame<\/strong> Hindu nationalist icon of development
\nCurrent status:<\/strong> Putative prime minister
\nAspirations:<\/strong> To be prime minister
\nChances:<\/strong> Charisma versus Castes
\n

\"\"
Illustration: Mayanglambam Dinesh<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nThe frenzy among BJP supporters in Bihar is unmistakable. It cuts across the urban-rural divide, the age divide, the gender divide, and every other divide. Now that Modi is here, they exclaim, the BJP will sweep most of Bihar\u2019s 40 Lok Sabha seats. BJP\u2019s Nand Kishore Yadav, the Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly, told TEHELKA he reckons the party would be in the play in at least 15 seats. That is ambitious, given that the most the BJP has ever won is 12 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar \u2014 in partnership with the JD(U) in 2009 and with its previous avatar, the Samata Party, in 1999 (excluding the 14 seats that went to Jharkhand when that state was carved out of Bihar in 2000). Can Modi singlehandedly win Bihar for the BJP without the crutch of the JD(U)?
\nPATCHY PAST
\n<\/strong>
\nIt all depends on how big a leader Modi proves to be. Is he bigger than Lal Krishna Advani was in 1991? In the Lok Sabha election that summer, the BJP drew a blank in Bihar\u2019s 40 seats. (Of Bihar\u2019s 14 other seats that later went to Jharkhand, the BJP had won five.) This, despite the fact that BJP had roused massive public support, especially in Bihar, in the previous two years for its controversial campaign to build a temple in place of a mosque at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, and that the then chief minister Yadav\u2019s government had arrested Advani as he passed through Bihar while on a rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya to drum up support for the temple.
\nIn successive state and Lok Sabha elections, the\u00a0BJP<\/a>\u2019s performance was at best lukewarm and at worst rather poor. In February 2005, the BJP won only 37 of the 103 seats it contested. In\u00a0the second Assembly polls of 2005, the\u00a0BJP<\/a>\u2019s seats went up to to 55 and in 2010 to 91.
\nREASON TO HOPE<\/strong>
\nBJP<\/a>\u00a0insiders in\u00a0Patna<\/a>\u00a0believe they can create magic at next year\u2019s Lok Sabha election because of Modi\u2019s leadership, plus a mood of anti-incumbency against the\u00a0Congress<\/a>-led Central government, the marginalisation of the\u00a0RJD<\/a>, and anger with Kumar\u2019s government over unfulfilled promises \u2014 such as raising salaries of contracted school teachers to the levels of the permanent staff.
\nIndeed, the state\u2019s top BJP leaders claim credit for the achievements of their erstwhile ruling coalition with the JD(U), such as in building roads and improving the state\u2019s finances, saying those departments were run by BJP ministers. On the other hand, they say, the JD(U) ministers were responsible for the mismanagement of flood as well as drought-hit regions or in the running of mid-day meal schemes in schools where poisoned food killed poor students.
\nOf the claim that the JD(U) would walk away with the votes of the backwards and the maha Dalits given Kumar\u2019s munificence for them, BJP leaders are quick to point out that their party had had more EBC and maha Dalit ministers than the JD(U) did. The BJP parades its commitment to the backwards by giving a shout out to Nand Kishore Yadav, a prominent Yadav leader in the BJP, and Sushil Kumar Modi, who was deputy CM and finance minister in the coalition government and is a backward caste leader. In addition, the BJP is putting ebc and Dalit cadres in charge of most of the party\u2019s 56,000 \u201cbooth\u201d committees \u2014 which keep track of voters in their area and marshal them on election day \u2014 where these communities have sizable presence.
\nOf course, the biggest excitement in the BJP is over Modi\u2019s emergence as the party\u2019s national campaign head. Apart from projecting him as a backward caste leader, the BJP in Bihar is also playing up Modi\u2019s Hindutva credentials unabashedly. A string of meetings are planned, beginning with a massive rally at Patna in October. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the party\u2019s ideological parent, has pressed all its local units \u2014 shakhas \u2014 into rallying supporters to join the meetings. Hundreds of village and town hall meetings are planned to bring Modi\u2019s message to the voters. To woo the maha Dalits, the RSS-BJP have organised mass feasts for them across the state.
\nSHAKY STILL<\/strong>
\nBut, of course, there is always many a proverbial slip between the cup and the lip. Half of the 12 Lok Sabha seats the BJP won in 2009 gave it a margin of victory of less than 50,000 votes, including less than 10,000 on one seat. That could spin dangerously in a three-cornered contest. Three others were won by margins of 50,000-80,000, including the party\u2019s Muslim poster boy, Syed Shahnawaz Hussain\u2019s win from Bhagalpur. In any case, the nationally recognised BJP leaders from Bihar, such as Hussain, CP Thakur, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Shatrughan Sinha, are actually political lightweights in the state, having less sway than most state-level leaders.
\nAnd most state leaders themselves are of any reckoning only in and around Patna. Nand Kishore Yadav represents an Assembly seat in Patna, as does the party\u2019s chief whip in the Assembly, Arun Sinha. Sushil Kumar Modi, a member of the indirectly elected legislative council, the Upper House of Bihar\u2019s bicameral legislature, is dismissed by party insiders as a creature of Patna. Moreover, even state BJP leaders concede it won\u2019t be easy to make substantial inroads into the backwards and Dalit votes without heavyweight leaders from those castes at the top. Two of the BJP\u2019s foremost state leaders are Giriraj Singh and Ashwani Chaubey, both aggressive groupies of Narendra Modi, and both of whom are upper castes. Prem Kumar, an EBC leader who was a minister earlier, is angry because he lost out to Nand Kishore Yadav in the race to be the Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly.
\nWill Modi\u2019s charisma override caste loyalties that have traditionally reflected greater clout than Hindutva in Bihar\u2019s elections? Both the BJP and its rivals seek an answer to that question, which will only begin to be answered after Narendra Modi\u2019s arrival in October.<\/p>\n
\n

<\/a>Nitish Kumar<\/strong>: The Dark Knight or the Joker?<\/span>
\nClaim to fame:<\/strong> Good governance
\nCurrent status:<\/strong> Newly-minted secularism champion
\nAspirations:<\/strong> Won\u2019t say but wants to be PM
\nChances:<\/strong> Development versus castes
\n

\"Nitish-1\"
Illustration:<\/strong> Mayanglambam Dinesh<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nPavan Varma, former Indian Foreign Service officer and author, recalls asking Kumar last year what he thought of Modi\u2019s chances to become the prime minister. Varma says he got a half-hour \u201ctutorial\u201d on the realities of India, its composite culture, national consensus, the need to carry people along, building and sustaining coalitions, and team spirit. Kumar\u2019s supporters dismiss the charge that his rejection of Modi on grounds of the latter\u2019s anti-Muslim sectarian image is political opportunism. They insist Kumar always kept the BJP in Bihar on a tight leash in their seven-plus years of running a coalition government, earning him the trust of Bihar\u2019s Muslims. Yes, the split with the BJP has made the path to a win in 2014 a tad uncertain. Yet, Kumar is confident that the people of Bihar know his government\u2019s worth and will vote for the JD(U).
\nTHE PROTEAN PRAGMATIST<\/strong>
\nKumar has been variously described as cautious, reclusive, non-confrontational and, of course, opportunist. His detractors have called him two-faced and diabolical, alleging that he says things to please in the moment but rarely means it. In 1994, when he broke away from Lalu Yadav\u2019s Janata Dal in Bihar, he continued to play second fiddle to fellow former socialists, George Fernandes and Sharad Yadav among others, who too had broken away to form a rival camp named Samata Party. It was only in 2005, after Fernandes was eclipsed by a defeat of the BJP-led central coalition in 2004 and when Sharad Yadav himself lost the Lok Sabha poll, that Kumar emerged into his own.
\nAnd since then, it has virtually been a dream run for him. He has won two Assembly elections back-to-back, the second more spectacularly than the first, and returned for his JD(U) superb results in the 2009 Lok Sabha election on the back of his performance in the state. Now that he has broken from the BJP, good governance is the only card he has to play as the caste combinations are hardly in his favour.
\nREAD THAT SCORECARD<\/strong>
\nKumar has been a man in a hurry since becoming chief minister in November 2005. He targeted four constituencies: the EBCs, who alone form 35 percent of the state\u2019s electorate; the maha Dalits; the poorest among the Muslims, known as \u201cpasmanda musalman\u201d; and women. He fired off his first term by reserving 50 percent seats in all panchayats for women, more than the constitutionally mandated one-third. His inducements for the backwards and the Dalits have included financial largesse such as scholarships and hostels, especially for their girls who were also given uniforms and bicycles to ride to school; building boundary walls for Muslim graveyards to protect them; and giving freebies such as radio transistors.
\nBut more than such handouts, Kumar is basing his hopes to be victorious in 2014 on a widespread feeling of political empowerment his government has triggered by officially creating the special categories of the EBCs and maha Dalits. In addition, Kumar hopes that an image of a crime fighter, part true but also part pumped up by a pliant news media in the state, affords him a special place with the state\u2019s electorate that had been fed up with the lawless rule of Lalu Yadav. Also, JD(U) leaders point out, they have the most Yadav MLAs, more than even the RJD.
\nSTEEP UPHILL CLIMB<\/strong>
\nBut that\u2019s about all the chief minister can hope for. Since splitting from the BJP in June, Kumar and his JD(U) have ended up with the weakest caste coalition among the three front-ranking parties. And that, as JD(U) spokesman Rajiv Ranjan admitted in a conversation with Tehelka, makes it extremely vulnerable to a dip in electoral fortunes. As noted earlier, the JD(U) is unlikely to gain many upper-caste votes, especially since he has come out openly against Modi, a Hindutva icon.
\nThe fact that Kumar\u2019s own caste, the Kurmis, are a tiny 2.5 percent of the state\u2019s electorate, and hence are politically insignificant, also doesn\u2019t bode well for him. The other prominent backward caste group, the Koeris, who are around 4 percent, may be unsure too as one of their leaders, Rajya Sabha MP Upendra Kushwaha, quit the JD(U) in a huff earlier this year, miffed at being sidelined by the chief minister.
\nThis is not just some cold caste calculation. As a senior BJP leader told TEHELKA in Patna, the JD(U) should worry because it does not have the support of any of the \u201caggressive\u201d castes. These include the Bhumihars and the Rajputs among the upper castes, the Yadavs among the backwards, and the Paswans among the Dalits. Why is the support of at least one of them important? Because they chaperone the EBCs, the maha Dalits and others at the lower social spectrum to the voting booths. Conversely, the disadvantaged risk violence if they choose to vote against the wishes of these aggressive castes.
\nWorse still, the JD(U) has never been a cadre-rich party, unlike the BJP and the RJD. Indeed, the joke in Patna has been that in the BJP-JD(U) alliance, the BJP provided the cadre and Kumar\u2019s party supplied the leaders. And this is actually true \u2014 many BJP MLAs in Bihar were \u201cloaned\u201d by the JD(U) to the BJP. Several of them are relatives of JD(U) leaders.
\nAnd lastly, as Pavan Varma admits, some voters may turn up disappointed as expectations from a government are \u201cbound to outstrip\u201d what it delivers. And lately, Nitish Kumar has had a tough run of luck with schoolteachers up in arms and children dying from mid-day meals at government schools.
\najit@tehelka.com<\/a>
\nCORRIGENDUM<\/strong>:\u00a0An earlier version of this story said that the BJP won 114 seats in the Bihar assembly election of February 2005 and had the most seats of all parties. This is incorrect. The BJP won 37 seats and it stood behind three other parties. The error is regretted. – Editor<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2014 Lok Sabha election in Bihar will be a direct contest between three powerful politicians. Which way does the wind blow now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":189302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[8947,842,453,236,3531,349,8948,316,2684,1381,8949,1384,7779],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}