Alone together

Laloo8217;s sermon 8212; that men don8217;t live by bread alone 8212; has fewer believers. People see him as a ruler now; Laloo wants people to see him as the rebel, still. 8216;8216;They are trying to snatch power from us,8217;8217; Laloo warns his audience, countering charges of non-development, corruption and crime.

Many trusted voters still prefer this anarchy to an order in which they had no say, even 15 years ago. Laloo is playing on this fear. But some have already overcome the bitterness of the past to think of the future. And that is Laloo8217;s fear.

LALOO8217;S style and slogans had given the Yadavs and Muslims 8212; his most trusted base 8212; a sense of empowerment. 8216;8216;This flying machine used to be Jagannath Mishra8217;s. Now, it is the cowherd8217;s,8217;8217; he would tell people after landing his helicopter in hamlets during his first term as chief minister. 8216;8216;You children of the cowherds, climb into it and see.8217;8217;

Besides this symbolism, there was substance too 8212; 8216;8216;You cowherds, go, learn to read and write,8217;8217; he told them, and started the charvaha vidyalayas, specialised teaching centres for children who couldn8217;t attend regular school.

8216;8216;Who will not let Dalits vote when Laloo Yadav is ruling?8217;8217; he thundered, and relocated polling booths. He grilled officials on poverty alleviation projects. After the arrest of rath yatri L.K. Advani in 1990, Laloo had no challenger for the Muslim voter. Till this election.

LALOO had refused to occupy the chief minister8217;s bungalow in the initial days. Fifteen years later, he not only occupies the bungalow, but has merged another one into the campus, built outhouses and a swimming pool. He may have gone to surrender in the fodder scandal case riding a rickshaw, but 80 state police vehicles are now at the Rashtriya Janata Dal chief8217;s disposal.

When he asks for paan, a dozen people run around; one person carries a spittoon wherever he goes. On winter evenings, he soaks his foot in warm water and keeps it atop a table. As one servant scrubs his foot, another waits with a warm towel. Ministers and wannabe ministers touch that foot. He spits, as if it fell on your face. This is Mandalism as new royalty.

As power seemed eternal for him, the substance gradually drained and only the rhetoric remained. Not only charavaha vidyalayas, even ordinary schools closed down. Roads vanished and crime soared. Institutions of governance 8212; from police station to public distribution system, PS to PDS 8212; collapsed. He doesn8217;t see a file for more than a second; and no police officer in Bihar gets a call from the chief minister8217;s house unless it involves religious tension.

The only institution Laloo takes seriously is the election. He thinks and acts from election to election. No personal ego or moral convictions come in the way. In the words of adversary Ram Vilas Paswan, Laloo has one hand on your throat and another on your foot. He may touch your feet and smother you, as per his convenience.

EVEN while reigning over anarchy, cocooned by sycophants who compose poetry to him, his earthiness and sense of justice is not all gone. He personally intervenes in individual cases of administrative highhandedness. It is only that he is out of touch with just so much and so many. He doesn8217;t have the patience or perseverance to attend to mundane governance. He8217;d rather talk of fascism.

All this was well and good as long as he was merely the rebel. He was the rebel of Bihar who fought against an unjust Centre, rebel of the weak who snatched power from the upper caste, rebel of the Muslims who stood up to the Sangh.

Now he is the Centre. The Sangh Parivar is not strong enough. And no political combination in Bihar can think of an upper caste chief minister.

Laloo has thus to speak like a ruler. It8217;s a new role. 8216;8216;I will bring development to Bihar in the next five years,8217;8217; he promises. Does Bihar believe him?

From embers to economics
ATIQ KHAN

IT must be hard to be Mulayam Singh Yadav. While national attention, as it were, is focused on Bihar, the political buff has more than half an eye on Uttar Pradesh. The chief minister8217;s testy relationship with the Congress 8212; they back each other8217;s governments in Delhi and Lucknow but are obviously competitors 8212; is nearing a climax.

This summer, the buzz in Delhi goes, the Congress will attempt to dislodge the Mulayam government. Maybe the chance will come when the Allahabad High Court delivers its judgement on whether the Anti-Defection Law is applicable on the 40 BSP MLAs who joined Mulayam8217;s Samajwadi Party SP.

There8217;s a familiar ring to it. A wrestler by avocation and Lohiaite by political upbringing, Mulayam was chief minister when, in 1990, kar sevaks first sought to damage the Babri Masjid. He was also chief minister on June 2, 1995, when the 8216;8216;State Guest House incident8217;8217; took place. Mayawati was physically attacked and changed from one-time ally to all-time foe.

This is his third term as chief minister, and it8217;s awaiting its defiant, defining moment, the sort that will polarise public opinion against or in favour of Mulayam. Who knows? It may only be a month or two away.

MULAYAM and Laloo entered the big league at the same time. In the winter of 1989-90, both found themselves chief minister, speaking a rustic dialect, talking a hard talk. Today, the evolution is remarkable.

From a Yadav-Muslim base, Mulayam has sought to expand his party8217;s appeal to upper caste Rajputs. The socialist now makes place for socialities. More substantially, the Etawah-born politico has discovered economics, something that seems to have eluded Laloo.

Samajwadi MP from Kaiserganj, Beni Prasad Verma has known Mulayam close to 40 years. He was once his alter ego, before Amar Singh came along. From Ram Manohar Lohia to Subrata Roy Sahara, it8217;s been a long journey. Verma, mischievously cryptic, nods as you talk of the new Mulayam, 8216;8216;Haan 8230; aajkal modern ho gaye hain.8217;8217;

The big creation of Mulayam8217;s third run as chief minister is the Uttar Pradesh Development Council, headed by Amar Singh, manned by business barons and attempting, at least seen to be attempting, to attract investment.

This, really, is where he seems to have parted company with Laloo. Whether it8217;s an Ansal-developed township or Anil Ambani8217;s Rs 10,000 crore mega-power plant, he8217;s thinking out of the cow belt8217;s traditional box.

Of course, it may not quite have worked. The Ansal township ran into court strictures. The Reliance Energy plant ran into a family dispute. The Rajput-Yadav alliance ran into an ancient hostility in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Even so, Mulayam is perhaps north India8217;s first caste chieftain who is trying to become a more wholesome umbrella leader, talk development and sell hope in the economic desert that the Hindi heartland has been reduced to by two decades of identity politics.

PREDICTABLY there8217;re the acolytes and the doubters. 8216;8216;Right from his days with Lohiaji, Mulayam developed the knack of being able to convince people even in adverse circumstances,8217;8217; says Ram Sharan Das, SP state-unit president.

Others argue that for all the talk of infotech and energy, and the 52 letters of intent from would-be investors, there8217;s little to show on the ground. Rather, the chief minister has been lampooned for an over-obsession with Saifai, his native village, and a promise to build an airport there.

Since law and order is the flavour of the season, Mulayam has been attacked by the Congress and the BSP and even Atal Behari Vajpayee himself for failure here.

His loyalists plead crime is a natural corollary to any party in Uttar Pradesh. Besides, they tell you, he ordered SP MP Atiq Ahmed to surrender to the police after the murder of BSP leader Raju Pal. It is, one supposes, an achievement.

THE big bother for Mulayam is the Muslim vote. It has stayed with him right since his stridently anti-saffron days in the early 1990s. He8217;s moved on, made friends in the BJP 8212; its Rajput MLAs were said to have helped him become chief minister in 2003 8212; but never really lost the Muslim voter.

Now, with the BJP in decline and with the Congress in some sort of preliminary revival mode, Avadh8217;s Muslims may just experiment. But the SP insists it8217;s unfazed.

Urban Development Minister Mohd Azam Khan almost wags his finger when he says, 8216;8216;Mulayam has taken the maximum decisions for the benefit of Muslims.8217;8217; No matter that some of them, such as the Urdu-language Maulana Mohd Ali Jauhar University, became controversial.

Nevertheless, Mulayam is the one regional leader at the cusp of a national status, something even his political guru, Lohia, didn8217;t achieve. As Verma puts it, 8216;8216;It is natural for someone who has 50 MPs in the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha to become a national leader.8217;8217;

But just how powerful is this clout? The rest of 2005 will tell us.