On an uncertain pitch, push the umpire on to the backfoot. It’s the oldest trick in the book and in the case of Laloo Prasad Yadav, it’s beginning to pall. Launching his campaign in Bihta, Bihar, a few days ago, amid much name-calling directed at political opponents, Yadav called the Election Commission a few names too. Without naming it, he accused it of caste and religious bias in transfers and postings of officials in poll-eve Bihar. A few days later, addressing a meeting of the Extremely Backward Castes in Patna, the RJD chief flashed those accusations again. There could, for the sake of argument, be reasons to fault the conduct of the Commission as Bihar goes to elections again. But Yadav’s crude innuendo certainly doesn’t make the grade.We suspect this is not about the EC, anyway. It is about Yadav’s own jangled nerves as he plunges into an election after the sound rebuff the electorate administered to him in the last one. More than that, it is about his brand of politics that flaunts as its calling card a disregard for the rules of the game. Just a few months ago, there he was, at the EC’s throat again, flashing a civil servant’s letter and asking for the election commissioners’ resignation. That was the time L.V. Saptharishi charged two election commissioners with countermanding the 2004 Chhapra poll because of alleged communalism or casteism or both, take your pick. The framing context for the Union railway minister seizing upon those belated and dubious allegations, then, was his own increasing encirclement by his legal troubles. Earlier, with the February elections in Bihar set in motion, Yadav had conjured up a brand new inquiry, over and above the existing investigations, to excavate “Godhra’s truth”. This is also about a familiar spectre that Yadav pulls out each time he must face the voter. During his 15 years in power in Bihar, Yadav has contrived a continuing political theatre — defiant, reckless and always spectacular — to feed in his constituency a permanent sense of seige. Come elections, it serves to fill up the empty space in his campaign where a positive political and development agenda should have been. But if the last election in Bihar said anything at all, it was this: Yadav’s audience is becoming disenchanted with the drama now, if not outright alienated.
