The wit is gone, complaints remain

In Bihar, the battlelines have changed as Ram Vilas Pasan has betrayed the forces of social justice to sit in BJP8217;s lap.8217; They say Paswan is the leader of the backward communities. Which community is more backward than the Musahars the people who survive on catching mice from landlords8217; farms. But I can catch the field mice better than any Musahar.8217;

There8217;s aripple of laughter in the thin crowd which does not fill even one-third of the ground. Mild laughter greets him also when he calls the Janata Dal United the Jantu animal Dal.8217;

That8217;s about all the laughter that greets Laloo. His great communicating skills with his masses seem to have become a thing of the past. The great wit on the Indian political stage seems to have lost a great deal of his power to amuse and provoke.

Ironically, many in the crowd, including women, are provoked only to shower him with complaints. What happened to our homes under the Indira Awas Yojana, some women just below his perch keep shouting. Angry at the interruptions, Laloo shouts back, asking them to keep quiet and listen to him. The women persist in their complaints.

Laloo gives in to the protests. Changing tone and track, he is apologetic. They read the BJP government have been hounding me for so long now.8217; He doesn8217;t mention the CBI cases against him in the fodder scam. For three months, they didn8217;t allow me tocome to you.8217; He doesn8217;t mention he was in jail for those months.

He then asks his party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, candidate Surendra Prasad Yadav, last time8217;s winner from Jehanabad, to apologise to the crowd for all the unfulfilled promises. The candidate obeys him, hands folded and head bent.

He has come to this, to the politics of apologies, like Sonia Gandhi is apologising for the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi,8217; says CPI ML-Liberation leader Ranjit Abhigyan. Laloo warns his flock against the Maley8217;, as the Naxalite group is known in Bihar, for the outfit8217;s candidate for Jehanabad can do the RJD nominee much harm, cutting into the anti-BJP votes.

The people do not, however, take the apology easily. As he drives his way back to Patna and stops in the gathering darkness to address smaller roadside crowds, the complaints come back thick and fast, After small bands of party faithfuls have routinely garlanded him and shouted the zindabad, villagers, mostly led by women, harass Laloo.

At mostplaces, it is the forgotten promise of pucca houses of the Indira Avas Yojna. At others, it is the sauchalay,8217; the community toilet. The sauchalay8217; is important to villagers, particularly women, for a unique reason. At times of class or caste tensions in the village, the landowners don8217;t allow the landless poor to use even non-farming land for ablutions. The use of land for this is sometimes a matter of life and death.

He will do all this, Laloo tries to pacify the crowds, once the elections are over. He will come back among them, but surely they most vote for janthan8217; lantern, the RJD symbol. You must not lie to your leader,8217; he says. Just as his rath8217; drives off, a young villager retorts, No, we mustn8217;t, we must leave it to the leader to lie to us.8217;

Even the party faithful are anxious. Only the previous day, Paswan8217;s meeting at Hajipur, where he filed his nomination, was a huge success. And the day after Laloo hit the campaign trail, the other camp of the BJP-JD United alliance put up anotherbig show at Biharsharif where Union Defence Minister George Fernandes came to file his nomination. By comparison, Laloo8217;s first day out to his folks 8212; at Masauri as well as at Chhatra and Kurtha 8212; wasn8217;t a headstart at all.