The meeting over, the two set off for Patna by car. Singh was quite pleased with himself. It had been a massive rally and Laloo, as usual, had turned the crowds heady. But Laloo was bursting with rage. ‘‘What need was there for you to talk of development?’’ he thundered, the moment the car doors shut. ‘‘This is a fight against communal forces, this is a fight for Delhi and you talk of development in Bihar. Do you think reviving sugar mills gets you votes? You are a fool if you do. Politics is about power and nothing else.’’ Raghuvansh Prasad Singh obediently took the tongue-lashing all the way back to Patna. The Goraul sugar mill has been dead all these years. It isn’t as if sugar mills in Bihar don’t work or turn profits. But only the private ones do. The Bihar State Sugar Corporation Ltd, like most other public sector undertakings, is burdened by colossal losses. All its mills are defunct. All its employees remain unpaid or laid off for years. Its accounts are in arrears of 15 years. ‘‘It only takes a little will and focus to turnaround most, if not all, undertakings. They still have huge material assets and there is no dearth of cheap manpower resources. But why must Laloo Yadav bother?’’ says Umadhar Prasad Singh, lone MLA for an ultra-Left splinter of the Marxist-Leninists, ‘‘he has grasped the convenient reality that his votes come not from governance but from votebank politics and he has convinced his votebank they do not have stakes in development or governance. He tells them if he builds roads, their bare feet will burn on the tar, unpaved roads are better.’’ Umadhar Singh had to sit on a three-day hunger-strike in front of the Bihar assembly last fortnight to get pre-sanctioned relief supplies released for his flood-affected constituents in North Bihar. ‘‘But that is routine in Bihar,’’ he says. ‘‘Nothing happens normally, nothing comes in due course, for everything you must resort to extraordinary methods. If you start wondering about prospects for development in Bihar, you will suffocate because all avenues seem closed. Nobody is interested.’’ When the Congress joined hands with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) after the assembly polls of 2000, the explicit condition, at least on paper, was that the Rabri Devi-Laloo Yadav dispensation would focus on development and governance. The Congress high command in New Delhi got Dr S C Jha, a retired diector of the Asian Development Bank, to probe the causes of Bihar’s financial and institutional mess and suggest remedies. Dr Jha finalised his report in February this year. Nobody in the Bihar government has bothered to take a look. Dr Jha had to wait for weeks on end even to get an appointment with Laloo so that he could formally present his findings. The Congress, although there is an institutionalised monitoring mechanism in the form of a coordination committee with the RJD, has not been able to pin the government down on implementing remedial measures. But then, the Congress in Bihar is not in a position to put pressure on Laloo. It is a beholden tail happly snuggled in the hind quarters of the RJD. Most senior Congress leaders are courtiers of Laloo, forever marking their loyal attendance at 1, Anne Marg. They are either ministers or members of councils and boards, all at Laloo Yadav’s pleasure. If the party high command does decide, some day, to pull out of the alliance, the odds are the Congress in Bihar will split down the middle, the better part siding with Laloo. As one senior Congressman in Patna said, ‘‘Congress ka ab Bihar mein hai hi kya? Jo kehte hain Congress ko nuksaan ho raha hai woh bewakoof hain. Congress ka kya hai jiska nuksaan hoga? Laloo ke saath to humko fayada hi fayda hai, kamse kam terah minister to hai.’’ (There is nothing for the Congress to lose in this alliance. The party has nothing to lose in Bihar. We have only to gain, at least we have 13 ministers.) Make no mistake about Laloo’s brilliance in realpolitik. Over the past decade and more that he has lorded over Bihar, he has broken and sundered all parties — the cadre-based BJP and the CPI included — to add to his numbers; he remains capable of repeating that. At the moment though, the Opposition is too divided to threaten him. The parties of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) have, time and again, proved ineffective in building a bulwark and forcing issues. The BJP, Samata Party of George Fenandes and Nitish Kumar, Janata Dal (United) of Sharad Yadav and and Lok Shakti of Ram Vilas Paswan are all busy fighting their own little turf wars. A senior state BJP leader admitted privately: ‘‘You can go on railing against lack of governance and exposing scams but nothing happens because Laloo has the advantage of numbers, he has outsmarted everybody.’’ It was this division of the Opposition vote that pulled him through the last assembly elections, it is this division that he continues to bank on. And as long as he has the better of politics and power in the state, he need not bother attending to his essential, but terribly tiresome task of governance. The Goraul sugar mill can remain a bitter pill. In Bihar, take one, daily.
