Bihar’s newest party has begun life on a cynical note. Last week, on the day Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) was formally recognised as a political party by the Election Commission, it admitted into its fold former MP from Vaishali, Lovely Anand, and her son, amid strident rhetoric about the “injustice” done to her husband Anand Mohan Singh and pledges to work towards getting his conviction overturned. Anand Mohan Singh, a dreaded Rajput bahubali or strongman, leader of the now defunct Bihar People’s Party, who had also acquired a Robin Hood image in the state’s Saharsa-Supaul belt, faced several criminal cases before being convicted for the lynching and gunning down of former Gopalganj DM G. Krishnaiah in December 1994.
At the time of the original sentencing in 2007, he had been awarded the death penalty; it was commuted to life imprisonment a year later in 2008. As Manjhi’s new party pledges to take up Anand Mohan Singh’s “cause” now, it is impossible not to notice the grim irony in the fledgling outfit’s quest for winnability — HAM projects itself as a platform for the aspirations of Bihar’s Dalits-Mahadalits, while expressing support for a man convicted of the murder of a young Dalit officer.
Even Nitish’s “development” card — he can, in fact, be viewed to be a rightful claimant, given his government’s law-and-order and sadak-padhai achievements, especially in its first term — is now discomfited by association with Lalu’s “jungle raj”. “Social justice” and “secularism” are yet to recover from the unsettling effects of the realignment of political forces that has taken place recently in Bihar — Nitish’s social justice and secularism, after all, were markedly different from Lalu’s versions of both, and now that they are together, it remains to be seen whose notion will prevail.
This election in Bihar will be crucial because it will give a sense of where the BJP, with which the HAM is now allied, and its opposition are headed nationally. The verdict will also, hopefully, bring much-needed stability and reprieve for the people from a political churning that threatens to run out of purpose and meaning.
