Opinion Raise the red lantern
Kin and clan dominate candidates lists in Bihar. Parties need to think differently.
Sons, daughters, wives, nephews and other close relatives of netas dominate the candidates lists of both the NDA and the JD(U)-RJD-Congress combine for the Bihar assembly elections. The standout names, of course, are Tej and Tejaswi, sons of Lalu Prasad and Rabri Devi, who were declared RJD candidates for the Mahua and Raghopur seats, respectively, on Wednesday. The lantern’s lineage has had a gender reversal. In the 2014 general election, the mother-daughter duo of Rabri and Misa Bharati Devi represented the Lalu clan. Both lost, and are missing from the candidates’ list. What next? Will Lalu insist that Nitish Kumar, the CM-face of the mahagathbandhan (grand alliance), include one or both of them in his ministry if they win their seats, and Nitish a third term?
The RJD’s decline in Bihar coincided with the party becoming a family enterprise. Lalu inherited the political legacy of Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan, who had consistently criticised nepotism in politics. The emergence of the Janata and the politics of social justice opened up the political space for backward castes, Dalits and non-elite Muslims. The consolidation of hitherto unrepresented communities around the Janata was instrumental in Lalu’s rise to office. Lalu read the development correctly and, initially, spoke of the self-respect of oppressed communities. But he did not, or could not, translate this talk of social justice to concrete policy. When failures mounted and the law intervened, he fell back on family and the party shrunk. The rest is history.
Nitish’s success owed a lot to the politics he built as a counter to Lalu. He kept relatives at a distance and ruled through hand-picked bureaucrats. Like Lalu, he too failed to build a party that encouraged debate and dissent, leading to his current dependence on the RJD. Social transformation is ultimately a political agenda, and a leader needs the institutional mechanism of a party and cadres to make it happen. Family is a poor substitute.
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