My Bihar village of a few hundred is just a few miles from Phulwaria in Gopal Ganj, where the populist leader Lalu Prasad Yadav was born. The leader, who charmed everyone with his wit and simplicity, ruled Bihar for almost 15 years starting 1990 –- seven years himself as chief minister, eight years through his homemaker wife, Rabri Devi, as proxy.
Son of the soil, Mr. Yadav’s rise was an achievement, something close to unimaginable for his villagers, as equally for mine and many other villages around us, especially as he was from a so-called low caste, Yadav.
Years later, in October 2013, the same populist leader stood a sorry figure in a court, in the neighboring state of Jharkhand, which was annexed from Bihar in 2000. Mr. Yadav had been found guilty of participating in a what was known as the “Fodder Scam,” which siphoned public funds earmarked for animal husbandry, and he was about to be sentenced.
Requesting leniency from the judge, who was a younger classmate from his law college, the 66-year-old politician pleaded, “I was the chief minister of Bihar for two terms and a union railway minister. Please, consider awarding lesser punishment to me.” (He received a five-year prison sentence, which meant his political career was over, at least for now.)
It was a far cry from a leader my villagers adored, almost revered. Though he had ruled Bihar like a king, he was loved and hated in equal measures by the people he governed.
He took on high and mighty in bold letters. His other achievement was further erasing the word “development” from the state’s vocabulary and adding “corruption,” rather gloriously. Because of this, he was a source of both pride and ridicule.
But many Muslims, like my villagers, and Yadavs still preferred him, as no major religious riots took place in his kingdom. No one taunted any cowherd, at least to his face. Mr. Yadav made an alliance possible between two distinct communities, many a times at conflict with each other in past: the Yadavs, who have traditionally herded, prayed and protected cows, and Muslims, many of them having a diet that included cow meat as well.
In spite of all his shortcomings, he turned out to be the unifying force in a highly fragmented society like ours, and he would often say that even if he didn’t provide swarg (“heaven” in Hindi), he gave the powerless sectionsswar (“a voice”).
I grew on the stories of his rise, his humor, his further rise. But more than a chief minister of the state, he was a character of folklore for us.
Lalu was “Lalua” for us villagers, lovingly (Obama in Bihar becomes Obamwa, Hillary turns Hileriya, all lovingly). In my village, one can have a “Lalua” haircut. One can crack a Lalua-type joke, or a joke about Lalua itself. Smokers can get a “Lalua chhap beedi,” a Lalua-brand beedi. Devotees can read the Lalu Chalisa, based on the Hanuman Chalisa, a devotional hymn read by Hindus praising their god, Hanuman.
When Mr. Yadav visited Pakistan in 2003, seeing the chief minister’s popularity, General Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, jokingly asked if Mr. Yadav would like to stand for elections in Pakistan.
Omnipresent Lalua would feature even in a rebuke by our elders that we as kids had to face when we misbehaved: “Idiot, you see that son of a charwaha[cowherd]. He has gone on to become chief minister, and you? Even after all the facilities of a rajkumar [prince]?”
Mr. Yadav’s rise to power coincided with a critical juncture in India’s history. The grand old party, Congress, was fast becoming history in the state, with Muslims deserting the party after religious violence in Bihar under the party’s reign over the state, and Congress was equally a mess in New Delhi as well. The country’s economy was in shambles, as was Bihar’s, a state whose contribution to India’s economy was one of the highest until 1970s.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., was trying hard to make its fortunes those days. Its leader, Lal Krishna Advani, was leading arath yatra (chariot pilgrimage) in 1990 to build a temple in place of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Mr. Yadav, as chief minister of the state, stopped him from entering Bihar and overnight became a hero among Muslims, who made up around 15 percent of the state population and was considered an important voting bloc.
Around this time, in my home, something was clearly bothering my grandfather, Dada. He used to write us beautiful speeches praising the leaders of India’s independence and reformers for our Republic or Independence Day functions in school, every year without fail.
The speeches were mostly called bhashan (the Hindi word for ”speech”) when my elder sister used to present them. In the 1990s, when I grew up to repeat those speeches, they came to be mostly known as taqreer (“speech” in Urdu).
Dada began adding a few new names, like Maulana Mazharul Haque, Shibli Nomani and Allama Iqbal, to the list of the leaders and reformers to be mentioned in my speeches, which had initially included Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and which always talked about the importance of hubbul watni (Urdu of “love for the nation”).
In retrospect, the sudden assertion of his Muslim identity by my Dada was rather surprising. He was a man who chose to remain in India after the partition of the country in 1947, who escaped death from a marauding mob in Kolkata that was looking for anyone from “the other religion” to kill. He was a man who taught me to use secular greetings like adaab (“respect”) for any new person, as you never knew whether a person might not welcome a Muslim greeting like salaam.
It reminds me of another story from the 1970s. My villagers had killed a straynilgai, – or blue bull, equally revered as cows in some parts – for meat. The neighboring Hindu village had protested. Dada called a meeting of villagers, and as someone who was a respected man in the area, he said to them that everyone’s faith should be respected.
It was decided that no cow would be slaughtered in my village from then onwards. Those who wanted to eat beef were free to get the meat from licensed slaughterhouses a few miles from my village. He guarded that unwritten treaty until he died in 2005. His wish is still respected.
Normally a serious man, Dada would have loved a few of the “Lalua” jokes, like this one:
Once Lalua went to Amrika. President Bill Clinton, hosting him in a big hotel, asked him what Mister Lalu would like to eat. Lalua said that he wanted to eat satua, as gram flour is called in Bihar, which is commonly eaten in many parts of India. Not able to arrange satua for Lalua, President Clinton felt very embarrassed that he could not meet the demands of a guest from a small place like Bihar.
It was a subtle symbol of challenge to the high and mighty, and my villagers would laugh heartily every time they heard the joke, with the same intensity as when they heard it the first time.
We didn’t have proper schools or colleges around us. “Lalua’s” love probably made us ignore that. And over time, it was taken as something very natural, that good colleges or schools exist only in Patna, Aligarh or Delhi. As a result, students like me had to travel to bigger cities for education. I came to Delhi in late 1990s, barely a teenager at that time.
But while I was away at school, it would sadden me to read Mr. Yadav’s fate in elections or the corruption scandal that eventually caught up to him. As a kid, I thought it was my duty to warn “Lalua” that what he was doing would take him nowhere.
I couldn’t find his address (Google was still not known to many Indians then), so I wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper I subscribed to, suggesting that Mr. Yadav mend his ways before his lantern, which served as his party symbol, was extinguished. The rough version of the 15-paise postcard is still with me, with few handwritten corrections. The “fair” version, as we used to call our final draft during our school days, I sent to the editor. To my disappointment, the newspaper never published it.
After the Fodder Scam surfaced, Mr. Yadav could never possess the same power that he had held in the 1990s –- for good or bad. But my villagers always voted for the “corrupt Lalua” – not the “nationalist” B.J.P., not the “secular” Congress.
(Neyaz Farooquee is a journalist based in New Delhi. A more detailed version of this essay can be found in his book “Unmaking of a Radical,” expected early next year. You can follow him on Twitter at @nafsmanzer.) (Courtesy: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com)
