The pecking order at the anti-BJP rally in Patna on Sunday should have left no one in doubt as to who will call the shots in this grand alliance. Though leaders of the Janata Dal(U), the Congress and the RJD were on the dais, but, by all accounts, it was a Lalu Prasad Yadav show. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and a leader from the Samajwadi Party addressed the rally, but it was Yadav who got the top billing. Indeed, even the crowd mustered by Yadav’s RJD outnumbered that of all others combined. In other words, Nitish Kumar might be projected as the chief ministerial candidate of the grand alliance, but Yadav constitutes its main drawing power. Take another test which too endorses the primacy of Yadav.
In all such public meetings, it is customary for the main speaker to speak the last. And that is when Yadav spoke. Indeed, Sonia Gandhi spoke not only ahead of Yadav but even before Kumar, which again proves the shambolic state of the Congress Party in Bihar. Of course, what they all said was only to be expected, there being nothing new in the criticism of Prime Minister Modi. Charges about the unfulfilled election promises, the so-called tilt of the government towards big business, the sectarian agenda, etc., were all old hat. The fact that the move to amend the 2013 land acquisition law had been abandoned for want of support in Parliament was repeated ad nauseam by the speakers.
How far all these talking points would influence the voter in Bihar in the coming Assembly poll was anyone’s guess. But what the big take-away from the rally was the fact that Kumar was now fully at the mercy of his friend-turned-foe-turned-friend Yadav. The organisational weakness of the JD(U) was all too visible at the rally. Having relied all along on the organisationally superior BJP for fleshing out his earlier alliance with the saffron party, Kumar found himself weak and lonely after his gamble of challenging the rise of Modi in the BJP misfire. Per force, he has had to seek the hand of friendship of Yadav, abusing whom he had risen to the post of the chief minister.
Now, in order to retain the same chief ministerial “gaddi”, he tries to eat all those pejorative terms about the RJD boss and does not miss an opportunity to massage Yadav’s ego. On Sunday, Kumar was at pain to gloss over the recent history of his embittered relations with Yadav so that he could remain in contention for the CM’s post after the elections. However, the greater irony is that in Yadav, we have a leader who is duly convicted in a massive case of corruption and who stands barred from contesting elections for a period of six years. In the normal course, propriety would have demanded that such a leader be shunned both by his peers and the ordinary people.
But as the Swabhiman rally in Patna showed, despite his conviction, Yadav was a crowd-puller for his caste-men. So, all that talk about ordinary Indians being disgusted with corruption, and about politicians themselves pretending to fight corruption, is pure hogwash. While politicians are opportunists, the people at large are cynical, it seems to matter little if a leader is corrupt so long as he is a caste-brother or promises this or that freebie. At the current level of our political maturity, it is a vain hope that we can be led by people who are free from the taint of corruption and other wrong-doing. Kumar, a relatively clean politician, stands tarred by association with the fodder scamster Yadav, who now looms over him and would act as the real boss of the opportunistic and purely negative anti-BJP alliance.
Bihar’s and Nitish Kumar’s Swabhiman is certainly not enhanced by casteist and corrupt politicians like Lalu Yadav, regardless of the number of their caste’s followers they can gather for an election rally.
