Author: R K Nandan
Publication: The Economic Times
Date: May 29, 2005
Introduction: Lalu was first allowed
to take over the Indian Railways. Now he has been allowed to take over
Bihar where the Assembly has been dissolved & a bureaucrat close to
him appointed as adviser
It could be the ultimate leveraged
buyout (LBO) of all time. With some two dozen MPs, Rashtriya Janata
Dal leader Lalu Prasad Yadav has taken over first the Indian Railways and
now the state of Bihar despite his party losing power in the last assembly
elections. The midnight, May 22 Union Cabinet decision to recommend
dissolution of the Bihar Assembly was insisted upon by Lalu Yadav to pre-empt
his political rival Nitish Kumar from forming a government with the support
of independents and just the required number of dissident MLAs from steel
minister Ram Vilas Paswan's Lok Janashakti Party (LJP) to stake a claim
while overcoming the disqualification norm of the anti-defection law.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who
awarded his government 6 out of 10 for its performance in the first year
of power, was apparently steamrolled on May 22 by the combination of Lalu
Yadav and the Left which wanted to pre-empt any semblance of communal forces
- - read the BJP and its NDA ally, the JD (U) - - from ruling the roost
in Bihar. It is a moot point whether the best way of keeping 'communal
forces' at bay is through crude, manipulative, back-room politics of the
kind which would dissolve an assembly to run a state. Ruin a state
could even be an appropriate term going by the fact that the decision to
dissolve the Bihar Assembly was preceded not just by the appointment as
gubernatorial adviser of a discredited bureaucrat dose to Lalu Yadav but
also by the removal from the district of Siwan of two outstanding IAS and
IPS bureaucrats who had placed their careers and more on the line to rescue
the local people from the tyranny of the dreaded don Shahabuddin.
Going by its latest track record, the Left could even ally with criminal
forces to keep communal forces at bay! So much for Left ideology and integrity
where a terrorist don in Siwan can be reprieved just because he is as of
now on the side of the 'non-communal' RJD! Ironically, the Union
Cabinet decision to recommend dissolution of the Bihar Assembly was taken
at the same midnight meeting where the terrorist-instigated explosions
in New Delhi cinema-theatres was condemned!
In the wake of the Union Cabinet
decision to recommend dissolving the Bihar Assembly, some political pundits
and correspondents warned in their Page One analyses that there could be
an upper caste backlash against the Congress in north India, not just in
Bihar but in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh which elects the most
number of MPs - - 80 in all - - to the Lok Sabha. In their fixation
with the caste matrix, the analysts may have forgotten something called
the people who desperately wanted to be rescued from the gangster-politician-bureaucrat
nexus which has made Bihar a byword for the lack of governance. A
state where the RJD leader could appoint his totally inexperienced wife
as the chief minister just so he could remote-control the administration
first from jail and then from the Rail Bhavan after his post-2004- election
LBO of the Indian Railways!
Even Rabri Devi's CMship was enacted
under a facade of democracy by the RJD representatives and their Congress
supporters in the Legislative Assembly. In the wake of the midnight
May 22 decision to recommend dissolution of the Bihar Assembly, the question
will now inevitably be asked whether such a step would have been taken
if the RJD had succeeded in weaning away the required number of BJP or
JD (U) MLAs to stake a claim to form the government without its supporters
incurring the provisions of the anti-defection law. And would the
Left with all its talk of political morality and ideology have played along
with any such RJD-move under the pretext of keeping communal forces at
bay? Maybe the Left doesn't quite believe in the masses it claims
to represent if it continues to endorse manipulative back-room politics
of a kind where the main beneficiary is a Lalu Yadav who suspends a railway
officer for daring to ask RJD MPs travelling in a train for their ID-cards
and who allows the people of Siwan to suffer the unending tyranny of a
terrorist don.
Even if the decision to recommend
President's Rule in Bihar is a fait accompli, it is still not too late
for the Left to take an honest position that only the best bureaucrats
be appointed to sensitive positions in the state. It is still not
too late for the Left to insist that the Indian Railways not be run in
such a way that its protege Lalu Yadav can suspend any official who asks
a ticketless RJD MP for his ID-card. If it doesn't do so, the Left
may find that it itself is undermining the credibility of its claim to
fight communal forces! As for Dr Manmohan Singh who proved that he
was not an invisible PM with the stand he took on Jharkhand, maybe the
time has come to realise that visibility cannot be a matter of convenience,
depending on the pressure!
