Caste in Bihar PoliticsSince 1977

He then used this brilliantly, through his knowledge of caste antipathies, social estrangements and constituency arithmetic. Once installed, he set about creating an iconoclastic image of the ‘common Chief Minister’.

In the process, he neither had to nor wished to govern Bihar in order to rule it; the twin themes of Mandal and Mandir gave him such electoral ascendancy that the need for performance fell by the wayside.

Among the heterogeneous caste and class groups within the Backwards, the economically rich and politically influential Yadavs cornered most of the benefits of ‘Lalu Raj’, while the larger mass of Backwards remained poor. But they supported Lalu Prasad Yadav until 2005 because he gave them a sense of pride and participation.

Politics is an act of self-location. Lalu Prasad Yadav loomed large because he emerged at a particular historical moment.

With his advent, the ‘backwards among the backwards’ also emerged.

The one real change Lalu Yadav brought was a change in the caste character of the exploitative order. He gave the Backwards a sense of political participation and the Muslims a qualified sense of security in fractured times.

He undid the hegemony of the upper castes and installed his own. He was a product of caste, not its producer.

Political violence and electoral malpractice in Bihar long predated him, and his constituency had long been their victims. Be it corruption or political crime, caste war or anarchy, the Congress had set the precedents. Lalu Prasad Yadav was a response.

The state seemed ‘on the verge of infrastructural collapse at the most fundamental levels of administering a civil society’. In his first term Lalu had an unvarnished and unrestrained ‘social justice theme’, ‘of assuring izzat, i.e. self-respect, to the socially and economically deprived of the land’.

But he could not bring the derailed wagon of the state’s development back on track. When corruption charges became serious, he quit as CM but installed his wife as CM and ruled through a proxy.

Deep into his second term (completed by his wife Rabri), ‘the political calculus [showed] splits in the backward caste, untouchable-Dalit, and Muslim alliance which Lalu had crafted so brilliantly before and after the 1990 and 1991 elections’.

Muslim society also changed, challenging upper-caste hegemony during Lalu Yadav’s tenure as CM. The Momins/Ansaris, Rayeens, Kulhaiyas, Pamarias and Bhatiyaras mobilised their caste groups for access to social justice — not only reservations … but also a share of political power.

For Lalu Yadav, who swears by Mandal, social justice means ‘the substitution of Bhumihar–Rajput Raj by Yadava Raj, that is, the dominance and pre-eminence of the Yadavas in every walk of life’ — which led a section of Muslims (the Pasmanda), as well as the Koeris and Kurmis, to desert Lalu.

By the turn of the century, for many, his ‘limiting “tunnel vision” reduced him to the status of yet another Yadav leader’. One visible factor was the brazen and cynical ‘Yadavisation’ of the state administration, which fed ‘the formation of the Samata Party in 1994 by the engineer and Kurmi leader, Nitish Kumar’.

Upwardly mobile middle castes and classes were ‘people not likely to be attracted by Lalu’s politics of poverty’, being ‘concerned about a civil society of law and order of everyday life, no matter one’s social status or professional position’.

A second ‘reality of post-Laloo dominance’ was ‘the softening of [his] scheduled caste-Dalit support base’.

This has been crystallised as ‘specific secular and political interests, economic interests and personality interactions, which are decisive in determining how people vote … true for any social or religious segment of society; these are never unitary solidarities in any political sense’.

The issues of political, economic and social freedom, and the allied issues of social justice and self-respect, have a long history in Bihar … Laloo Prasad Yadav brought the idea to a new level of awareness … But the concept [went back to] Swami Sahajanand … and Jayaprakash Narayan, and Karpoori Thakur, and to movements like the Kisan Sabha, the Triveni Sangh, the Bihar Socialist Party, the CPI and the CPI (ML).

The story of Lalu Prasad Yadav was also his transformation from being ‘the solution’ to becoming the problem, over the 15 years from 1990 to 2005. Since then, ‘just as Indira was not India, so Lalu is not Bihar’.

Nitish Kumar’s government ‘expedited the enquiry process into the Bhagalpur riots (1989) and many aggressors [were] convicted. Most of these [were] Yadavs, which raised uncomfortable questions about Lalu’s famous mantra of the Muslim-Yadav electoral partnership’.