Laloo Prasad Yadav- Absentee Kingmaker?

The prisoner-patient of fodder scam taint may be at his weakest today, but his boast that you can’t take Laloo out of Bihar still rings a tad true. The old warrior seems nowhere close to exiting 2019’s election chessboard.

- Giridhar Jha

Time is a great leveller, they say, and a peep into a secluded ward of the Rajendra institute of medical Sciences (RimS) in Ranchi could give you a startling snapshot of how unpredictably harsh it can be at times. Lonely, forlorn and worn down by ailments creeping up on him like a pack of hyenas, there lies a man who once strode the land like an insouciant emperor. Charismatic, burlesque, irreverent of old graces—and the unmoving feudal power they rested on—he came like a messiah of seemingly apocalyptic change, almost a force of nature. Today, the once-mighty Laloo Prasad Yadav is reduced to a mere prisoner- patient, being treated for a kidney beginning to give way, the fruit of long and acute diabetes, while doing time after his conviction in the infamous Rs 950-crore fodder scam cases. Barring once-a-week interactions with visitors, he spends most of his time in solitude. But even in this state, you can’t take Laloo out of Bihar—as his own jokey proverbial coinage went—or indeed out of politics.

India is beginning to simmer with pre-electoral heat, and the busy chatter of coalition match-making fills the news pages. As does the latest, stunning googly from the government that has set the whole field aflutter: a 10 per cent quota for the economically poor among privileged castes. Amid all this renewed focus on reservations, a vital part of the jigsaw rests here in this ward. Laloo Yadav, the old Mandal messiah, may strike you at this point as the Man Who Isn’t There, but in reality he is—the Mandal logic has structured Indian politics in such a way that a counter-mobilisation is almost inevitable. And it may well be strong enough to turn Laloo into the absentee kingmaker of 2019.