Taint Tales From Lalooland

- Giridhar Jha

WAY back in 1973, when Shib Prasad Choudhary, a modest farmer of Salarkalan in Gopalganj district, broke the news to his wife that he had fixed the marriage of their daughter Rabri with Laloo Prasad Yadav from Phulwaria, she was far from pleased. For, somebody had already told her that the groom-to-be lived in a thatched house, unlike her daughter who had a concrete roof over her head. It took Choudhary some time to convince her, saying Rabri was not going to marry a house but somebody who looked too promising to lead a life in penury for long.

Choudhary was not wide of the mark. More than four decades later, Laloo is being labelled as the biggest zamindar of Bihar, accused of having amassed assets worth more than Rs 1,500 crore for his family through unscrupulous means.

The allegations are now being probed by three central investigating agencies— Income-tax, CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED)—which have raided his family members in quick succession recently to trace the sources of the riches of a political dynasty that owes its rise primarily to Laloo’s espousal of the cause of the poor early on in his career.

Laloo has never had a clean slate as far as corruption charges go. The two-term Bihar CM was sentenced to a five-year prison term in the fodder scam in 2013, which rendered him ineligible to contest any election for 11 years—a decision that prompted him to bring his children into politics sooner than expected.

Now, a litany of corruption charges has surfaced all over again to haunt not only the 69-year-old RJD president but also his family, including his two sons— Tejashwi Prasad Yadav and Tej Pratap Yadav, both of whom are senior ministers in the coalition government headed by chief minister Nitish Kumar.