PROFILE. Lalu’s ‘lantern’ shines bright for the alliance

Jab tak rahega samosa me alu, tab tak rahega Bihar me Lalu (“As long as there’s potato in samosa, Lalu will be in Bihar.”)

This line would have sounded hollow just a year ago, when RJD chief Lalu Prasad failed to retain even his own Lok Sabha seat. But a year has indeed been a long time for the indefatigable Yadav chieftain who has resurrected his fortunes and redefined the national political discourse in the span of an Assembly election.

Political commentators are now contending that the alliance era, which had been given a definite burial with the arrival of Narendra Modi, is far from over. And Lalu has added to the debate by declaring his march to Modi’s constituency, Varanasi.

“I will create a national social movement against the BJP. We will march to Delhi. I will immediately go to Varanasi to light the lantern and see what Modi has done for Ganga maiyya (mother),” Lalu said at a press conference he held in Patna with a beaming Nitish Kumar after the election results on Sunday.

Lalu and Nitish have proved that it is not the Congress but ‘Opposition Scaled Up’, which can trump the BJP. And Lalu, who solidly held on to his formidable M (Muslim – 16 per cent) and Y (Yadav – 15 per cent) support group, is the chief campaigner of the new alliance experiment.

From the time he fumed over “drinking poison”, a reference to aligning with Nitish, to hugging and hailing him as the third-term CM of Bihar, Lalu worked on a clear sharing of responsibilities with his new friends. Hailed by the media as “Jai and Viru” (the popular protagonists of blockbuster Sholay ), Lalu and Nitish allotted different roles for each other in the campaign.

Lalu played the mischievous “bad cop” to Nitish’s sober, understated “good cop” to perfection. While Nitish refused to dwell too much on what BJP elders like LK Advani would have to say on the party’s defeat, Lalu went for the BJP’s jugular. “I have learnt from reliable sources that Modi will resign and be sent back to Gujarat,” he claimed.

Continuing the jugalbandi , Lalu declared he will leave governance to Nitish and engage in national politics. “We will rouse the rest of the country against the dark forces of communalism,” he thundered.

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