Lalu’s comeuppance

In the epical narrative of the fodder scam in Bihar, former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s latest conviction serves as the final proof of his being a metaphor for political corruption. Unlike all previous penalties in the saga of State treasury loot, which Lalu creatively employed to embellish his image as the victimised radical subaltern, the time for comeuppance may have finally arrived for the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief. After the Supreme Court set aside a Jharkhand High court verdict that conviction in one case is reason for Lalu not to be tried in multiple other cases related to embezzlement of money belonging to the animal husbandry department, a special CBI court convicted him last Saturday in a second case pertaining to the ₹950 crore scam. The RJD chief was immediately taken into custody and is now lodged in Birsa Munda jail, awaiting the quantum of sentence to be pronounced on January 3. Lalu, who has already been barred from contesting elections after his conviction and five-year jail-term in 2013, is an accused in four fodder scam cases being tried by the same CBI court. With the ‘land for railway hotel’ scam involving Lalu, wife Rabri Devi, son Tejaswi Prasad and a fresh chargesheet by the Enforcement Directorate against daughter Misa Bharti and her husband, the noose has clearly tightened around the first family in the RJD. The impunity with which Lalu used political power for personal gains seems to have finally eclipsed the charisma and promise of this vastly talented proponent of social justice.

The RJD chief has sought to attribute his present legal troubles to an upper caste conspiracy hatched by the BJP. While central investigating agencies have indeed shown noticeable alacrity in pursuing corruption cases against prominent Opposition leaders, it is a bit disingenuous to demand institutional integrity when you have spent a major part of your public life undermining these very foundations of democracy. The timing and momentum of Lalu’s prosecution may be political but even his most ardent supporters would be hard-pressed to argue that he did not use his position to loot the resources of an impoverished State. It is particularly disturbing to witness the degeneration of the product of a movement that had challenged the Emergency and mobilised backward castes against upper caste hegemony, leading to Mandalisation of Indian politics. The undeniably gifted Lalu once held out the promise of systemic reform in Bihar. But after decades of support by a vast majority of rural poor and the landless communities, Bihar remains among the poorest and most backward states in India.

Undoubtedly, the BJP gains when a charismatic opponent of Lalu’s stature gets diminished. But secularism cannot be used as a shield against corruption. There is no betrayal greater than hiding mundane ambitions of private property and wealth behind grand promises of communal harmony and social justice. In that sense, Lalu’s rise and fall must serve as a cautionary tale.

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