PATNA, 18 April 2004 — Why is Rabri Devi called Rabri? It was a custom at least in her family to ask the mother what she wanted to eat just after the painful labors of childbirth. Her mother asked for rabri and thus was a future chief minister of Bihar named. Luckily her mother’s sweet tooth craved for variety. Rabri’s sisters are called Jalebi, Rasgulla and Paan. All three are housewives. Could a Rasgulla Devi have become chief minister of Bihar? I rather think not. Too Bengali. But Jalebi would have been fine: it’s national. The sons were not as sweet. They were given more divine, or at least heroic, honorifics, possibly because they were considered boons. The three are called, familiarly, Prabhu, Sadhu and Subhash. By all accounts the only thing holy about Sadhu Yadav is that he is a holy terror.
Both Rabri and Laloo were born in extreme poverty, so I do not grudge them their current comforts. As Zsa Zsa Gabor once pointed out, the only thing worse than being nouveau riche is being nouveau poor. For a year after he became chief minister, Laloo Yadav lived in the impoverished hut where he had grown up in Patna. Today, the foremost couple of Bihar share adjoining bungalows on a spot where, it is said, the old rulers of Kalinga once had their palace. There is sufficient space for a palace. The first home of Bihar is zoned off from the jagged din of an edgy city. Security has its attendant advantages.
A walk through the residence is a journey. In the fading light of a summer evening I amble past some 150 cows, chewing cud in utter peace, waiting to be milked. The cows have a team of private masseurs. They also produce milk worth about 10 lakh rupees a month. Wheat and vegetable gardens succeed the cow farm. There is a fish tank. Laloo Yadav is taking his evening constitutional in the fields after yet another day of helicampaigning. He is undressed for the occasion. A lungi draped over his swelling waist is all he needs. He proudly shows me his grain before he moves on for a bath and some clothes fit for television. He is unperturbed by mosquitoes as he sits on a chair for the interview; behind him is the trunk of a shisham tree that has been converted into a likeness of the sun by art students.
The interview is in English; or at least some of it is. When work is over we move toward a porch with an awning, two rows of chairs, and a television set.
Laloo provides a generous commentary to the news. Groups of loyalists troop in, sit down, drink tea offered by waiters in British Raj turbans and leave when an imperious signal tells them that the audience is over. The groups change but the conversation does not. They all offer flattering estimates of how the enemy will be destroyed in the coming elections.
Rabri Devi joins us; she has just finished her first road show in the Yadav heartland of Maner. She is calm where her husband is loud, bright where her husband is shrewd. She is not very literate, but literacy is measure of poverty, not intelligence. She seems a little more cynical of the tales flatterers tell, but she keeps her counsel. The head of the Patna Chamber of Commerce offers us singharas cooked in ghee followed by idli-sambar. I can barely struggle through the first course of this high tea but Laloo compensates.
When I leave after nearly three hours at the residence, there is a nagging feeling of something not quite right, or perhaps something not quite wrong, through the evening. Then it strikes. The lights have not gone out even once in the first home. I suppose they dare not.
Opinion polls are an upper caste conspiracy. A mild suggestion that life might be less optimistic than the loyalists had guaranteed, with opinion polls as evidence, evokes a vociferous denial. Laloo Yadav raises his face before raising his voice, and dismisses opinion polls as urban nonsense. Well, if he did not believe in opinion polls did he believe in the bookies? They were offering a mere 15 paise to a rupee on Atal Behari Vajpayee becoming prime minister again, which is about as certain as a bet can get. Five rupees was being handed out for every rupee on Sonia Gandhi becoming PM. I told him some other odds. Only 25 paise was being paid out for BJP getting 175 seats, another safe assessment; while you could make 1.20 rupees for every rupee on BJP getting 200 seats, which meant that this was very possible too. Who set these odds, asked Laloo? The bookies were casteist supporters of the BJP. I changed the subject.
The question is provocative, the answer unabashed. How, I ask Laloo Yadav, is he going to rig the election in the age of electronic voting? In the old days Laloo would joke that a favorite genii of his lived in the ballot boxes, and magically changed the results to ensure his victory wherever there was any doubt. But that was a private joke. His formal answer is offered very formally. There is no rigging in Bihar. Such an accusation is nothing but propaganda by the upper castes. A sharp lady I met in Hazaribagh, which is now in Jharkhand, was more eloquent through her laughter. All the goons, she said, were busy improving their punching speed on their mobile phones.
Likewise, every candidate is very pious and spends only what the Election Commission permits it, said Laloo. However, in fairness, one could hardly expect Laloo Yadav to disqualify himself by admitting the truth; moreover, every serious candidate overspends. I asked a person close to Laloo how he manages electoral finances. “He gives money in stages, and tries to make sure that it is not spent by the candidate immediately on sofa sets and refrigerators. He also pressures candidates to raise their own money. Agar sab paiswa de diya to candidate ka involvence nahin hoga, naa...”
There is a definite feel-good factor in Jharkhand, which was part of Bihar in the last elections but has spun off into an independent state.
Jharkhandis are feeling very good about leaving Bihar. The difference is visible the moment you touch down. In three years they have brought their highways into the modern age. They insist that you drive to feel the difference. In Bihar, the highways are patchy; the state roads an insult. We made the mistake of trying to drive through Bihar Sharif. Someone should do a documentary on what they call a road. It is a mid-18th century track weighed down by mid-20th century vehicles. There are no potholes, because there is no road. Our vehicle hurtles across stone until we bump onto a highway. Relief. It isn’t an autobahn but at least you move.
The most desolate spot in Patna is Sadaqat Ashram, the beautiful bungalow bequeathed to the Congress by Dr. Rajendra Prasad. This is the smithy where men of iron forged the idea of a modern India.
I last visited the Congress headquarters of Bihar more than ten years ago, and it was in a state of constant bustle, the rooms and lawns full of functionaries, workers, ticket-seekers. We drive through the gates at 10 in the morning, at the height of a general election. There is not a single person around. The party flag is frayed and colorless, for no one has bothered to change it in years. One office is open, but there is no one inside. At the far end of the building is a comfortable domestic scene: A man, possibly an employee, is seated on a chair, reading a Hindi newspaper; nearby, a woman is doing chores. He looks startled, even perturbed, by the appearance of a vehicle. To stop would be embarrassing, not to him, but to the memory of a great institution. We drive on.
The irony is that Laloo Yadav simply stole this election from the Congress while the misled party watched, helpless, listless, lifeless. Congress seats were halved although its votes had doubled, as opinion polls are now confirming. A further irony is that with the Congress out of the picture, its vote is striding back to the NDA rather than staying with its allies. Laloo may have been right when he pointed out that the Congress vote is not transferable. That makes sense. It is a national party, and a Congress alliance works only if the Congress leads, not if the Congress follows.
“Hey Ganga Maiya tohe piyari chadhaibo, sainya se kar de milanwa...” Every old Bhojpuri film had at least one scene of the heroine worshipping at the banks of the Holy Ganga as it swept majestically past Patna. It was to Mother Ganga that the young heroine came when she prayed for a lover, offering her devotion in return. These days the heroine would have to walk four kilometers from Sadaqat Ashram.
When Laloo Yadav became chief minister more than a decade ago, the Ganga still flowed below the Ashram and by the cremation ghat where the last rites of the great Jaya Prakash Narayan were completed. The Ganga has literally silted up, and been replaced by fields on which crops are being sown by those who have seized the land illegally. The absence of the river is startling to someone who is familiar with Patna. The whole city would pour into the sweeping river at the Chat Puja in winter.
Laloo and Rabri once were among those many thousands; now they offer puja in the fish tank at their residence. The whisper is becoming a murmur and the murmur, say Laloo’s opponents, will become a roar on election day: When the Ganga turns away from the city, its rulers pay the price.
