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RJD leader Lalu Prasad Yadav disqualified from Lok Sabha.
Lalu Prasad Yadav's long innings in the politics
of Bihar has most probably come to an end with the Central Bureau of
Investigation's special court convicting him in the fodder scam case.
For all his political acumen and grandiose rhetoric, a term of 11 years
in the political wilderness after the conviction is very unlikely to see
either him or his Rashtriya Janata Dal re-emerge as potent forces.
Former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav has been in jail in the
past too, but in different circumstances. In 1975-77, he was held under
the infamous Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), a preventive
detention law that was later repealed, and then for briefer periods six
times after 1997 in connection with the case of having misappropriated
crores meant to be spent on animal husbandry. His imprisonment now is on
specific charges under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Prevention
of Corruption Act, 1988, though he pulled out all stops and used all the
provisions in the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) to postpone it. In
the 17 years after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) began its
investigation into the case, Yadav not only managed to stay afloat on
the political scene, but also conducted the affairs of the state
government from inside jails and became a union minister. He did this
even as many others convicted in 44 of the 53 cases to do with siphoning
off government money faded from the political scene. Now, unless the
CBI special court verdict is set aside by the higher judiciary, Yadav
also might fade away from the Bihar political scene that he dominated
for a couple of decades after 1990.
Beginnings of the Scam
The fodder scam, as the case has come to be known, belongs to another
era. It involved officials in the state animal husbandry department
withdrawing funds amounting to Rs 950 crore from the government treasury
with fictitious bills. This neither happened overnight nor in one
place. The fraud took place across the districts of southern Bihar (that
became Jharkhand in 2000) some time in 1977. Yadav became a Member of
Parliament (MP) in that year, a legatee of the anti-corruption movement
that Jayaprakash Narayan had led in the state. He had nothing to do with
the scam when it began. The illegal withdrawal of government funds,
with the money being shared by the suppliers and officials in the animal
husbandry department, went on without attracting much notice until
1990. The earliest occasion it was brought to official notice was in
1990, when Yadav became the chief minister of Bihar.
Rather than acting against it, Yadav let things continue, after
ensuring that a share of the spoils came to him. In the six years from
1990 to 1996, the quantum of money fraudulently drawn from the treasury
increased manifold. A big chunk of the Rs 950 crore was drawn during
Yadav’s chief ministership. Pliant officers were posted in the same
place for years on end and some of them given extensions on
recommendations from ruling and opposition political leaders. One of
them, R K Rana, retired from government service and became an MP, thanks
to Yadav. The practice of granting extensions continued till the Samata
Party, a group that broke away from the Janata Dal under George
Fernandes and Nitish Kumar in May 1995, petitioned the governor and the
president pointing to the huge scam. They had obtained documents from
the auditor general’s office and these were appended to the petition.
CBI Inquiry
The looting stopped, but very little was done to catch the thieves. A
raid was conducted on the offices of the animal husbandry department in
January 1996 and some documents were seized. Yadav then formed a
committee to “investigate” the scam. A few heads would have rolled and
the matter would have ended there. But Samata Party leaders changed the
script by filing a public interest litigation in the Patna High Court
asking that the CBI look into the scandal. Following the Supreme Court’s
directions, Justice S J Mukhopadhyaya, then in the high court, ordered
on 11 March 1996 that the case be handed over to the CBI. Thus began the
investigation that led to Yadav’s conviction on 30 September 2013. The
CBI registered its first FIR (first information report) on 27 March 1996
and filed a charge sheet on 23 June 1997, accusing Yadav, among many
others. Later, the case saw many more FIRs being registered and many
more charge sheets being filed.
The CBI found prima facie evidence against Yadav, among others, and
he was detained for custodial interrogation on 30 July 1997. He stepped
down from office, anointing his wife, Rabri Devi, as chief minister.
Yadav had been the president of the Janata Dal, the party heading the
union government, till a few days before this. But a leadership revolt
in the
party saw him walk out of it on 5 July 1997 with a chunk
of followers to form the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), which remained in
the Janata Dal-led United Front. His loyalists continued as union
ministers. Given these reasons and the extent of “autonomy” the CBI was
known to exercise, there was little hope then that the agency would
pursue the fodder case to its logical conclusion. But a change of guard
at the centre in March 1998 altered this.
Charges were framed in the CBI special court on 5 April 2000. Yadav
was still at the helm in Bihar, with Rabri Devi and her cabinet
unabashedly taking instructions from him, either from jail or at his
house when he was out on bail. This continued even after the cases were
transferred to Jharkhand and the start of the trial in February 2002.
Yadav moved interlocutory applications, a procedure permitted by the law
to ensure a fair trial, and the last one seeking the transfer of the
case to another judge was dismissed by the Supreme Court on 13 August
2013.
Interestingly, this malfeasance involving such a huge amount of money
did not lead to any serious “disruption” of Parliament at any time,
though it was raised now and then. The fodder scam surfaced around the
same time as the stock market scandal (involving Harshad Mehta and
others), the sugar scandal (involving union minister Kalpnath Rai), and
the telecom scandal (involving union minister Sukh Ram), which forced
repeated adjournments of Parliament. The action taken report (ATR) on
the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) report on the stock market,
sugar, and telecom scams were sufficient for the Opposition – the Janata
Dal, the left parties, and their allies – to hold up proceedings in the
Lok Sabha. But in the fodder scam, even after the CBI found prima facie
evidence against Yadav and others, there was not much noise. Some
leaders, Sharad Yadav prominent among them, even stood up in his
defence, accusing the investigating agency of foisting charges on him in
collusion with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The CBI, no doubt, was partial to whoever was in power in New Delhi.
If proof of this is needed, it can be seen in the timeline of the case.
Yadav’s trial began when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
ruled at the centre, which had little sympathy for him. In May 2004, the
Congress returned to power in New Delhi, with Yadav joining the United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) cabinet as railways minister, and this had an
effect on the pace of the case.
Empowering Backward Castes
In Bihar, Yadav did play an important role in ensuring the
empowerment of the state’s socially and educationally backward classes
(in other words, the Other Backward Classes or OBCs) in the post-Mandal
era. Beginning in 1990, he consolidated the foundations laid by Karpoori
Thakur in this field. He also played a critical role in containing
anti-Muslim violence in Bihar, a state where the minority community did
not feel all that safe. This helped Yadav, even after his detention by
the CBI in 1997, to steer his RJD to power in the election to the state
assembly in 2000. This, however, does not mean that the CBI’s case
against him was part of a conspiracy by those representing the status
quo in politics.
It is true that the fodder scam was not his creation, but it is also
true that he let the swindle go on and that its scale increased when he
was in power. The scam may now seem small compared to the likes of the
2G spectrum sale scandal, the Commonwealth Games contracts, or coal
block allotments in more recent years. But the money embezzled was meant
for the upkeep of cattle in Bihar’s villages and thus the welfare of
the poor. Instead of acting against the swindlers, Yadav, the chief
minister, opted to turn it into an opportunity to make money for
himself. The CBI, in the course of the trial, showed that one of the
suppliers in whose name money was drawn from the treasury had returned
the favour by paying for flights that Yadav’s family members took.
End of the Road
The implication of the CBI special court’s verdict of 30 September
2013 is that it is the end of the road for Yadav. The Supreme Court’s
ruling disqualifying convicted lawmakers from membership of Parliament
or a legislative assembly, irrespective of the scope for an appeal, and
for a further period of six years after their release from imprisonment,
casts a very dark cloud over his future in politics. Interestingly,
Justice Mukhopadhyaya, who along with Justice A K Patnaik, struck down
as unconstitutional Section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act
that allowed convicted lawmakers a three-month leeway, was the one who
ordered the CBI to investigate the fodder scam in March 1996.
Yadav could cock a snook at his detractors when news of the scam came
out in the early 1990s because he had positioned himself as the
representative of the assertive subaltern groups in Bihar in the
aftermath of the Mandal era. The process of OBC assertion was
strengthened during the years of the BJP’s ascendancy with the minority
community rallying behind him. A Muslim-Yadav combine, which veteran
socialist Madhu Limaye had attempted to achieve in 1979, came about in
this period, strengthening Yadav’s position in the state. It helped his
RJD win an assembly election in 2000 despite the scam and his perceived
role in it.
Bihar under Lalu
However, Yadav’s time as chief minister was not noted for progress in
the state. For instance, Nalanda, an ancient seat of learning, was
pushed to the 274th rank among the 372 districts in India that fared the
worst in rural literacy in the late 1990s. West Champaran ranked 356
and Katihar 359. Of Bihar’s 29 districts, 21 were in the group of 50
districts where the human development index (HDI) was the lowest in
India during the same period. The Planning Commission’s Approach Paper
to the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1998-2002), a period coinciding with
Yadav’s dominance in Bihar, said, “In Bihar, the per capita income, as
measured by the State Domestic Product, declined from Rs 1,204 in
1990-91 to Rs 1,067 in 1994-95”. Yadav was the chief minister all
through the period the state registered a fall in per capita income.
Bihar is the only state that had this “distinction” at that time. The
impact of this on the poor and those below the poverty line was glossed
over with political rhetoric, of which Yadav was a master. But rhetoric
being what it is, reality bit back in 2005, and Yadav and his party lost
the state assembly election.
It can be argued that Yadav alone cannot be blamed for Bihar’s sorry
plight because a long spell of Congress rule had wrecked some of the
foundations of a democratic polity in the state, while the bureaucracy,
insensitive to the basic needs of the poor, forced people to resort to
violence and dacoity. But Yadav did nothing to arrest the drift. Present
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar seems to have learnt well from his
comrade-in-arms of the 1970s. The Janata Dal (United)-BJP combine’s
victory in the assembly poll in 2005 was the outcome of a consolidation
of the forces of the social status quo, with some support from sections
of the non-Yadav backward classes. But the combine’s landslide win in
2010 was due to a massive shift of the OBCs to its fold. This certainly
had to do with Nitish Kumar’s record of governance in the state, which
managed to dispel apprehensions of a return to the era of upper-caste
domination and a reversal of gains in the field of social justice. In
addition, incidents of violence against dalits, which had continued
during the Lalu-Rabri era, seemed to have abated after 2005, quite in
contrast to fears that were voiced about the composition of social
forces that brought the Janata Dal (U)-BJP to power.
All this, and also the law, as it stands, which will prevent Yadav
from contesting elections for 11 years, indicate that there is little
room for manoeuvre for him and his party. There are, no doubt, other
leaders in the RJD, but Yadav’s emergence as a force in Bihar happened
in a very different context. It was in a good part due to him that the
ideals of social justice and political democracy, which have since grown
into a force, found their way into the political discourse in Bihar. As
with all such transformations in human history, this is irreversible.
In some ways, Yadav was already on his way out of Bihar’s political
scene when the verdict came. His conviction and the sentence on 3
October 2013 of five years of rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 25
lakh have only hastened the process. Significantly, this has come when
the Janata Dal (U) has snapped its ties with the BJP and only a few
months remain before the next general election. It could very well lead
to a polarisation of votes between the Janata Dal (U) and the BJP in the
general election. The RJD may survive for a while, but it is unlikely
to re-emerge as a major force in Bihar.
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