AS chief minister, he's the face of the establishment. But all along his two active decades in the assembly, Laloo has talked like a rebel, with or without a cause, mostly with success. Indeed, in recent times, as its most stable chief minister (from March '90 till date), he has changed Bihar's socio-political profile.
Bihar lived with upper caste Rajput dominance till the late '60s; the landed peasantry, Bhumihars, controlled the political leadership. The two balanced each other in the clash for supremacy and blocked out other castes. S.K. Sinha (Bhumihar) was Congress chief minister for the first two tenures while A.N. Sinha (Rajput) headed the party wing. Brahmins were the interlopers, the stopgap CMs whenever the two wouldn't share power.
The mid-'60s saw Karpoori Thakur taking on the establishment, backed by the socialist cadre, the middle peasantry and what would now be known as OBCS. But Thakul--though incomparably taller than Laloo in stature, with a vision for Bihar--didn't have a stable base; he belonged to the barber community, with just one per cent population.
Laloo had a solid 12 per cent caste base, plus all the anti-Congress votes, when he became CM in '90. A declining Congress had repelled Muslims, OBCS and Dalits. Mandal, and Advani's arrest in Laloo's Bihar, turned the rustic into an MuD hero. This Muslim-Yadav-Dalit votebank he inherited after Thakur's death in '88. The kulak lobby, mainly Kurmis and Yadavs, always resented the Congress, but could never throw up an alternative. Laloo fitted the bill. He also had comrades like Sharad.
By the '90s, the Kurmi-Yadav power-dyad echoed the old Bhumihar-Rajput pact-complete with the inner tension. Nitish Kumar, a popular Kurmi MP, fell out with him as his first term ended. He floated Samata Party. Yet the MYD dominance in most assembly segments gave him the advantage. He won 167 seats in the 324-member assembly in '96.
Privately, he felt cheated as nobody proposed his name for PM. The Left veto had struck-the fodder seam had already cast its shadow. Yet the cult--village children still ask barbers for a 'Laloo cut'-was kept alive with words of injured innocence. The success of a regional party, if he floats one, hinges on that.
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