Commentary/Janardan Thakur

The Man Who Would Be King

Kings and king-makers seldom get along for long. More so when the king-maker has nursed the ambition of becoming the king himself. Laloo Prasad Yadav, for instance.

The Bihar chief minister is a self-proclaimed king-maker: ''It was I who made this man the prime minister,'' he had told press photographers, pointing to Deve Gowda sitting beside him at Bihar Bhavan in New Delhi, soon after the Karnataka chief minister was chosen leader of the United Front. He said it with a queer mix of pride, contempt and jealousy, and it is hard to say which of these predominated.

To have played a crucial role in the choice of the country's chief executive was obviously a matter of pride. As president of the Janata Dal and the chief minister of one of the few Janata Dal bastions in the country, Laloo Yadav had certainly played a key role in Deve Gowda's selection, and so a little pride was quite in order.

But more than pride, there was contempt in the look that some cameramen had captured: 'imagine-this-man-becoming-the-prime minister' sort of expression Not having been there and not having found one of the photographers who could remember the exact words that Laloo Yadav had used on the occasion, one can make surmises based on the picture, and knowing his peculiar turn of phrases and manner of speaking one imagines he would have said something of this sort: ''Dekhte hain na, inhi ko hum banaye hain desh ka pradhan mantri.''

Deve Gowda was of, course, too overwhelmed, too weighed down with gratitude to bother about what was being said, and in any case he could not understand even Laloo's words, not to speak of the nuance. But apart from pride and contempt there was the sense of jealousy in Laloo's expression and words. The dark horse from the south had come sprinting from nowhere and pipped him to the post.

Notwithstanding all that Laloo had said about Delhi's climate not suiting him, he had become a serious aspirant right from the day Vishwanath Pratap Singh had thrown up his name as a future prime minister. The victory in the assembly election had made Yadav so arrogant that he could not imagine he could do any worse in the Lok Sabha polls, or that Deve Gowda could do better than him. But then Deve Gowda had been nowhere in the reckoning.

With most of the former bigwigs of the Janata Dal going into the shadows Laloo had emerged as the party's kingpin, and if only he had done as well in the Lok Sabha election as he did in the assembly poll he could easily have put the crown on his own head. But all that had remained a dream; nobody in the party had even mentioned his name! So what better could Laloo Yadav do than declare that he was the real king-maker?

For a time Laloo Yadav had gone around with the perkiness of a king-maker. The way his entire family had got ensconced in Bihar Bhavan it even appeared that he would rule Bihar by remote control from Delhi while 'guiding the affairs of the nation.' Deve Gowda, he was certain, like many others in the party, would be content to be his rubber stamp, an his belief got stronger when the prime minister accepted his nominees for the government without a demur. And what nominees!

A man accused of grievous crimes put in the central home ministry, a young lady with very little to recommend her for the top post and a lot to arouse suspicions on other grounds, such were the top recommendations of Laloo Yadav. They were accepted without any questions asked.

Little did Deve Gowda know what sort of liabilities Yadav was foisting on his head. And to be fair to the prime minister, he did his best to defend the choices Laloo had made. When Mohammed Taslimuddin's track record became a first-rate scandal, Deve Gowda sought the 'advice' of Laloo Yadav, and was told that there was nothing to worry: ''Taslimuddin is a man of very good character and I can vouch for it personally.'' It was only the BJP which was ''conspiring to paint the man black.''

The prime minister believed him and Laloo Yadav went to town with assertions and threats: ''Taslimuddin's record is clean...he will remain a minister...he must retain his portfolio lest it sends out a wrong signal....'' Not very long after this, Laloo had to eat crow. He had to say it was he was he who had asked Taslimuddin to resign from the government. Laloo did not like it at all; he fumed and fretted, spent hours ''pacing the room, up down up down, shouting abuses right the left...'' A little bird from the Bihar Bhavan whispered that Laloo had ''declared war on an upstart crow.''

Getting rid of his man Taslimuddin was bad enough, what Laloo could not brook was any aspersions on Kanti Singh whom he had got the 'juicy portfolio' of coal. The chief minister had got word that the prime minister was keeping himself informed on the activities of the lady minister, especially her movements in the coal belt of Bihar where she was alleged to be distributing largesse in a big way.

The suspicion in the chief minister's camp (more than a suspicion, really) was that the 'informer' was none other than Railway Minister Ram Vilas Paswan. What is rather well known is that the chief minister cannot see eye to eye with Paswan, one reason being that the man had pretensions of being the country's 'greatest Dalit leader', perhaps second only to Babasaheb Ambedkar. That is something Laloo finds even more difficult to accept than Mayawati or Kanshi Ram, especially when it comes to the dalits of Bihar.

Laloo Yadav fancies himself as a great messiah of the poor and the downtrodden in the state, a 'saviour of the wretched of the earth,' as one of his bandwagon journalists wrote of him. What makes Ram Vilas Paswan a greater persona non grata is that he aspires so strongly to become the prime minister.

Circles close to Laloo Yadav feel disturbed about what they perceive as Paswan's growing political and financial clout. The latest development that has upset them is that Paswan has acquired the ownership, albeit indirectly, of the state's two premier newspapers which had fallen on bad times. Their fear is that the media would be used to hit out against the chief minister and project Paswan's leadership.

What incensed Laloo Yadav most was that he failed to install one of his favourites as the CBI chief. He had been caught wallowing in the fodder scam and wanted the prime minister to bail him out, by hook or by crook. Deve Gowda had got his chance; he now had the upper hand. He was now set on getting Laloo removed from the party presidentship.

The prime minister, he was told, must also be the head of the party. If he himself could not become the president he would like one of his acolytes to be his dummy president. Gowda's hatchet man, C M Ibrahim is at the job, and Laloo's camp believes that even Paswan had joined hands with the prime minister to have him removed from the presidentship.