Lalu Prasad addresses a public gathering at Laukaha in Madhubani. Picture by Ravi Bhaskar

Laukaha (Madhubani), Nov. 28: This was to have been a sympathy election, but chief minister Nitish Kumar wouldn’t have it that way. He is out seeking endorsement for himself and his governance-raj, not charity in the name of a dead man.

This was meant to have been about the memory of Hari Prasad Sah, benevolent benefactor and panchayati raj minister, whose untimely departure due to a brain stroke created the vacancy. It is about Nitish Kumar instead. And perhaps a wee bit about his desperate challenger, Lalu Prasad.

What would otherwise have been a barely noticed contest in a rural outback has become a high prestige face-off which has brought to this unlit periphery in north-eastern Bihar an unlikely shower of stardust — former and incumbent chief ministers, their erstwhile and present cabinets, followed by rival infantry ranks of legislators and party apparatchik waging a small but critical battle.

Should Nitish lose this one, some of his current grip could begin to give — a hole, however, small blown into the perception of invincibility. He is unprepared to be visited by that prospect. He has employed all the soldiery at his command and himself taken, unusually, two final days of the campaign to barnstorm this small Assembly pocket.

Should Lalu Prasad be beaten again, the Opposition in the state will lie inoculated afresh by despondency. Lalu Prasad has barely managed to stir himself into battle mode, but Laukaha could summon another bout of political coma. He has pulled out all stops and a couple of choppers. He has exhorted indifferent allies such as Ram Vilas Paswan to join him on the barricades. He has rallied his ragged troops with another do-or-die call following the reverse in the Daraunda Assembly bypoll just months ago. Truth be told, Lalu’s man in the fray enjoys a personal edge over Nitish’s. The RJD’s Mukhtar Ahmed is principal of a local college and a man of long and sober public work. For some reason, though, he is also a practised loser; many believe because he has a knack for riding the wrong horse. He has contested on Congress tickets in the recent past and it hasn’t got him too far.

The JD(U)’s Satish Sah, son of the departed Hari Prasad, has little to recommend him other than his parentage. He is widely seen as a wastrel who did not bother matriculating. He subtracts from the goodwill and voter-sympathy his father left behind. But local vice and virtue may barely come to bear upon the Laukaha outcome. As one elderly constituent told Nitish’s campaign party at village Baluar, “Your groom is terrible, but then the groom’s party is agreeable, and that is what we are content with.” The young Sah, in other words, will get what he does because he is Nitish’s chosen lamp-post in Laukaha.

Nitish himself doesn’t have much to say of Sah beyond introducing him as the party’s nominee. “Meri sarkar mein kaam hua hai, woh aapke saamne hai,” he tells gatherings as the dust-cloud of his caravan drifts from habitation to habitation. “Yeh kaam jaari rakhna hai is liye is sarkar ko mazboot rakhna hai, aage bahut kaam hai (A lot of work has happened under my government and that is before you. This work has to go on and so you should strengthen this government, we have a long way to go).”

He speaks most passionately, and often, about the girl child and education, and what his government has done to get more children, especially girls, to school. But what Laukaha seems to appreciate more is the road-and-bridge building that has gathered ground in this Kosi-ravaged belt.

“For months during the rains people from neighbouring villages would remain cut off because of floods or stagnant inundation,” says Vijay Deo, a brick kiln manager near Mahadev Math, where Nitish addressed the first of eight election meetings yesterday. “But we now have half a dozen connector bridges and culverts and that has transformed life in this area, movement has become possible even during the rains.”

A silken four-lane carriageway running north-east of Darbhanga deposits you at the strip forking off in the direction of Laukaha. The road into the country is a patchwork of broken parts and parts under repair. The country itself is rather barren, even though this is the peak of paddy harvest. “Too much riverine salt and sand in the soil,” explained a wayside farmer. “We get a crop but it is never very robust.” Most of Laukaha, which fuses seamlessly into Nepal to its north, is both fed and ravaged by the whimsical and often turbulent Kosi. It is subsistence country, no economic activity beyond struggling agriculture in the pastures and petty retail in smoky hamlets.

It matters a great deal to them that roads and bridges are beginning to describe new routes in this backwardness and school children on bicycles are beginning to ride them. Like everywhere else in the state, caste is the popular arithmetic of elections. Lalu Prasad is banking hard on Yadavs and Muslims, they will tell you wisely on the chowks, that is why he has given his ticket to a Muslim. The Nitish team has its own calculus: upper castes, all non-Yadav backwards, all non-Paswan Dalits — they make up far more than Lalu’s M-Y combine. But it can never be that simple in a Bihar election. There are the usual “vote-katuas”, making algebra of what could have been simple arithmetic. The Congress has fielded a Yadav and that worries Lalu. There is an Independent mahadalit who could hurt the JD(U). But these too could be considerations all too local to weigh on what is a bigger-issue contest.

At the Narendrapur crossroads, an RJD tableau stood mid-street cautioning against the “beimaan raj (dishonest regime)” of Nitish Kumar. “Corruption has reached new highs, ladies and gentlemen, beware of this fraud government that is looting people in the name of development, beware, beware, vote back the messiah of the poor Lalu Yadav...”Squatted in his little cycle repair shop not far away, Vijay Kamti, retorted: “Well, there may be a bit of corruption, that is everywhere, but at least we are seeing something happen now, nothing happened in Laukaha for so long, now suddenly there is a road at least.”

And why waste your vote, added one of his clients, Nitish Kumar is chief minister, why turn opposite when the tide is still with him?