Patna, Sept. 8: Lalu Prasad, twice blessed. Yet again.

When the Grand Alliance stormed to power in November last year, Lalu's two sons - Tej Pratap and Tejashwi - got key ministerial berths in the government. The icing on the cake was the deputy chief minister's post for Tejashwi, the younger of the two.

Now, some ten months down the line, Lalu has scored another double: Two grandsons on the same day.

On Wednesday morning, Misa Bharti, the eldest born of Lalu and Rabri Devi, was blessed with a baby boy at a Delhi hospital.

A few hours later, around 5 in the evening, Lalu's youngest daughter, Raj Lakshmi, became a mother for the first time when she delivered a boy in the same hospital.

Both sisters underwent Caesarean section operation.

Lalu can now have a cricket team comprising his grandchildren: Raj Lakshmi's son is the eleventh.

Misa, 41, who has an MBBS degree, was elected to the Rajya Sabha earlier this year; Raj Lakshmi, 25, a management graduate, is married to Tej Pratap Singh Yadav, the MP from Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh and the grand nephew of Samajwadi Party boss Mulayam Singh Yadav.

So named after the draconian Emergency era law under which Lalu was imprisoned, Misa has been married to computer engineer Shailesh Kumar since 1999. The couple already have two daughters - Durga Bharti (13) and Gauri Bharti (7).

"I was with Misa throughout the surgery holding her hand and kept talking to keep her calm. Now, with the grace of god I am blessed with a baby boy," Shailesh said.

Having become a father for a third time in the morning yesterday, Shailesh kept instilling confidence in co-brother Tej Pratap Singh.

"He (Tej Pratap Singh) was nervous but I gave him strength and he too went inside the operation theatre for a short while at the end of the surgery," said Shailesh.

Raj Lakshmi, who got married in February last year, is the only one of Lalu Prasad's nine children to be born after he became chief minister in March 1990.

The proud grandfather, who is in Delhi for a health check-up, congratulated his daughters over phone; grandmother Rabri made a video call to bless her two grandchildren. "I have seen the photo of both my grandchildren. Let them first come here, I will think of what to gift them," she told The Telegraph.

Maternal uncles Tej Pratap Yadav, 28, and Tejashwi, 26, who are still bachelors, were on cloud nine after hearing the news. "I am very happy that both my sisters have given birth to baby boys. It is also a proud moment for me to become a maternal uncle. God's blessing is also there with both of them and their children," Tejashwi told The Telegraph.