Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav at the shagun ceremony of the RJD leader's youngest daughter and the Samajwadi chief's grandnephew in Lucknow on Sunday. Pictures by Naeem Ansari
Lucknow, Dec. 7: Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav today took a step towards becoming family, days after the Bihar leader joined others to accept Mulayam as the head of the Janata parivar.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal chief was in Lucknow for the shagun ceremony for his youngest daughter's wedding with the Samajwadi Party chief's grandnephew.
Raj Lakshmi and Tej Pratap, recently elected to the Lok Sabha from Mainpuri - a seat that Mulayam vacated after also winning from Azamgarh in the May election - are to be engaged in New Delhi on December 16. The wedding is expected in February.
'I am going to Lucknow. I will meet Mulayam Singh Yadav today to finalise the date for my daughter's marriage with Tej Pratap,' Lalu Prasad told journalists before leaving Delhi.
Raj Lakshmi, 24, is the only one of Lalu's nine children to be born after he became chief minister in March 1990. She was born in June that year. Raj Lakshmi is a management student at Amity University in Noida.
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Dimple Yadav (fourth from right) with other family members at the shagun ceremony on Sunday. Also in the picture are (sixth from right) Aparna, wife of Mulayam’s second son Prateek; and Sadhana (to Aparna’s right), Mulayam’s second wife
Accompanied by his wife and former Bihar chief minister Rabri Devi and other family members, Lalu Prasad reached Lucknow around 11.30am. Mulayam's brother Shivpal, who is the public works department minister, was at the airport to receive them.
The ceremony was held at 5 Vikramaditya Marg, the residence of the Samajwadi chief. Shagun involves exchange of gifts for the bride and the groom, and is the occasion when the wedding is finalised. The bride does not accompany her parents for the ceremony.
Tej Pratap, the son ofMulayam's late nephew Ranveer Singh Yadav and Mridula, is a management graduate from Leeds University in Britain, family sources said.
The 27-year-old MP told the media in Delhi recently that he was happy with the way the splintered Janata Dal family was coming back together, and said he believed this 'will bring about a big change in the political landscape'.
'But our marriage is a purely personal affair and has nothing to do with politics,' he added.
On December 5, Lalu Prasad, Nitish Kumar, Sharad Yadav, H.D. Deve Gowda and other socialist leaders had met at Mulayam's house in Delhi and authorised the Samajwadi chief to work out the modalities of the merger of all their parties in a grand Janata reunion.
'This is a first step towards building a personal relation that could not happen in 1997,' a Samajwadi Party insider said today. At that time, a marriage proposal between Mulayam's elder son Akhilesh and Lalu Prasad's eldest daughter Misa had fallen through. Misa, a doctor who nurses political ambitions, is married to an engineer, Shailesh Kumar.
Akhilesh was not present for the shagun ceremony this afternoon because he had to be in Delhi for the meeting of chief ministers called by the Prime Minister. His wife Dimple, also an MP, was present.
Tej Pratap, Mulayam’s grandnephew and Mainpuri MP, who is to wed Lalu Prasad’s youngest daughter Raj Lakshmi. The 24-year-old management student is Lalu Prasad’s only child born after he became chief minister. A close aide of Lalu Prasad said her name reflects his change of fortune.
Akhilesh Yadav, Mulayam’s elder son and Uttar Pradesh chief minister, missed the ceremony because he was in Delhi for a meeting called by the Prime Minister. A proposal for Akhilesh’s marriage with Lalu Prasad’s eldest daughter Misa had fallen through in 1997. Misa, who was born during the Emergency and named after the draconian law under which her father was arrested, is now married to a software engineer. Akhilesh’s wife Dimple, an MP, was present at the shagun.
