Patna, Aug. 30: Today was a tumultuous day's countercharge in the battle for future Bihar. But in many ways, today was also about memories of another day.
The last time Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad stood together on the Gandhi Maidan dais was a quarter of a century ago. Lalu was taking oath as chief minister of Bihar, Nitish stood behind him, among the applauders. It was an epochal victory they were celebrating, scored against the then mighty Congress.
Today, 25 years on, Nitish was centre stage and it was Lalu's part to hail him as chosen leader. And with them stood the boss of the party the two Bihari spearheads have fought the better part of their careers: Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Perplexing is the musical chair whirl Bihar's politics have been tossed into - three bitter foes in glued-hand concord against a foe they jointly believe to be the more formidable, even ominous: Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
They went at him like he were the shape of a dart board, volley upon volley upon volley until they made Modi's election as Prime Minister sound like a monumental national error. Jumla, jumla, jumla, rang the echo from the stage, the repeated mocking of Modi's belied promise to funnel black money cash into accounts countrywide.
" Jhooth bol ke pradhan mantri ban gaya hai yeh aadmi, bhagaao! (This man has become Prime Minister speaking lies, chase him out)." The clarion cry of Lalu Prasad, surely, and yet again, the man who held the house and eventually brought it down with his gift of the gab. Illustration: he acknowledged the presence of wife and former chief minister Rabri Devi last, and he acknowledged her thus: "Begum Lalu Prasad Yadav". Rabri felt obliged to guffaw too.
Until quite recently, today's Gandhi Maidan dramatis personae may have thought sitting along side a nightmarish prospect. Today it became, for each of them, a dream. Nitish secured unequivocal endorsement as alliance head amid much public fanfare; Lalu basked in some much-needed character certification from Nitish; Sonia, well no Congress leader had come to address such a mammoth Bihar gathering in living memory. Between them they also came to convey a compact that isn't about to come loose, no matter how persistent the BJP's "jungle raj" poke at the alliance.
As if charged on crowd-sourced energy, Sonia led an assault Nitish, and later Lalu, would not let up on. Modi delights in insulting Bihar, she said, and he is unashamed about corruption and about delivering nothing. "He made hollow, false promises with his 56-inch chest, in a quarter of his term Modi has lost the confidence of the people, please send out a clear message to him."
Nitish, taken by unlikely bursts of bellicosity, tore into the BJP's "jungle raj" campaign and quoted data to say the crime rate was highest in Delhi, "right under Modi's nose, right under that thing which measures 56 inches. Bihar is in good hands and will continue to be so, Modiji needn't worry, he should clean up his own act". Applause rippled. A little later, having dared Modi yet again on his DNA remark, Nitish likened the Prime Minister and his bandwagon to a Hitlerian bunch.
"They are disciples of Goebbels, they believe in repeating lies a thousand times so it begins to sound like the truth," he railed. "The reality is the Prime Minister has been forced to his knees by the people. Today, he has rolled back on land acquisition. His 'mann ki baat' was not his 'mann ki baat', it was the people's 'mann ki baat'. This is a day for us to celebrate. We are also preparing to give this man a fitting reply for insulting us repeatedly. Will we take the insult to our DNA lying down?"
But it was left to Lalu to draw the battle lines as only he can. His metaphoric descriptor of it: "We do not want smart cities, we want smart villages."
Lalu pitched the contest in the clean and classic rich-versus-poor paradigm. "Who do they mean when they talk of jungle raj? They mean the poor, Dalit, backward people of Bihar, they are the naked and the hungry and the landless. They are the ones being insulted by Modi and his people; recognise them, defeat them because they are after you. They will rob you and distribute wealth to their rich friends, then they will call you junglee (rpt) junglee (wild)."
He wasn't to let Modi's repeated entreaties to Bihar's " yaduvanshis" (Yadavs) go unchallenged either. "Will he break Yadavs? Which Yadav will he break away from Lalu? Buffaloes can't break Yadavs, and Modi can?" And he wasn't to omit mention of the BJP's "communal designs". He waved to the crowd and cautioned, "After today, Modi will be more rattled, more angry, beware, he will try to create tensions and outbreaks of violence, be alert, don't fall into the trap, the poor should unite."
The turnout was as the organisers of the "Swabhiman Rally" had promised: so huge it spilled over large parts of Gandhi Maidan and for the better part of the day left Patna deluged, a human churn as evidence that the Lalu-Nitish combine has substantive and combative votaries to call on. It was a torrid day, ridden with late monsoon heat and humidity; the crowd milled about for hours, cheering and chanting, yet restless on the peripheries, often just for a drink of water.
The torrent bore the distinct emboss of the Lalu-Nitish constituency - classes of backwards and Dalits, the underprivileged poor, minorities, all overwhelmingly rural, a dhoti-pyjama-lungi horde, not a trousered set. "This is Bihar's reply to (Narendra) Modi's suit-boot sarkar," said Shyam Rajak, food minister in the Nitish government. "The masses are not going to be hoodwinked, this oceanic turnout is proof Bihar is aware and alive to the challenge."
If Nitish was hard and punctilious to counter Modi's attacks on governance in Bihar, the sharpest to sense the socio-economic profile of the crowd was Lalu; and his message came out keenest. "Listen, you who want to hear, look at this crowd and get the message straight. This is not the arrival of Jungle Raj II, this is the arrival of Mandal Raj II."
That too brought back memories of another day.
