The good old Laloo

People usually curse Laloo for the jungle raj in Bihar for 15 years of unopposed rule. True, under him Bihar was retrograded to one of the least developed states in India. There was nothing called governance. The law and order situation was pathetic. Murder, dacioti, rape, corruption….you name it, they were all there in Bihar. He single handedly transformed the fate of then Janta party which later broke in Rashtriya Janta Dal, led by Laloo, and the other faction led by Ram Vilas Paswan. Laloo Prasad Yadav was involved in many scams and he didn’t even leave the fodder of poor animals. Bihar became a place to make money by few elitist. The economic gap widened.There was no investment in the area because of demands from the local mafia. There was turmoil all around. People were looking at opportunities to leave the state and settle down in elsewhere. There was exodus of students after school for better education. States like Karnataka and Maharashtra played host to them and that’s the reason you find Bihrai students in myriad in many localities of Delhi like Mukherjee Nagar. A ‘”student from outside” state became synonymous with a “Bihari student”. So who were the beneficiaries? The private colleges in Karnataka and our good old Bokaro (oops Dhanbad) Alleppy express (Well if you are unaware of this train then you better brush up your GK. This is the only train that connects many places in Bihar, and now Jharkhand, to southern India. It crosses 5 states and the total run time is 60 hours! This express train stops at every damn place which has a railway platform or no platform). This exodus of students led to brain drain and also lost of huge revenue that could have been generated if they would have stayed back. But there is a dearth of professional colleges in the state and all the existing ones are overburdened with children and grandchildren of Bihari Babus. BIT Mesra, Ranchi (perhaps the only engineering college of repute) has the dubious image of having progenies of ministers, political leaders and people with influence. I dare not narrate those stories where such students were involved because by doing that I will put the life of my family members in danger, well if those babus are already exposed to the world of blogging :P.

There is absolutely no professionalism in those colleges with late semesters being a regular feature. This revenue loss further aggravated the sick economy already slackened under the pressure of corruption and lack of revenue generation. This is an article published in The Hindu by Professor Shreesh Chaudhary, IITM. He talks about the mind-set of people that has set-in and no change in governance can rectify that.

Coming to issue of Laloo Prasad Yadav. He has been the architect of the mayhem that existed in Bihar few years ago (situation has improved a lot after Nitish Kumar took over) but have you even wondered how a man with a rural background can rise to such high level on his own. He had no patrons when he started his political career. The answer lies in his shrewdness. He successfully exploited caste politics in Bihar to his advantage but in the process he also worsened the existing situation of social divisions, the upper caste and the lower caste ( he empowered the lower caste with arms and thus opening new vistas for a bloody conflict). When he was being tried for the scams he intelligently nominated his wife as the CM. Rabri devi was ignorant of the dirty world of politics but that’s not the only thing she was ignorant of! She was also ignorant of the fact that world has made overwhelming progress in the art of language and now people don’t use symbols to convey but the 26 English alphabets. In short she was illiterate. But its was not her fault, c’mon she wouldn’t have even imagined in her wildest of imagination than one day she will become the CM of a state. Laloo didn’t trust someone else with the job because he must have feared that his hold on the party might decline if someone else becomes the leader. Even though he was involved in multi-crore scams, he was active in politics and eventually became the Railways minister of India. And again here he transformed the fate of loss-making operation to a public sector unit that stunned everyone by earning a profit of Rs 15,000 crore (Rs 150 billion) in 2005-06. I will quote few lines from a Rediff.com article.

On September 18 this year, Prasad, who is also the Rashtriya Janata Dal president, will deliver a lecture to the management students and the faculty at IIM-A, explaining how he turned around the Indian Railways from a loss-making operation to a public sector unit that stunned everyone by earning a profit of Rs 15,000 crore (Rs 150 billion) in 2005-06.

The invitation to deliver a lecture came after IIM-A’s Prof G Raghuram conducted a detailed study on the Indian Railways ‘turnaround’ and decided to introduce the case study as a part of the curriculum.

Ever since Prasad took over as India’s Railway Minister, the Railways have become the second-largest PSU profit-earner after the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. Lalu has surprised many by emerging as one of the top-performing ministers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet.

So what has Prasad done to the Indian Railways which his predecessors could not? The answer lies in his own down-to-earth attitude and rustic wisdom.

Prasad puts it in his inimitable style: “My mother always told me not to handle a buffalo by its tail, but always catch it by its horns. And I have used that lesson in everything in my life, including the Railways.”

So you see how Laloo handles thing. He has achieved something which few politicians in India can boast of. He has proved the prowess of a Bihari when it comes to intellectual and governance skill. No doubt Biharis excel in many competitive exams across the country. It’s our blessing in disguise

Laloo is an able leader but the only problem is that he is more concerned for his family than his country. If he would have cared for Bihar then it would have surpassed many states in the country.