My very approximate approximation of Lalu Prasad Yadav
It is his carefully untrimmed ear hair, defiantly spiking out on both sides, that gives Lalu Prasad Yadav that satirically menacing look. As the most vocal and colorful defender of the supremacy of India’s parliament in the face of an increasingly assertive section of civil society seeking to legislate, Yadav is characteristically effective.
Lalu Prasad Yadav, TV grab from www.ndtv.com
There is a veritable turf war going on in India these days between parliamentarians and an unquantifiable but significantly loud section of civil society over whose right it is to draft bills and enact them into laws. At issue is the Lokpal (Ombudsman) Bill and the extent of powers that should be enshrined in the proposed new institution to fight and redress massive corruption in public life at all levels.
If India were a forest, politicians would have marked the whole country as their territory. Seasoned old predators have been on the prowl for decades but now new, much younger, wildlife is intruding. The confrontation is expectedly brutal. What is ironic is that leading the pack of new intruders is a 74-year-old former army truck driver consumed by the utter moral righteousness of anything and everything he does. The man, Anna Hazare has now been tormenting the political establishment for the past six months or so by going on hunger fasts until his way prevails.
Television shows are full of representatives from both sides with their own loads of braggadocios about who gets to draft a bill as far reaching as the Lokpal Bill. Yadav has very vociferously cast his lot behind his own crowd of federal legislators saying that parliament is both competent and supreme.
What makes this 64-year-old former chief minister of the state of Bihar as well as former Railway Minister compelling is his unrestrained rusticity and unselfconscious sense of humor. It is also his ability to go off on a tangent that entertains in parliament. For instance, yesterday during a nearly 25-minute speech, studded with colloquialisms straight out of the hinterland of Bihar, he said it was his misfortune that he was born in 1948 because the British “fled” before he was born.(The British left India in 1947). It had nothing to do with the debate but then he is like an improv comic who often just wings it.
Despite his manners and language shorn of urban finesse, his purpose is deadly serious. He is telling this agitated section of India’s civil society that laws cannot be enacted from the sidewalks and streets. For a man who has built a whole career out of removing political filters from his rhetoric, for once that gift is coming in particularly handy. At one point during the speech he even spoke how much politicians have to grovel in order to get elected to parliament. His implication being that there was no way that he was going to let the street protestors led by Hazare hijack lawmaking.
Yadav’s style may be rough-hewn but there is no mistaking his passion for the political establishment. During the speech he also spoke about how under the proposed Lokpal Bill it would easy to file frivolous cases against the country’s prime minister and how it would lower the prestige of the office when the prime minister travels abroad. Yadav has obviously thought through the major consequences of the bill as and for a politician.
In a sense he said everything that other Members of Parliament would have loved to say but were inhibited by their natural filters of political circumspection. For someone who wears his ear hair with the conviction of a wolverine, circumspection does not come naturally to Yadav.
