Tejashwi Yadav proves his mettle in Bihar bypolls

Had his father Lalu Prasad Yadav not been convicted in the fodder scam, Tejashwi Yadav (28) would still be a struggling cricketer––or “a cricket trainer”, as he once aspired to become.

His father may have been responsible for foisting him as the Deputy Chief Minister in 2015 but it is Nitish Kumar, his deputy Sushil Kumar Modi and the BJP government at the Centre who must share the credit for turning him into a leader.

While Nitish Kumar’s conscience did not allow him to continue in an alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal because the CBI had named the Deputy Chief Minister as an accused in the IRCTC Hotel lease case, the alibi did not wash with the people.

While the CBI made him an accused along with his father and other family members in a 12-year-old transaction (at a time when Tejashwi Yadav was still a minor), even BJP supporters found it unacceptable. What’s more Nitish Kumar’s conscience did not seem particularly perturbed over the Rs-1,300-crore Srijan scam, known as the fund transfer scam, which was unravelling at that time in the state, in which BJP and JD(U) leaders’ names had surfaced.

But Nitish Kumar and Sushil Modi trained their guns on Lalu Yadav and his son for a two-acre plot of land which they had acquired in 2012 in lieu of a lease that the Railways gave in 2006 to a private hotelier.

The land on the outskirts of Patna would have been valued at much less in 2005 when the area was undeveloped. The building boom after 2008 certainly led to an escalation in land prices but it seemed preposterous to blame Tejashwi Yadav for it. It was not difficult for Tejashwi , therefore, to play the victim card. Nitish and Modi also appeared petty and vindictive when the CBI and ED were unleashed against his sister and brother-in-law. In Bihar, people have a long memory and soon people began asking why Nitish Kumar had joined hands in the first place with a convicted politician in 2015 and why he went to Tihar jail to meet another convicted politician, former Haryana Chief Minister of Haryana Om Prakash Chautala.

Lalu Prasad Yadav’s conviction in the fodder scam on the ground that as Chief Minister he had failed to prevent the loot of the treasury came at a time when the PNB bank fraud also came to light and Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi fled the country. This also helped turn the tide. If Lalu Yadav was guilty of patronising the scamsters, by the same token, weren’t PM Modi and others in the BJP equally guilty?

The recent bypolls allowed Tejashwi to prove his mettle as a campaigner. He lacked the rustic humour of his father and yet he managed to communicate and connect, sometimes even better than his father. He is not casual in his speeches and speaks after doing his homework. This was first noticed in his maiden speech as Opposition leader in the Assembly when Nitish was seeking trust votes after returning to NDA fold in July last. Armed with facts and figures, he, on several occasions, pushed the Treasury Bench on the backfoot.

He may not yet be a big crowd-puller but he is clearly popular among the youth cutting across caste lines. Belonging to the post-Mandal generation, he is somewhat more acceptable even to the upper caste youths than older OBC leaders.

Politics, he had once admitted, was far more complicated than cricket. But thanks to his two uncles, he has started his innings with several no-balls, byes and wides. The few balls that he has played, he played them with a straight bat.