Lalu Prasad Yadav

Lalu Prasad Yadav (born June 11, 1948, Phulwaria, near Gopalganj, India) is an Indian politician and government official who in 1997 founded and then served as the longtime president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD; National People’s Party) political party in Bihar state, eastern India. He was also the former chief minister (head of government) of Bihar (1990–97).

Lalu was born into a Yadav-caste family of poor farmers in a village in northwestern Bihar. He completed bachelor’s and law degrees at Patna University. His political career started early, while he was at the university. He became a student leader and came under the tutelage of the socialist activist and theorist Jaya Prakash Narayan. Yadav joined Narayan’s protests against the policies of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the early and mid-1970s. He was arrested in 1975 during the state of emergency declared by Gandhi and was detained until 1977.

After his release, Yadav was elected to the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) as a representative of the newly formed Janata (People’s) Party (JP), which was opposed to Gandhi’s rule. In 1980 he ran for a seat in the Bihar state assembly elections and defeated the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) candidate. He was reelected to that seat in 1985. For most of 1989 he functioned as the leader of the opposition in the assembly, but late that year—and by then a member of the Janata Dal (JD; People’s Party)—he won a second term in the Lok Sabha.

Yadav by then had developed a campaign platform that mobilized lower-caste Hindus and the minority Muslim population and made him a champion of social justice. The support of those two communities contributed immensely to his electoral success. He returned to state politics in 1990, winning an assembly seat and becoming Bihar’s chief minister. He retained his assembly seat in the 1995 elections and began his second term as chief minister.

Yadav’s political career hit a snag, however, following allegations, beginning in 1996, that he and a number of Bihar’s other leading bureaucrats and politicians were implicated in a corruption scandal (often called the fodder scam) involving the embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars of state money that supposedly was to be used to purchase animal feed. Yadav was forced to resign as chief minister in July 1997, but he installed his wife, Rabri Devi, as his successor, and it was widely believed that he remained in charge of the state administration. In December 2006 Yadav was acquitted of the original corruption charges.

Also in July 1997, after having stepped down as chief minister, he broke with the JD and formed the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), of which he became the president. In 1998 he was reelected to the Lok Sabha and in 2002 he won a seat in the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of the parliament). In between, he ran for and garnered a seat in the 2000 Bihar assembly. The RJD formed a coalition government with the Congress and other parties, with Rabri Devi again serving as chief minister.

In 2004, following his reelection to the Lok Sabha, Yadav was appointed as the minister for railways in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, staying in that post until 2009. During his tenure there, he was instrumental in making the chronically deficit-ridden national railway system a profitable undertaking. His management techniques were studied in business classes, and in 2009 he was included on a list of India’s most powerful leaders.

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While he was being lauded for his performance as a cabinet minister, however, the political fortunes of his party were sinking. In the 2005 Bihar assembly elections, the RJD could win only 54 of the chamber’s 243 seats, and the coalition government stepped down from power. The party’s poor performance continued in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections (it won only 4 of the 44 seats it contested), and Yadav himself lost in one of the two constituencies in which he ran. A year later the RJD could muster only 22 seats in state assembly elections. Those setbacks drastically undermined Yadav’s political weight in New Delhi. More were to come. In 2012 fresh charges related to the 1996 animal-feed scandal were brought. At a trial in September 2013 he was convicted on fraud charges, and in October he was sentenced to five years in prison. He appealed the ruling and was released on bail in mid-December. Although he was forced to relinquish his Lok Sabha seat, he continued to lead the RJD. In 2017 Yadav was convicted of additional charges related to the scandal. While serving that three and a half-year sentence, he was convicted in a third fodder scam case in 2018, receiving a five-year sentence.