The Fall and Rise

election from Siwan until his criminal convictions made him ineligible to run. Shahabuddin’s electoral success began in 1990, when he won an assembly seat as an independent. He caught Lalu’s attention, and in 1995, won another assembly term with the RJD. Lalu then rewarded Shahabuddin with a ticket for the Lok Sabha polls; his faith was well placed with Siwan becoming a safe seat for the RJD till 2008.

Former Bihar DGP D.P. Ojha once observed that “had Siwan been a kingdom, Shahabuddin would have been its shahenshah”. His writ was all-pervasive. The story, possibly apocryphal, goes that in Siwan no one spat or urinated in the vicinity of a Shahabuddin poster. Ojha had a 256-page dossier on Shahabuddin, detailing his network of 500 criminals, arsenal of AK-47s and Rs 100 crore empire. But in December 2003, two months before his superannuation, Ojha was unceremoniously removed from his post by then chief minister Rabri Devi, Lalu’s wife. In the 15 years that Lalu and his wife ran Bihar, Shahabuddin enjoyed complete autonomy in Siwan. Businessmen would hang pictures of Saheb on the walls of factories and offices. If he seemed to believe he could act with impunity, it was because he could. In 1996, SP S.K. Singhal, survived a murder attempt. Shahabuddin and two of his bodyguards were convicted for their part in the plot. Even when Lalu’s brother-in-law, Sadhu Yadav, was involved in a vicious turf war with Shahabuddin, Lalu spoke up for his protege. It was the start of the estrangement between Lalu and Sadhu. “Lalu,” says an RJD leader, “always considered Shahabuddin as the sole custodian of Siwan’s Muslim votes.” In March 2001, Shahabuddin’s private army fired at a Bihar police team, who had been ordered to raid his Pratappur house, killing 11 people including two policeman.

Shahabuddin’s fortunes nosedived days before his mentor Lalu Prasad was formally unseated from Bihar. The state was then under President’s rule and an assembly election (the