BIHAR: PASSING OF A DON
The strongman of Siwan, former RJD (Rashtriya Janata Dal) MP Mohammad Shahabuddin, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Delhi’s Tihar jail, succumbed to Covid in a Delhi hospital on May 1, nine days short of his 54th birthday. No sooner than the news broke, a silent yet determined move was discernible in the state to claim the support of the minority cohorts that swore by the Bihar bahubali.
Though Bihar, like many other states, is under complete lockdown in an attempt to rein in a brutal second wave of the disease, politicians, cutting across party lines, have made their way to Siwan’s Pratappur village to commiserate with Shahabuddin’s son Osama Saheb, who is being groomed to inherit his father’s mantle.
So, if Jan Adhikar Party chief Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav was the first to visit Siwan on May 7 to offer condolences to Shahabuddin’s kin, RJD legislator Ritlal Yadav arrived a day later. Ritlal had a 30-minute discussion with Osama on May 9, which political observers see as Tejashwi Yadav’s damagecontrol exercise. This is because Shahabuddin’s family is said to have been miffed with the RJD for not trying hard enough for the don in the last days of his life. Pappu Yadav’s visit, too, was seen as an attempt to fish in troubled waters. Shahabuddin’s widow Hina Saheb, who has unsuccessfully contested the
past three Lok Sabha elections on an RJD ticket, is apparently not meeting any of these politicians, including those from the RJD.
With no love lost for the RJD, Pappu Yadav has reportedly been doing all he can to wean away Shahabuddin’s supporters from the RJD. He has described Shahabuddin as someone who remained loyal to Lalu Prasad Yadav till the very end and stood firmly behind the RJD boss in his hour of crisis, when Tejashwi was little more than a baby in his parents’ lap.
Well aware that there is a groundswell of sympathy among Muslims for Shahabuddin after his death, Pappu Yadav is clearly trying to create a parallel Muslim-Yadav axis of his own.
Incidentally, like Shahabuddin, both Pappu Yadav and Ritlal Yadav are known for their muscle power. The former, a five-term Lok Sabha MP, prospered under Lalu, but was shown the door by the party in 2014 when he tried to stake a claim to Lalu’s legacy. Ritlal, on the other hand, has emerged as a Tejashwi confidant. He can be seen standing next to him whenever the Leader of the Opposition addresses the media on the premises of the Bihar assembly.
Neither an old associate nor Shahabuddin’s contemporary in the RJD, Ritlal’s visit is being seen as Tejashwi’s effort to neutralise the attempts of political opponents like Pappu Yadav to pull Shahabuddin’s family away from the RJD. Incidentally, Ritlal, too, has more than a dozen criminal cases lodged against him. He is also an accused in the murder of Satyanarayan Sinha, the husband of BJP’s Danapur candidate, whom he defeated in the 2020 assembly election.
While it may be a trifle premature to say that Shahabuddin’s death will diminish the influence of bahubalis in Bihar politics, the fact that two of them—Pappu Yadav and Ritlal Yadav—are engaged in a tug-of-war over his legacy is of note.
JD(U) MLC Radhacharan Shah, who visited Shahabuddin’s home on May 9, was emphatic that his was a personal visit with no political agenda. Shah, incidentally, is a former RJD leader, who shifted loyalties to the JD(U) in June 2020 with four other MLCs. “It was hardly the time to discuss politics,” he said.
Shahabuddin has left behind a chequered legacy. In his heyday, he was the undisputed Saheb of Siwan, a district also, ironically, the birthplace of India’s first president Rajendra Prasad. The don ruled Siwan with an iron hand during the 15-year reign of Lalu and Rabri Devi. While bureaucrats and police officers reported to him, his opponents were scared to even put up posters during elections. Doctors and transporters were asked to charge not more than the amount “Saheb” prescribed. It was also a time when no one in Siwan would dare issue a public statement against Shahabuddin.
On his part, not once did Lalu make an attempt to conceal his ties with Shahabuddin, even visiting him in Siwan jail and addressing him as his “younger brother”. After his conviction, Lalu thrice fielded his wife Hina as the RJD candidate in the Lok Sabha polls.
Shahabuddin typified the kind of criminal elements that Bihar’s fragmented polity had been catapulting to centre stage in the recent past. Part-gangster, part-community lord, part-politician and part-Robinhood, Shahabuddin operated with impunity in a political landscape where the line separating politician and criminal had got blurry.
The law started to catch up with Shahabuddin when the Nitish Kumar government took over in November 2005. Nitish ensured speedy trial of all cases involving politicians with criminal antecedents, which led to Shahabuddin’s conviction and subsequent disqualification from contesting elections. Yet, his conviction only marginally eclipsed Saheb’s clout. In 2016, he was accused of allegedly masterminding the murder of Siwan journalist Rajdeo Rajan. Earlier, he was convicted in a double murder case in which two brothers were doused with acid and killed in Siwan for not paying extortion money in August 2004. Eyewitness and the victims’ third brother, Rajiv Roshan, too, was shot shortly before he was to depose in the case a few years later.
In an ironic twist, Shahabuddin’s death due to Covid on May 1 came on the same day his mentor Lalu was released from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi, having secured bail in April after more than three years in judicial custody. Lalu called Shahabuddin’s death “a personal loss” while his son and Leader of the Opposition in Bihar, Tejashwi Yadav, described the don’s death as a “painful” and irreparable loss to the party.
As long as he lived, especially in the last few days when his son Osama is said to have struggled alone to ensure better medical treatment for his father, the don had few sympathisers. But, in his death, politicians seem to be vying for the sympathy his passing on has generated. ■
Politicians are vying to win over Shahabuddin’s support base. While Pappu Yadav of the Jan Adhikar Party was the first to visit Siwan, Tejashwi sent confidant Ritlal Yadav to commiserate and make nice with the family