Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Though no check to a new evil appears, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor’s life is not safe… If the law is too mild private vengeance comes in.

A succinct description of Laludom, or more accurately, its numbered days. Bihar has seen it all: political murders, private justice-dispensing armies, parallel law enforcing systems, hoodlums in uniform on the train, on the streets, in police stations… As Rajeev Srinivasan says in this piece,

…I have become a believer in Bihar. If only for the negative thought that Bihar couldn’t possibly get any worse.

Is the present condition of Bihar entirely Lalu’s contribution, or is it merely the ultimate result of a chain of events that occurred over 50 years that was given this final, horrifying shape? In The Making of Laloo Yadav: The Unmaking of Bihar Sankarshan Thakur traces the Bihar Mess to the way successive Congress governments ruled and in this we can clearly fathom why Congress can never hope to return to power again here. The last Congress Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra comes across as no less a monster than Lalu is. Lalu picked up Bihar from where Mishra had left, and hastened its decline and fall.

Today at the hour of his most ignominous defeat ever, much is being written, good and bad. Rediff has a Gibbonesque The rise and fall of Lalu Yadav showcase on the man.

As journalist Sankarshan Thakur wrote in his book The Making of Laloo Yadav: The Unmaking of Bihar, ‘No chief minister of Bihar has ever held court under a tree by the roadside. No chief minister of Bihar has ever held a cabinet meeting on the lines of a village chaupal, on a cement platform under open skies. No chief minister of Bihar has ever summoned the state’s high and mighty to the streets of the Patna Veterinary College compound and turned their dismissal into a public spectacle. No chief minister of Bihar has raided liquor shops, hawaldar-like, and cancelling their licences on the spot. No chief minister of Bihar has stood in line with the hoi polloi at the Patna Medical College Hospital to get his fever-ridden son treated.’

It is meaningless to make an “objective/impartial” assessment of Lalu’s “contribution” to Bihar; we know what it has been. However, the singular praise that goes in his favour–especially in the secular media is that he gave voice to the “voiceless,” a statement that perhaps originated with V.P. Singh who gloated that

…the rise of Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar his “lab experiment in social justice.”

True. Yet the reality that stares us is the manner in which Lalu went about giving the said voice… it was, well, crude to say the very least. Ever since, Lalu became the template for every aspiring politician–old, young, aspiring, or established–chanting the “social justice” mantra but not quite realizing how one goes about it in practice. Lalu demonstrated it for 15 years. And now how, when the Fall happens, one realizes the truth of the proverb that you cannot fool all the people all the time.