A palpable sense of jubilation was in the air in the RJD camp when party supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was in prison since 2017, reached daughter Misa Bharti’s house in Delhi after being discharged from AIIMS on May 1, but it proved ephemeral.
Within a few hours, news of the death of Mohammad Shahabuddin hit them hard. The former MP died at a Delhi hospital, a few days after he tested positive for Covid in Tihar jail. An aggrieved Lalu called it “a personal loss”. His son Tejashwi Prasad Yadav too dubbed the untimely death of the 53-year-old leader as “painful”.
The death closed an inglorious chapter on the unholy nexus of crime and politics in Bihar. But the party stood by its controversial leader even after he was gone, just the way it always did in his lifetime, regardless of his tainted political background and a dossier replete with heinous crimes. Party leaders even alleged that Shahabuddin died because of negligence during his treatment.
In his heyday, Shahabuddin ruled Siwan with brute power, heading a syndicate involved in crimes ranging from kidnapping and extortion to murder with impunity. The don, who also fancied himself as a modern Robinhood, wielded enough political clout during the 15-year-long reign of Lalu and Rabri Devi. Sahab, as he was called by his supporters, ran his fiefdom in Siwan before the law caught up with him. In 2005, right after coming to power, the Nitish Kumar government initiated speedy trials of all cases involving politicians with criminal antecedents, which resulted in his conviction and disqualification from contesting elections. Among other cases, he was accused of having masterminded the murder of former JNUSU president Chandra Shekhar and convicted for the gruesome killing of two brothers who were drenched in acid in Siwan. The third brother of the victims, an eyewitness, was also shot dead shortly before he was to depose in the case a few years later.
Lalu, however, continued to back him all through these years. From the 2009 Lok Sabha elections onwards, Shahabuddin kept fielding his wife Hena Shaha as his proxy from Siwan, but she could never win. Now, the RJD apparently does not want to disown Shahabuddin despite his tainted legacy simply because of his perceived influence on a section of minority voters, which helped Lalu consolidate his Muslim-Yadav vote-bank in the past.
Elsewhere, however, Shahabuddin’s death evoked extreme reactions, as people recalled him as the veritable terror of Siwan. The Plurals Party founder Pushpam Priya Choudhary, for one, says that her generation of Biharis had faced the slur of being called goons and criminals outside the state. “If I mourn the death of its symbol in jail today, it will be an insult to the crores of Bihar,” she tweeted. “I have no regrets whatsoever. Full stop.”
