RJD says ‘jungle raj’ narrative created by NDA; pays it back in kind

Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), after stomaching years of “jungle raj” jibe, has found the perfect opportunity to pay its rivals back in their own coin, and Tejashwi Yadav seems to be in no mood to let it go by.

Tejashwi has been periodically posting lists of crimes happening in the state from his X handle. Even on Tuesday (July 16), Tejashwi posted a list of 40 serious crimes that occurred over four or five days, with details including the nature of crime and place of occurrence. This has been the sixth such “crime bulletin” posted by him in the past one and a half months.

Alongside, he has been updating people about other things too, such as Bihar’s shameful record of 17 bridge collapses in three weeks.

“Maha-Mangalraj”

The spurt in crimes is being reported in local Hindi dailies regularly. These include everything from murder to rape to kidnappings to lootings to extortion demands to bank robbery. Two people killed at Patna wedding on July 13; 18-year-old grandson of CPI(ML) leader murdered in Jamui; property dealer shot at; 17-year-old girl kidnapped in Vaishali on July 11; private bank in Motihari robbed — hardly a day goes by without at least one such crime being reported.

Tejashwi, who is also the Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly, has termed the collapsing of 17 bridges in three weeks as a “world record of corruption and bad governance” and sarcastically dubbed the NDA rule in Bihar as “Maha-Mangalraj” — clearly a sly reference to the “jungle raj” narrative used by the NDA for years to paint the 15 years of Lalu-Rabri rule in the state in a bad light.

The “jungle raj” narrative

While RJD chief and Tejashwi’s father Lalu Prasad was chief minister from 1990 to 1997, Lalu’s wife Rabri Devi was in the post from 1997 to 2005. But even 19 years after the RJD was ousted from power in Bihar, BJP and ally JD(U)’s leaders let go of no opportunity to remind the people of their “misrule”, described it as jungle raj (rule of the wild). Even during the Lok Sabha election campaign held earlier this year, BJP leaders Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, and JD(U) supremo Nitish Kumar used the “jungle raj” narrative to remind people of those “dark days”.

There is no denying the fact that official crime data of that period reveals poor law and order in the state. But similar situations were reported from other states, too, including those run by the BJP or its NDA allies. Now, taking the fight directly to the BJP and JD(U), Tejashwi recently dared Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to reveal the details of the collapsed bridges, including when they were built and during whose tenure, when the tenders for their construction were issued, who laid their foundation and inaugurated them.

RJD sniffs an opportunity

Interestingly, serious crimes have particularly surged in Bihar over the past six months, ever since Nitish Kumar dumped the RJD and returned to the NDA fold. Such is the situation that over a dozen police teams have been attacked and seriously injured by the powerful sand and liquor mafia (Bihar is a dry state) when they went to conduct raids against them.

And with the fear of lawlessness once again haunting the people of Bihar, the RJD has struck when the iron is hot. Lalu Yadav, who still remains a popular leader among his traditional support base, last month targeted the much-publicised “good governance” in Bihar, citing lawlessness and mafia raj.

Surprisingly, NDA leaders, including Nitish Kumar, have so far maintained a stoic silence on the rising crime graph in Bihar. Only senior BJP leader and Union minister Giriraj Singh has strongly countered Tejashwi for targeting the “NDA double-engine government” and said he should recall the Nineties. Other BJP leaders have publicly demanded the “police encounter model” and the use of bulldozers, along the lines of neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, to control the rising crime graph in the state.

Nitish flip-flop

Amusingly enough, Nitish Kumar jumps on BJP’s “jungle raj” jibe bandwagon whenever he joins the NDA fold. But whenever he had walked out of the NDA and joined hands with the RJD — once in 2013 and again in 2022 — he has countered the BJP’s “jungle raj” narrative. He has even quoted National Crime Record Bureau figures and claimed that more crime had taken place in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Chhattisgarh under BJP rule.

In 2014, when Nitish had briefly appointed his senior party leader, Jitan Ram Manjhi, as chief minister, the latter had publicly announced that there was no “jungle raj” during Lalu-Rabri’s rule. “It is baseless to describe the Lalu-Rabri tenure as ‘jungle raj’. There was nothing like it,” Manjhi had been widely quoted as saying at that time. Now, the same Manjhi, a Dalit leader, founder of the Hindustani Awam Morcha, an ally of the BJP, and currently a Union minister, is back to parroting the “jungle raj” narrative.

Why Lalu was targeted

Nitish himself took the BJP’s barbs for “joining hands with the architects of jungle raj” when he forged an alliance with the RJD after ended his 17-year-old alliance with the BJP in 2013, and then again in 2022. On both occasions, he was supported by the RJD to run the government. Nitish himself came to power in the state for the first time in 2005 by promising a crime-free state. But his “apradh mukt (crime-free) Bihar” narrative was nothing but a political stunt.

Political analyst Soroor Ahmad told The Federal that crimes took place in Bihar before, during, as well as after Lalu-Rabri’s rule. However, they were tagged with the “jungle raj” jibe by the BJP/JD(U) to create a negative perception about Lalu, “a mass leader who had challenged the powerful social forces in a state infamous for its semi-feudal roots, in favour of the marginalised and weaker sections”.

An unmatched feat

“It was widely claimed that during the Lalu-Rabri rule, mothers were not allowing their children to step out of their homes fearing they would be kidnapped, and people not being able to leave their houses even in the evenings, forget nights. All those were nothing but exaggerations, cooked-up stories to create an image of ‘jungle raj’,” said Ahamad.

“The fact is that even markets were running at night in towns, marriages were taking place, theatres were functional, and all long-route trains were operating and people were boarding those. It is during this so-called ‘jungle raj’ that a World Cup cricket match was held in Patna for the first and only time, on February 26, 1996. Even after 18 long years of NDA rule in the state, that feat is yet to be repeated,” he added.