Lalu's rule irrevocably broke the stranglehold of Brahmins, Bhumihars, Rajputs & Kayasths on Bihar politics. It provided a sense of dignity & equality to tens of millions of people, which is why they kept voting him back.Threads like these are a very distorted UC perspective(1/n) https://twitter.com/devzoy/status/1270973279558422528

Upper caste views are blinkered because they extrapolate from their own feelings of loss and portray Lalu's rule as a lost era for Bihar. They always voted heavily against Lalu at the time, but it didn't matter. Lalu's era represented the culmination https://mobile.twitter.com/GabbbarSingh/status/980368571393101830

of a three decade struggle for political empowerment & social progress. It was started by the Socialists &OBC leaders in the 60s who fought (and in the end defeated) the Congress system of vertically integrating the backward castes through patronage, under a largely UC leadership

You know what is not called the jungle Raj: the feudal order under the covering of democracy that the Mandal movement sought to reverse. The middle class on Twitter remembers the kidnappings and extortion that affected their class. But in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the UC landlord and

his goons could virtually kidnap anyone, and they often did kidnap the women of their LC landless workers. The lower castes had no recourse since the bureaucracy and the police was all UC. As was the dominant local political leadership. The landed UCs did not even need militias

for the most part, because there was no resistance. This was the period of "peace" and "order" and presumably good governance that the middle classes on Twitter hark back to, in contrast to the gunda raj of Lalu. Also, corruption was built into this political economy, which was

based on exploitation of the landless and the poor, in the service of a elite which had effectively captured the State. But that is also not looked at as corruption.

Sure, Lalu's reign shouldn't be romanticized. It did represent State corruption and the criminalisation of

politics, but these were not started by Lalu. Contrary to the middle class view that associates Mandal politicians with the criminalisation of politics, goons were inducted into politics during the Congress era. As Milan Vaishnav describes in his book on the subject, they started

actively contesting elections in the late 70s as the Congress system declined and they could no longer depend on the patronage of the Congress. The era of leaders like Lalu saw the rise of lower caste criminals with political connections, in a crude way democraticising the

criminal-political nexus. Even the process of State corruption started much before him. The fodder scam for instance, started in the Congress administration and the Congress CM Jagannath Mishra was also charged in the scam, not just Lalu.

The most important legacy of Lalu's era

is that even today, politics in Bihar is organized largely around the theme of social justice, and (unlike UP) has not seen the return of dominant castes on the centre stage. Nitish Kumar's support is based on fusing this politics of social justice ( mobilizing the MBCs and his

base of Kurmi/koeri) with a politics of development that was not emphasized by Lalu. But even Nitish's politics of development builds on the base of popular consciousness that imbibed the idea that the State is responsive & accountable to people like them, and not just the elites

Also, Lalu's rule banished communal riots from a state that had just seen one of the worst communal riots in modern India at Bhagalpur. He stood up directly against Hindutva at the height of the Janambhoomi agitation when Congress was busy appeasing the rising communalism.

Of course, his politics had limitations which is why people eventually voted him out. The negligence in providing public goods (health, education, roads); the skewing of OBC politics towards Yadavs to the relative marginalisation of other more backward castes; the failure to

prevent the massacres of Dalits by militias like the Ranveer Sena, or to hold them accountable.

But it's always amusing when upper castes wonder why people vote on the basis of identity (in this case for very meaningful reasons of dignity & pursuit of political/social equality)

Or when they castigate the lower castes for being ignorant, narrow minded and 'casteist' for doing so.

Well, the same upper castes/middle classes are now wholesale voting for Modi even as they suffer substantial losses of wealth, income and opportunities. They will couch it in

'higher' terms like 'vikas' (which we havent seen for the last 6 years), but essentially their vote is also for identity. Only in this case ( unlike the marginalized support for Lalu), they are voting for their caste/religious pride & chauvinism rather than for dignity & equality