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On 22 Feb 2024, Tejashwi Yadav, the heir of the notorious Lalu-Rabri dynasty and a recently dethroned Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar had a rally (Jan Vishwas Yatra) in Siwan, the district from where Shahabuddin used to be the Lok Sabha member representing the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the party of Lalu Yadav.
The widow of Shahabuddin, Hena Shahab, and her son, Osama Shahab were reported to have stayed away from that rally. Shahabuddin, a criminal politician and a former member of the Lok Sabha representing Siwan, was a trusted lieutenant of Lalu-Rabri and their RJD. In the 1990s, Lalu, in one of his showdowns with the opposition, had entrusted Shahabuddin with the task of holding all MLAs likely to support him confined to a hotel. Those MLAs belonged to the parties varied from the Congress to the CPI-ML.
During Shahabuddin’s incarceration, Lalu had given the Lok Sabha ticket to Hena and to show his absolute solidarity with the Muslims and the out-lawed criminal politician, he had walked with Hena to the local District Court to file her nomination.
Shahabuddin died of Covid languishing in a Delhi jail during the pandemic year.
The abstention of Hena and Osama from the RJD rally was a significant indication of the attitude shift in a section of Muslims toward Lalu’s party. The RJD, inherited by Lalu’s son, took the Muslims’ support for granted.
The Muslims of Bihar and India have gradually realized that they were used as a vote bank by the Congress party and the regional parties like the RJD and the Samajwadi Party of the late Mulayam Singh Yadav, now headed by his son, Akhilesh Yadav.
Despite the disillusionment of the Muslims with the Congress or the regional parties, however, they would generally vote for the candidates appearing to be defeating the BJP candidate in each constituency. The fantasy of the BJP strategists that the leadership of Modi was successful in peeling off the support of a chunk of Muslims including the Pasmandas and the Shias, as the statistics have confirmed in the past, would prove fallacious.
