Lalu Yadav has been in jail since January 2018. (File photo)
Patna:
RJD chief Lalu Yadav will not campaign for state elections in Bihar for the first time in more than four decades. The former chief minister, jailed for corruption since 2018, had handed over charges to his son Tejashwi Yadav, but has been overseeing the party’s affairs from a prison hospital.
Lalu Yadav, 72, is serving a four-year sentence in Jharkhand in a case involving the misuse of funds earmarked for livestock feeding during his tenure as Chief Minister in the 1990s. He has spent most of his tenure at a government hospital in Ranchi.
The Jharkhand High Court granted him bail today in one of many forage scam cases, but he will remain in jail. The last such case will be presented for hearing on November 9, one day before the outcome of the Bihar elections. Even if you are released on bail, it will be too late.
Lalu Yadav has been in jail since January 2018, but has been granted bail in many cases due to having already served 50 percent of his sentence.
For the first time since 1977, when he was first elected deputy, Lalu Yadav, a staunch of Bihar politics, will not be in the campaign. He had also missed last year’s national elections.
His face does not appear on posters for the RJD, the party he founded in 1997, which feature Tejashwi Yadav along with the slogan “Naya Soch, Nayi Bihar.”
Sources say that with the number of health problems that Lalu Yadav has been suffering from, it is not known whether he will be able to actively campaign in future elections. His son Tejashwi has bravely led the party’s campaign, but his critics say he has much to learn. Tejashwi’s first major electoral outing without his father, the 2019 election, turned out to be disastrous with Nitish Kumar and the BJP decimating the opposition.
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