The upcoming Bihar Assembly elections are turning out to be about the sons. The sons of men who have set their foot strong in the state, occasionally tumbling and eventually falling. And the mighty who have taken the fall, like Shatrughan Sinha or Lalu Prasad, have brought their young boys to the fore. What will be clear in the upcoming campaigns is whether they want their legacies defended or are still nostalgic of power.
Shatrughan Sinha, for one, has had a long run in Indian politics and has had ups, downs, especially more downs since he left the Bhartiya Janata Party in the summer of 2019, on the eve of General Elections.
The actor-politician is now back on the field, this time with his son Luv Sinha, who was awarded the Congress ticket for Bankipur, which also lies under the Patna Sahib constituency, Shatrughan’s home ground.
‘Bihari Babu,’ as Shatrughan Sinha is fondly known, had a successful run with the BJP. The 74-year-old has served as the Rajya Sabha member from 1996-2008 and then continued as Lok Sabha member from Patna Sahib constituency between 2009-2019. He was also a cabinet minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government.
Sinha’s entry into the BJP and subsequent metamorphosis into the party’s top campaigner began with a call from L K Advani in 1991. Advani, a BJP veteran, who spearheaded the the party’s rise in the country, reached out to Sinha with a ticket for a bypoll from the prestigious, as Sinha later recalled, New Delhi constituency.
The opposite candidate was the legendary actor Rajesh Khanna fielding for the Congress.
Sinha lost the election that year as Khanna mostly won on a “sympathy wave” following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. That defeat was not only political but also an “emotional one.” Khanna was in fumes over Sinha’s decision to contest against him and refused to talk to him for a long time. However, Sinha rose in ranks and remained in the BJP for 27 long years, winning back-to-back elections.
Until in 2019, as the tide swung. It was no longer Advani’s BJP but the party was run by the Shah-Modi duo. Sinha claimed indifference towards him in the camp. “BJP did not give me the help they gave to other candidates,” he had said.
Sinha had also been critical of Modi-led BJP’s flagship economic moves, he termed the demonetisation “ill-advised” and the implementation of GST “faulty.” He said it was no longer the BJP of Advani, who he referred to as “a friend, philosopher and [his] guide” and that democracy within the party was replaced with “dictatorship.”
In March of 2019, Sinha parted ways with the BJP and in April, he joined the Congress, a “true national party” he had said during his admission. The move was supported by leaders across the Opposition parties, RJD supremo Lalu Prasad was one among the key leaders who hailed his move.
Other key leaders who supported Sinha’s jump to the Congress were AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee and Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav.
However, in 2019, Sinha lost Patna Sahib to Ravi Shankar Prasad. And, his wife Poonam Sinha, who was in the Lok Sabha race from Samajwadi Party in Lucknow, also lost to the senior BJP leader Rajnath Singh.
Now, through his son, Luv, Sinha would hope for a comeback in Bihar. In Bankipur, a strong BJP bastion for decades, the ‘Bihari Putra’, as termed by Sinha, is up against sitting MLA Nitish Nabin.
The prodigal son has, however, manintained that he is contesting 'for the people' and not to evange his father's defeat.
'Bihari Babu,' on the other hand, has denied retirement altogether.