Andha Kanoon: Why is Lalu Yadav alone singled out?

There was a 1983 Hindi film by the title Andha Kanoon starring Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini and Rajniknath which climaxed with the villain Amrish Puri chased by Bachchan to a courtroom and killed. The film ends with the hero Amitabh Bachchan literally getting away with murder, because he had already served seven years’ incarceration following conviction by the same court for the murder of the same person, when the man had just disguised himself and made the court and Police believe he was dead.

The crux of the argument was that you cannot convict a person twice for the same offence. For all its flaws this movie highlighted the basic principle of criminal jurisprudence—that a person could not be convicted for the same offence twice. But in the case of Lalu Prasad, the face of social justice and Backward empowerment, criminal jurisprudence has been made to stand on its head and thereby a lower court of Ranchi convicted him yet again in the alleged fodder scam on Saturday. This was the second time the court had convicted the president of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) for his alleged involvement in the ₹950 crore fodder scam committed over several years but which came to public knowledge in 1996 when Lalu Prasad was the Bihar chief minister.

That this second conviction for the same alleged offence was influenced by the BJP which has  governments at the Centre, in Jharkhand’s capital Ranchi, and now in Patna as well, is evident from the fact that Lalu’s  predecessor Jagannath Mishra and some others, also mentioned in the FIR of case number RC-64-A/96, registered on May 15, 1996 registered on the directions of a Patna High Court bench, have been let off. The whole purpose of pursuing the so called scam, it is now evident, was to remove Lalu Yadav from the political firmament over which he shone from 1990 to 95 and continues to do so even after the Damocles sword of fodder scam has been hanging over his head since 1995.

The bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Amitava Roy, debunked the well laid out principle of criminal jurisprudence that a person cannot be convicted twice for the same offence by striking down Jharkhand High Court verdict of quashing his trial in the three remaining cases when he had already been convicted by the same lower court in Ranchi for the same offence in October, 2013. This Supreme Court bench then ordered that he be tried and convicted separately for each of the four cases registered against him in fodder scam and be made to serve the sentences separately for each of the four cases. Curiously, none of the cases even allege he made any money, leave alone attempting to prove this. It alleged that he along with some others tried to protect the alleged perpetrators of the scam.

Following his conviction in October 2013, Lalu, then a sitting MP of the Lok Sabha, was disqualified from being a MP and barred from contesting elections for six years because his jail term was more than two years. Thus, from 2014 to 2020 he in any case could not have contested any election.

Now if this court too sentences him to undergo a prison term of six years, and if the courts follow the cue in the two pending cases against him, it could well add up to a quarter century of prison term. Going by his official date of birth in another few months he would be seventy. Thus even if he starts serving his successive sentences right away, he would be 95 by the time he completes serving his term.

New cases pertaining to Railways leasing out two of its hotels to a business house have already been slapped on him relating to his tenure as Union Railway minister in the first UPA government. In this round the central agencies have targeted his wife and former chief minister Rabri Devi, his smarter and brighter son Tejashwai Yadav, the former Deputy chief minister of Bihar and even his doctor daughter Misa Devi, a Rajya Sabha MP.

The crux of the matter is, no eligible member of Lalu’s family is to be spared to ensure that his party the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) finally folds up. It is so difficult for the upper castes, both urban and rural, to digest the fact that for all their efforts since 1995 aided by Sushil Kumar Modi, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav and his RJD still remain not just relevant to Bihar politics but are the only bulwark against the RSS/BJP in Bihar and not Nitish Kumar or Ram Vilas Paswan who had off and on displayed halff-hearted secular pretensions.

Two years back when the RJD-JD-U alliance was going strong and Tejashwi was the deputy chief minister under Nitish Kumar, political circles were agog with a whisper campaign that BJP leader Bhupendra Yadav was visiting Patna frequently meeting Rabri Devi on the sly and persuading her to break the alliance with Nitish Kumar and form a RJD government with outside support of BJP.

In return the offer was to withdraw all the cases against Lalu Prasad. But when Lalu heard this, he put his foot down and threatened to commit suicide if any attempt were made to break bread with the BJP. Only after that the BJP worked through Arun Jaitley, on old friend and comrade Nitish Kumar to break the secular alliance, which had trounced the BJP in Bihar in 2015.

During the investigations conducted by CBI officer UN Biswas at the instance of the Patna High Court, a charge sheet was filed in the Disproportionate Assets (DA) case in the year 2000, during the last NDA government. The prosecutors submitted to the court a list of Lalu  and his family’s movable and immovable assets which totaled to less than ₹50 lakh and included one Maruti 800 car which he had bought soon after becoming the chief minister, a flat in MLA colony which all other MLAs also possessed and some small plots of agricultural land in his natïve village as also some Indira Vikas Patra and Kisan Vikas Patra bonds he had invested in the name of his nine children. The value of his property was computed at the rate prevalent in Delhi then, which even then was at least 10 times higher. Yet it was a little above ₹40 lakh.

Can you believe a person who was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1977 and has remained in active politics since then as a MLA or MP, having total assets of only around ₹40 lakh and this for a person called chara chor (fodder thief) with Ravi Shankar Prasad and Sushil Modi claiming that the total value of fodder scam was ₹950 crore?

But the current scenario in which a judge about to pronounce an adverse judgment on the ruling clique’s chief dies in mysterious circumstances, when a judge questions the integrity of fellow judges on the basis of documentary evidence and is sent to prison for six months, when questions have been raised about two successive chief justices of India, when a judge giving a favourable judgment to the current regime is immediately rewarded with the post of Governor- shouldn’t one ask why only Lalu Yadav has been singled out for “exemplary punishment” ?