Rabri Devi, Bihar’s most prominent woman politician who now leads the Opposition in the Assembly, actually spent many days weeping in her office after becoming the chief minister in July 1997. For the semi-literate housewife, the abrupt transition from the kitchen to the cabinet was an agonising affair. “I used to cry in the office. I had fears. My heart used to beat fast. I hated meeting unknown people. I was clueless about what to talk. But the officers gave me confidence, teaching me the way things were supposed to be done. For three-four months, I used to cry a lot,” Rabri says in a new book on her life and leadership, Rabri Devi: Lalu’s Masterstroke. Written by Patna-based journalist Manoj Chaurasia, the book reveals the inside story of Rabri Devi’s intriguing metamorphosis from an unassuming housewife to Bihar’s “goongi gudiya” (mute doll) CM to fiery Opposition leader.Within a year of becoming the CM, Rabri had acquired enough mastery over the art of running the government. “I never allowed the word tension to creep in my mind. Sabka routine bana liya tha, kaun kaam karana hai, kaise karana hai, sab routine ke anusar karate the (I had formed a routine for each task),” she says.Unlike what is commonly believed, Rabri was not Laloo’s first choice as his successor. In July 1997, three days before Laloo surrendered in the CBI court and was sent to jail, he was still in discussions with party colleagues to choose a successor. It was at one such session that some 20 RJD legislators came running to Laloo and suggested Rabri’s name. “Eureka, eureka,“ shouted Laloo.It turned out to be quite a tough task for the RJD MLAs to persuade a ferociously unwilling Rabri, who clung to the chair she was sitting on when she was told about the decision. When she was finally led to the Raj Bhavan for the oath taking, a nervous Rabri had to be repeatedly prompted by Laloo to walk up to the dais. She stammered all through the oath.With Laloo in jail, Rabri had a distressing debut in politics. She had dropped out of school after the fifth standard and had forgotten the Devanagari script. She learnt to write her name while sitting in the CM’s chair. The then Patna DM Rajbala Verma taught her how to read and write. After a fortnight, she started identifying the alphabet and started signing her name on official files. Dr Shanti Ojha, editor of a local Hindi women’s magazine, also helped in the lessons. “If she wasn’t in a good mood, she would refuse to listen to anything and say, ‘Ja, na padhab (Go away, I will not study),” says Dr Ojha in the book.Even more difficult was the bureaucrats’ job of preparing her for a public speech. With Independence Day round the corner, she had to be readied for the customary CM’s address at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan. NK Upadhyay Madhup, who retired as deputy secretary of the CM’s secretariat and also as Rabri’s OSD, literally passed sleepless nights trying to prepare the shortest of texts that Rabri could memorise. But Rabri did not disappoint him. She delivered it flawlessly.On Independence Day Eve, however, Rabri was a virtual torture for the Doordarshan and All India Radio crew as it took them 45 minutes to record her 20-second message to the people of Bihar. She could not pronounce the two words “swatantrata” (freedom) and “swadhinta” (sovereignty).As instructed by Laloo, Rabri had been asking senior bureaucrats to read aloud the contents of the files before she would sign on them. But the important decisions, as the book reveals, were taken by Laloo, who kept in constant touch with her from jail through a trusted official.Rabri was extremely jealous of Kanti Singh, an RJD MP and Union minister described as Laloo‘s “blue-eyed lady and girl-friend since college days”. Kanti, for whom Laloo ensured a ministerial berth in the governments of HD Deve Gowda, IK Gujral and the current UPA government, had become, in the words of a politician close to the Laloo household, “a villain for Rabri”. Rabri once “drove out Kantiji with a broom in her hand from 1, Anne Marg,” says the book, quoting an RJD leader.An angry Rabri refused to cook what Laloo demanded when in 1995 he declined her request to give her brother Sadhu Yadav (now an RJD MP) an RJD ticket in the Assembly polls. “Rabriji rusal bari (Rabriji is very angry),” Laloo told a journalist at that time. To pacify her, he gave Sadhu a berth in the legislative council.When she was CM, an angry Rabri once threatened Opposition leader Sushil Modi on the Assembly floor, saying: “Muh thakoch denge (I’ll smash your face)”. When Modi demanded her resignation, she shouted at her Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ramchandra Purve: “Churi pehan kar aayal baran ka? (Have you come wearing bangles?)”THE WOMAN who was believed by Bihar’s ruling NDA to be a weak Opposition leader surprised everyone. During a heated debate in the Assembly that led to four adjournments, Rabri and a few RJD women MLAs forcibly entered Assembly Speaker Uday Narayan Chaudhary’s chamber. Rabri removed some of her bangles and presented them to Chaudhary. Coming outside, she shouted: “Yeh Speaker nahin, sticker hai (He is a sticker, not a Speaker).” During another hot debate in the Assembly in 2005, an incensed Rabri took off her slipper and waved it at the treasury benches.Rabri’s unflinching love and devotion for Laloo has been widely known in Bihar. The couple did not see each other till a year after they tied the knot in 1973, when Laloo was 25 and Rabri 14. Laloo was still jobless and lived in the one-room peon’s quarter allotted to his elder brother at the Patna Veterinary College, Rabri came from a rich landowning family. Laloo’s dowry consisted of Rs 5,000 and a few cows.The fact that Laloo was jobless while Rabri’s other three sisters had been married into well-off families was a source of bitter quarrels in Rabri’s extended family. But when Rabri’s father was asked why he was giving his daughter’s hand to a “bhikmanga” (beggarly man), he said: “Humein ladka pasand hai (I approve of the boy).” In her family, Rabri is not alone in having a curious name. Her sisters also had similar names arising out of the common family custom of offering to women the food of their choice after childbirth and then naming the newborn after the food item. Her sisters are named Jalebia, Rasgulawa and Paanwa.The naming of Rabri’s seven daughters and two sons is equally fascinating. Her eldest daughter Misa Bharti got her name from the draconian MISA (Maintenance of Internal security Act) under which Laloo as a student leader had been jailed at the time of her birth. The second daughter, Chunnu (Rohini Acharya) was named after chunav (polls) as Laloo was contesting the Lok Sabha polls from Chhapra in 1977 when she was born. The third daughter Chanda got her name from chandragrahan (lunar eclipse). The rest of the children’s names have similar tales to them.
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