Lok Sabha elections 2019: Wives of gangsters-turned-netas slug it out in Bihar’s Siwan

A middle-aged man struggles to place a pedestal fan next to Hina Sahab, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) candidate to the Siwan Lok Sabha seat in Bihar, as she takes a break from campaigning in the sweltering heat of Rasoolpur village.

This is Sahab’s third bid to win the seat that her husband Mohammad Shahabuddin, a gangster-turned-politician, held for four terms until his conviction in a criminal case barred him from seeking re-election in 2009. On both previous occasions, Sahab lost, the second time when Bihar was in the grip of a wave in favour of Narendra Modi.

“I was a housewife in 2009 when I got my first ticket,” Sahab said, pouring creamy, hot tea from one cup into another to cool it off. “In 2014, it was a Modi wave and I didn’t get time to campaign.” Dressed in a steel grey burqa her head covered with a matching hijab, Sahab claims she is a more confident woman now, having toured parts of her constituency and touched base with those who were followers of her husband. She sits among a crowd of 100-plus men, mostly from the upper caste Thakur community, in Rasoolpur, talking to them about election management, enquiring about people who are helping or are not helping with her campaign and planning a visit to the next village.

The sun has already set over Siwan, but Sahab is still full of energy. “This election is to teach Modi a lesson for breaking promises he made in 2014,” said Sahab, 46, who faces local strongman Ajay Singh’s wife Kavita Singh, 33, of the Janata Dal (United), or JD (U). Sahab is holding the ground in the absence of her husband, who ruled Siwan like it was his personal fief for a decade. His entry into the world of crime at the age of 19 in 1986, and his meteoric rise coinciding with the advent of his mentor and RJD leader Lalu Prasad at Bihar’s helm, is a story everyone has heard of. A call from Shahabuddin would shut down the city and businessmen were at his beck and call. He would settle family disputes from his court in Pratappur village. Those times are now past. “Isn’t it a change that his wife has to chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Vande Mataram in election speeches?” Kavita Singh said. This was a swipe at Sahab chanting these slogans at a poll rally after being challenged by the JD (U) candidate. “What’s wrong with it?” Sahab retorts. “It’s my motherland too.”

Siwan goes to the polls with these competing narratives, and trying to find a balance between nationalism and development, religion and caste.

Singh’s husband is a local muscleman, Ajay Singh, who is also an office bearer of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a group that projects itself as a saviour of the majority community in a region where a Muslim don is struggling to remain relevant, with his wife as a proxy. Singh drives into Tandwe village around 9 pm, sitting on the rear seat of a Toyota Fortuner SUV, to loud cheers of “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”.

A group of 50 men and women are waiting for her. “You have seen a reign of terror in Siwan. It should not return,” Singh tells villagers, as she reels off the names of welfare schemes introduced by Narendra Modi’s government at the Centre and chief minister Nitish Kumar’s government in Bihar. The thrust remains on Shahabuddin. “People were bathed in acid, thrown in the furnace of brick kilns, murdered in daylight and abducted for money. Nobody wants those days to return,” Singh says. “Hindus lived in fear all these years.”

The communal divide is sharp and caste rivalry deep. In the last two elections, Om Prakash Yadav won the seat, first as an independent and then as a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate. Yadav’s entry into Siwan broke the RJD’s hegemony over the community and helped rivals stop Shahabuddin’s wife. Yadav has been kept out this time after Siwan was given to the JD(U) instead of the BJP as part of a seat-sharing deal. How the Yadavs in Siwan vote will be crucial in determining the outcome of the election.