Purnia, Bihar: It’s 7 am Wednesday, the last day of campaigning before the Lok Sabha polls, and nearly 100 supporters have gathered at Arjun Bhawan at the heart of Purnia town in Bihar. They are here to see Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav, a Congress leader contesting as an Independent.
Last month, Pappu merged his Jan Adhikar Party with the Congress but couldn’t get the party ticket for Purnia as the seat went to the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) as part of the parties’ seat-sharing arrangement. Despite this, Yadav filed his nomination papers and is now giving his rivals — RJD’s Bima Yadav and sitting MP Santosh Kushwaha of the Janata Dal (United) — a tough time.
Such is the challenge he poses that RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav has cautioned the people that any vote against the RJD candidate, Bima Bharti, would be one for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
RJD office-bearers said Tejashwi was trying to consolidate RJD-Congress voters by painting Pappu Yadav as someone who would help the NDA win by splitting votes.
The RJD is said to be confident about the Purnia seat, given the perceived anti-incumbency against the two-term JD(U) MP Santosh Kushwaha.
So, what explains the clout of Pappu Yadav, a gangster-turned-politician, who had spent 12 years in jail in a murder case until his acquittal in 2013?
His latest election affidavit shows Pappu Yadav has 41 criminal cases against him and is out on bail in 15 cases. Charges against him range from damage to public property and rioting to The Arms Act, 1959.
According to political analysts, it’s a mix of muscle power and benevolence that allows him to wield considerable influence despite not having won an election in the last five years. Indeed, the area is rife with tales of Pappu Yadav’s generosity and willingness to help those in need.
“He is giving both the parties a run for their money and it’s all down to his groundwork in Purnia,” this analyst, who didn’t want to be named fearing political repercussions, told ThePrint.
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Pre-2019 — the rise and fall of Pappu Yadav
According to political analysts, Pappu Yadav’s life could be explained in two phases — pre- and post-2019 general elections.
Born in Khurda village in Madhepura, the leader, who has been with the RJD, the SP, and the Congress at different points of his life, was a close aide of local gangster Arjun Yadav in the late 80s and took over the reins of his gang after the latter was killed in an alleged police encounter.
He made his electoral debut in 1990 when he was voted into the Bihar assembly as an independent MLA from Singheshwar. A year later, he fought — and won — the 1991 Lok Sabha election from Purnia.
According to political observers, his already existing influence in the area combined with his strong local connection helped him quickly consolidate support.
“It was Pappu who started the trend of taking armed men with him while campaigning. No one — not even the administration — could stop his cavalcade of 40-50 vehicles,” a second analyst from Purnia says.
However, it was the 1998 murder of Pappu Yadav’s rival, the late Community Party of India (Marxist) Purnia MLA Ajit Sarkar, that marked the turning point of the former MP’s life.
On 14 June 1998, Sarkar, along with his driver Harendra Sharma and party worker Ashfaqur Rehman, were shot dead in broad daylight in the town’s Subhash Nagar area.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which was probing the case, arrested Pappu Yadav, then in the Samajwadi Party. But even this arrest and his time behind bars did not prevent the leader from storming into the 13th Lok Sabha after beating his nearest rival, Jai Krishna Mandal from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), by a margin of over 2.52 lakh votes.
“The 1999 election showed that Ajit Sarkar’s murder did not stick on his image and that he was not unpopular despite being in jail on the charge of murder,” another political analyst told ThePrint.
In 2004, the Purnia strongman moved to the Madhepur Lok Sabha constituency, winning the seat as an RJD candidate.
In February 2008, a special CBI court sentenced him to life imprisonment in the Ajit Sarkar murder. The sentence meant that he was disqualified from Parliament and could not contest the 2009 general election.
Yadav spent 12 years in jail in the murder case before the Patna High Court acquitted him in 2013. Meanwhile, in 2009, his mother, Shanti Priya, an Independent candidate, lost Purnia to BJP’s sitting MP Uday Singh.
In 2014, he returned to the Madhepura to win the general election despite the Narendra Modi wave sweeping the country. Just a year later, he was expelled from the RJD in 2015 and formed the Jan Adhikar Party, which he merged with the Congress party earlier last month.
In the 2019 general election, both Pappu Yadav and his wife Ranjeeta Ranjan tasted embarrassing defeats, leading the former to hit the ground running and reclaim lost ground in the Kosi-Seemanchal region.
Political analysts in Purnia told ThePrint that the second phase of Pappu Yadav began in the aftermath of the 2019 defeat. In the 2020 Bihar assembly polls, he lost Madhepura to RJD’s Chandra Shekhar Yadav — another major setback to the leader.
Post-2019 — the ‘messiah’ phase
According to various party estimates, at 30 percent, Muslims form the largest part of Purnia’s constituency’s 22 lakh voters. At 11.36 percent, the OBC caste Yadav comes in next while Scheduled Tribes form a considerable 9.09 percent.
Outside Bhawanipur village, some 20 km west of the main Purnia town, Vinod Kumar Yadav is busy drying maize in the scorching sun.
But ask him who will win the Lok Sabha election here, and the response is quick — “Pappu Yadav is sweeping this village as well as the neighbouring ones.”
Bhawanipur’s nearly 1,400 voters are a mix of Muslims and Hindus belonging to dominant castes such as Yadavs and Kushwahas.
In the village, a crowd gathered under a banyan tree recounts tales of Pappu Yadav’s beneficence. Vinod Kumar Yadav, for instance, talks about how the strongman helped an acquaintance get back Rs 19 lakh from a former business partner who was unwilling to part with it.
“He did not threaten him. He just told him to deal with the issue peacefully and honestly, and such is the weight of his words that the matter was resolved without any fuss,” he said.
In Purnia, such tales abound — from how the former MP intervened to bring down exorbitant medical bills to how he conducted “raids” against private doctors charging steep fees in the Kosi-Seemanchal region in the early 2010s. Both doctor associations such as the Indian Medical Association (IMA) and rival parties like the BJP had condemned the raids as an act of “vigilantism”.
Despite such accusations of high-handedness, Pappu Yadav continues to find support in Purnia. “Why should not I rally behind him,” one villager, Shambhu Goswami, asked after citing such instances.
According to yet another political analyst, for many in Bihar, Pappu Yadav is just a phone call away and it was this that helped him retain his clout despite losing the 2019 general election
“After losing the 2019 election, he started to travel across Bihar and began to speak for people across the state. He was in Patna during the (2019) floods, and in Maharashtra to celebrate Chhath Puja,” he said.
These instances gave Pappu Yadav political mileage, this analyst said, adding that he now has people rallying behind him “everywhere he goes”.
‘Unruly elements’
For many of Pappu Yadav’s supporters, the gangster-turned-politician’s accessibility is stark contrast to the constituency’s incumbent MP, JD (U)’s Santosh Kumar Kushwaha.
In Purnia’s Abdulla Nagar, Kailash Das spoke about how his repeated appeals to Kushwaha to help the family of a fellow tailor Shambhu Das who had died of ill health a few months ago went unheard. “In contrast, Pappu Yadav responded immediately and gave the family some money,” he said.
Not everyone, however, is willing to buy into Pappu Yadav’s ‘messiah’ image. A few kilometres before Bhawanipur, a Kushwaha voter said the Purnia strongman’s election could mark a return of some of the more “unruly elements” among his supporters.
“I am voting for Modi and (Santosh) Kushwaha has always come to our village whenever we have asked him to join us. Hence, we would not shift our loyalty to Pappu,” this voter, who didn’t want to be named fearing repercussions, told ThePrint.
According to the first political analyst, life has come full circle for the gangster-turned-politician, given that this election marks his return to Purnia after a gap of 20 years.
“There was a time when Pappu used to be the poster boy for the unholy nexus between Bihar’s criminals and politicians. But now, having spent some time out of power, and with incumbent candidates becoming so unpopular, people want Pappu to back,” he said.
On its part, RJD spokesperson Mrityunjay Tiwary tried to downplay Tejashwi Yadav’s aggressive push in the constituency by saying that the party leader was “putting his weight behind all candidates, whether from RJD or Congress”.
“Purnia is unnecessarily being hyped up. Tejashwi ji has been working hard also in Bhagalpur and Katihar, where Congress candidates are contesting,” Tiwary told ThePrint but also reiterated the RJD leader’s statement that any vote against the RJD Purnia would be a vote for NDA.
But Pappu Yadav’s supporters are unperturbed by such statements. Back at Arjun Bhawan, one supporter sums it up succinctly: “Pappu hi jeetega. He should win. He is always accessible, always available to us in times of need.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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