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Vajpayee's gift to the Bhumihars

Soroor Ahmed in Patna

Three-time member of Parliament Padmashree Dr C P Thakur, who was on Monday evening inducted as the water resources minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee ministry, is only the second Bhumihar to have become the Cabinet minister at the Centre. This despite the fact that this caste has dominated post-independent Bihar's politics.

Once, 19 out of 54 MPs elected from the state belonged to this caste. Yet no Bhumihar was rewarded with a Cabinet berth. The only other Bhumihar to have become a Cabinet minister was Shyam Nandan Mishra who was foreign minister during the brief regime of Chaudhary Charan Singh in 1979. Thakur's induction is being interpreted as a reward to the community for its unflinching loyalty towards the Bharatiya Janata Party ever since the implementation of the Mandal Commission report.

Thakur, a renowned kala azar expert, was born on December 21, 1931 in Dubha village under Muzaffarpur district where he did his schooling. After having done his MBBS from Patna University he got his MRCP from London and Edinburgh. He is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He got the Padmashree in 1982 for his work on kala azar, and in Patna his clinic is often flooded with patients, most of them suffering from this dreaded disease which is spread by the sandfly -- very common in the flood-prone north Bihar districts.

Though he was active politically since his student days, it was in the 1970s that he shot into the limelight when he became the personal physician to the late Lok Nayak Jaya Prakash Narayan. However, during the Emergency he developed a proximity towards the Congress and later joined the party and won from Patna as MP for the first time in 1984.

He remained a Congressman till the early 1990s and was considered an ardent critic of the BJP. In the 1989 parliamentary election he lost to Professor Shailendra Nath Srivastava of the BJP. When the Congress started becoming irrelevant in Bihar and his castemen, the Bhumihars, began deserting it he started flirting with the Samata Party. When the Samata itself began fading in 1995 he deemed it fit to jump on to the BJP bandwagon.

The BJP named him its candidate in the 1998 parliamentary election amidst protests by the Kayasthas. Film star Shatrughan Sinha openly expressed his displeasure as he wanted to field his wife instead.

Thakur managed to wrest the seat from the Rashtriya Janata Dal's Ram Kripal Yadav by a comfortable margin of 160,000 votes. However, a section of the BJP continued a relentless campaign against Thakur. In the just-concluded parliamentary election he managed to win by a slender margin of 45,000-odd votes, notwithstanding the fact that there was a rebel RJD candidate also in the fray. It is not only the Opposition parties, but many in the BJP too, who accuse him of being an elitist not interested in the well-being of the masses.

His name is also often associated with the Ranvir Sena, a dreaded private army belonging to the Bhumihars, which has been accused of many depredations against the lower castes.

Ironically, water resources is surely not Thakur's cup of tea. An expert with the World Health Organisation and winner of numerous prestigious awards the portfolio most suited for him would have been health. Maybe his caste background and the priorities of Bihar made Prime Minister Vajpayee allot him the water resources ministry.

Flood-prone Bihar needs better water management and it is expected that Thakur will really do something about it. Besides, the farmers of volatile central Bihar hope that he would get the 110 year-old Sone canal modernised. This area is notorious for its agrarian tensions.

He is the father of four -- two sons and two daughters. All his sons and daughters are well settled.

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