Lalu now?

If it’s the Congress and Lalu Prasad, a seat-share problem can never be far away. This one has nothing to do with the next Bihar elections, though — the Congress isn’t even sure the old allies are going to team up in end-2010. The seat puzzle vexing the party is: where does the former railway minister sit in the Lok Sabha? Lalu Prasad boasts a weighty CV: veteran MP, former Union minister, former chief minister and regional satrap, never mind his diminished strength. By right and precedent, he gets a front-row seat, perhaps next to successor Mamata Banerjee who is threatening him with a white paper on his tenure. But what has queered his pitch is not only the ups and downs of coalition politics but also a rule framed by one of the House’s first Speakers. It decrees that parties with five MPs or less, as well as Independents, should sit on the back benches. The Rashtriya Janata Dal has just four members and so ought to be banished to the last or the penultimate of the 11 rows that seat the House’s 545 members. Yet the first row is where Lalu Prasad has always sat, whether in the Rajya Sabha or the Lok Sabha; it’s from this vantage position that his rustic accent has soared above opponents’ murmurs and malfunctioning microphones, and his sense of humour has brought laughter. “It’s a matter of his prestige. Someone as senior and eminent in public life surely deserves a place with the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi?” a former RJD member of Parliament said. Speaker Meira Kumar will have the last word on who sits where, but the Congress knows there’s not much time left before the seats have to be allocated. Of the front row’s 19 seats, the UPA has a claim to 10. At the moment, Lalu Prasad is squeezed in a three-seater in the first row (all non-UPA seats) with his on-and-off friend Mulayam Singh Yadav and the CPM’s Basudeb Acharya. Mulayam is likely to keep his place because he leads a 23-member party. So too Acharya. But the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has 20 MPs, is a claimant to the non-UPA seat Lalu sits in. So, if he has to be at the front, the seat has to come from the UPA quota. The Congress has already decided on the first six seats in keeping with convention: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee (leader of the Lok Sabha), Sonia Gandhi, Sharad Pawar, P. Chidambaram and Mamata (she replaces Lalu Prasad). That leaves four. Lalu Prasad may look with hope at a couple of past precedents. In 1991, the P.V. Narasimha Rao-led Congress government requested the Speaker to give a front seat to former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar although he had less than five MPs. Shekhar occupied the allotted seat even when he was the lone Lok Sabha MP from the Samajwadi Janata Party. So, too, when former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda made it to the Lok Sabha in 2004 with four MPs, he was seated next to Shekhar. Deve Gowda will have to be given a front-row seat this time too. That leaves three. A Congress minister said that although ally DMK was eligible by strength of numbers, none from the party had the seniority to merit the front-row “honour”. “So, we may consider giving one to Lalu Prasad,” the minister said non-committally. Another Congress source was more cautious. “How will Mamata react? We may have to think about it,” the source said. “Second, what will the Bihar Congress people say? Given the way their brains tick, they will wonder if a re-alliance is on the cards… and knowing Lalu, he will make a meal of such a gesture.”