India jails former railways minister for corruption

Lalu Prasad Yadav, once among India’s most powerful politicians, was jailed for five years on Thursday and disqualified from parliament after being found guilty of corruption in a cattle-feed scandal dating back to the 1990s.

He was sentenced the day after the Congress-led coalition government abandoned its unpopular plan to change Indian law so that politicians could keep their seats in parliament even if convicted of a crime, provided they had filed an appeal as Mr Yadav is expected to do.

Mr Yadav is one of 56 accused of involvement in a scheme through which officials and politicians invented herds of livestock and siphoned Rs9.5bn from official funds destined for cattle fodder and other agricultural purposes. He was also fined Rs2.5m.

Sabir Ali, a politician from a rival party, said the punishment of Mr Yadav was “a new milestone” for India. “Nobody is bigger than the law,” he told NDTV television immediately after the sentencing by a court in Ranchi.

The issue of criminal MPs has become a topic of intense political debate as parties prepare for a general election by May next year in the world’s largest democracy. The Bharatiya Janata party, the Hindu nationalist opposition, initially supported the law change but then changed its mind and accused Congress leaders of seeking to protect allies such as Mr Yadav.

Congress leaders hurriedly abandoned plans to protect criminal MPs after an outburst last week by Rahul Gandhi, who leads the party with his mother Sonia. With the proposed ordinance being mocked by the public as a licence for corruption, he stunned party colleagues by calling it “nonsense” and “wrong” in an unscheduled three-minute speech.

Mr Yadav, 65, was a pioneer of “caste politics” and “vote-bank politics”. He mobilised members of his low-status Yadav caste as well as underprivileged Muslims in the northern state of Bihar, whose large population of over 100m gives it a key role in national politics.

He formed a party called the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and either he or his wife Rabri Devi governed Bihar as chief minister for 15 almost uninterrupted years after 1990. Mr Yadav held the important post of national railways minister for five years to 2009 in the Congress-led coalition.

Appreciated by political journalists and voters for his humorous way of speaking, he nevertheless left Bihar in a state of lawlessness and extreme poverty when his party was defeated by Nitish Kumar, now chief minister, in the 2005 state election.

Additional reporting by Jyotsna Singh