In the shifting sands of politics, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Lalu Prasad Yadav are two politicians who have remained steadfast on one question of principle — Hindu-Muslim harmony. Both are outstanding orators with a sense of humour, but the commonality ends there. Their lives and histories are far wide apart otherwise. Mr. Aiyar thinks and speaks in English; Mr. Yadav does so in Hindi, in fact, in Bhojpuri. Mr. Aiyar is 83, and Mr. Yadav is 75, but their paths have never crossed, though they were Ministers in the same Union Cabinet under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Their parallel lives make a metaphor of the crisis of Indian secularism.
The trajectory across the years
Mr. Aiyar went to Doon School, St. Stephen’s College and joined the Indian Foreign Service. Mr. Yadav went to a village school and then college in Bihar. Mr. Aiyar describes himself as a ‘secular fundamentalist,’ the title of one of his numerous books. Mr. Yadav has not written any book (though he has lent his name to a biography of himself titled, Gopalganj To Raisina. He has, however, scripted a social coalition of Bihar’s subalterns and Muslim minorities, by stopping the rath yatra of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) veteran L.K. Advani and ordering his arrest in Bihar in 1990.
