Yadav celebrates Indian rail triumph

Journalist Sankarshan Thakur sounded wonderstruck in his book The Making Of Laloo Yadav - The Unmaking Of Bihar. In a discussion of the book in The Hindu daily in May, 2000, he said: "No chief minister of Bihar has ever ruled from the two-room tenement of a peon [his elder brother] employed by his government. No chief minister of Bihar has ever held cabinet meetings under a tree by the roadside ... has raided liquor shops, constable-like, and canceling their licenses on the spot ... No chief minister has stood in queue with the public at the Patna Medical College Hospital to get his fever-ridden son treated." Yadav's critics continue to denounce him as an ambitious, political crook who had used caste-baste politics to destroy Bihar. The Yadav website, offering his five office telephone numbers, his e-mail and residence telephone number, is as contradictory and remarkable as the man himself, hailing his achievements, but also referring to him as a "convicted murderer". The online contact form offering "direct" correspondence to Yadav specifies two types of comments that can be sent to him: 1) Questions. 2) Jokes. The joke collection ridicules both Yadav and his impoverished, violence-ridden Bihar state. One joke claims that he went to Pakistan and solved the long-standing India-Pakistan problem over Kashmir. He simply insisted that if Pakistan wanted Kashmir, then India's unruly Bihar state comes free with it. Pakistan leaders hastily gave up their claims on Kashmir.