Business tycoon Mahendra Prasad an all-party ‘favourite’

 “Had there been only one seat vacant (in the Rajya Sabha), I would still have been elected,” asserted Mahendra Prasad alias King Mahendra, the pharmaceutical industry tycoon from Bihar’s extremist-affected Jehanabad district.

King’s confidence is not unfounded. He was elected to the Rajya Sabha unopposed on Friday last. This is King Mahendra’s seventh term as a member of Parliament (MP), and second time as a JD(U) nominee.

Be it the regime of Lalu Prasad or Nitish Kumar in the state or that of Rajiv Gandhi or Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Manmohan Singh at the Centre, King Mahendra has always had a smooth sail to Parliament.

The secret of his success, said a senior IAS officer, preferring anonymity, is “abundance of wealth”. The officer added: “His (Mahendra’s) desire to stay crowned as a lawmaker and politicians’ perennial need for moneybag have made the King a unanimous choice for Rajya Sabha candidature.”

Sources in the NDA revealed that Nitish, while taking on the Lalu-Rabri regime in Bihar, faced trouble when his party MP George Fernandes refused to finance the JD(U)’s campaign in 2005 Assembly elections. The JD(U) leader relied on King Mahendra, who owns an estimated Rs 5,000-crore Aristo Pharmaceuticals with branches in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and several other countries.

King Mahendra readily financed the campaign enabling Nitish to get in the saddle as the chief minister. And Nitish “rewarded” the King by sending him to the Rajya Sabha in 2005 for the first time as a JD(U) nominee. Showing streaks of a “practical” politician, the chief minister has kept the King in good humour again this time.

King Mahendra has never been short of political support though. Primarily a Congressman, King won the Jehanabad Lok Sabha seat on a party ticket in 1980. He lost the seat in 1984. The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, referred to King Mahendra as “Mr Clean” and got him — hardly known for his “unsullied” image — nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the President of India.

Seen as a muti-millionaire by ultra-Left outfits operating in his native Jehababad district, King Mahendra is alleged (by CPIML-Liberation and CPI-Maoist) to have “funded” several landlords’ armies, including Ranvir Sena and Brahmarshi Sena. These armies were locked in sanguinary clashes with the Naxalites throughout 1980s and 1990s.

Ironically, Lalu Prasad, who had earned the sobriquet of the “messiah of poor” and was running the regime of what was described as “social justice”, too, got King Mahendra elected as the RJD nominee to the Rajya Sabha in 2000.

The Bhumihars were in the forefront of the anti-Mandal Commission agitation and Lalu was the prime supporter of the Mandal recommendations. But Lalu, too, found King Mahendra “worth” being nominated as RJD’s Rajya Sabha member. This despite King Mahendra and his staunch supporters — Abhiram Sharma (JD-U MLA) and Jagdish Sharma (JD-U MP) — violently opposing the Mandal Commission.

Bihar and its politics have undergone a sea change since the 1980s. The Congress, which was in power then, gave in to Lalu Prasad-led RJD in 1990s. Lalu too went into oblivion after facing defeat at the hands his erstwhile “alter ego” Nitish in 2005. What has not changed even a wee bit is the “status” of King Mahendra. The King has rather become a “richer king” now.

It is not that Mahendra Prasad was born into an aristocratic family. His father Baliram Sharma was a farmer in nondescript Govindpur village in Jehanabad. Few have clues how Mahendra entered pharmaceutical business in the 1980s and emerged as a tycoon in a few years.

His close associates claimed the King leads a “very simple lifestyle”. The 72-year-old businessman is a teetotaller who loves daal-chawal, sabji and makai ka bhunja (maize snack) and eats home-cooked mutton and river-fresh fishes. He wears only pure khadi, used in the Tricolour, ordered specially from a Gujarat factory. “He (King Mahendra) is a very helping person. Thousands of people in Jehanabad are employed in his factories,” Abhiram said.

Thanks to his opulence, King Mahendra has developed aristocratic traits too. He won the first prize for maintaining the best garden at his Delhi-based mansion seven times in a row from 1982. And if Nitish is to be believed, he is a globetrotter, having set his foot in all countries of the world except Somalia.

The Rajya Sabha records, however, show that the fabulously rich man is utterly poor in parliamentary business. He has asked only five questions in nearly four decades of his Upper House career.