The Lady Bahubalis of Bihar in the fray

Lovely Anand, a political candidate in Bihar, navigates through family dynamics and political challenges in the upcoming election.

Lovely Anand, 57, sits on the top floor of the dark, musty three-storeyed Bihar Hotel in Sheohar town. “My husband is not a bahubali (strongman) but a kalambali (penman). It is the media that has given the name,” she says of Anand Mohan Singh, 70.

Lovely is contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha poll from Bihar’s Sheohar constituency, from where Singh had been MP twice, in 1996 and 1998, before he served a 16-year jail term for the murder of a District Magistrate. She descends the staircase, and drives about 10 km to Nayagaon village in the Dumri panchayat. The first family she meets says flatly they will not be voting for her, but for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

“Your family has been unapproachable and inaccessible for all of us here after your son won the Assembly poll in 2020,” the middle-aged man tells her. She rushes through the visit, saying she is busy, and needs to proceed.

“I promise that will change,” says Lovely, later telling people that a railway bridge and a hospital will come up.

Her older son Chetan Anand is the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) legislator from Sheohar but before the Nitish Kumar government sought a trust vote in the State Assembly in February 2024, he switched his loyalty to Kumar and his party Janata Dal (United — JD(U). Days after, his mother got a ticket from the JD(U) to contest the Lok Sabha election from Sheohar.

In Bihar, several mukhiapatis (village heads’ husbands) wield power in rural politics, with their wives being elected mukhias (village heads). “In Bihar ‘Mrs. Bahubalis’ are in the fray from both the JD (U) and the RJD in this Lok Sabha election. This is nothing new for us. We know it’s their husbands who are actually contesting,” says Maheshwar Singh, in his 80s says, on the outskirts of Nayagaon. The law prohibits convicts jailed for over two years from contesting elections until six years of their release.

“Had Anand Mohan Singh been born during the British reign, he would have been a krantikari (revolutionary). He comes from the family of freedom fighters,” says Lovely.