Lalu Prasad Yadav made 15 years of promises to Bihar — and broke every one. Mrityunjay Sharma has documented it chapter by chapter. Author and BJP Jharkhand campaign manager Mrityunjay Sharma discusses his book Broken Promises — a political history of Bihar from 1990 to 2005, the period of Lalu Yadav’s Jungle Raj. Sharma’s own journey from BIT engineer to Asian Paints corporate to entrepreneur to politician mirrors the generational frustration of educated Biharis who watched their state’s promise squandered.
The book’s core argument is that Lalu’s politics was never socialism — it was caste arithmetic disguised as social justice. True socialism, as Lohia and Karpoori Thakur understood it, aims to dismantle reverse discrimination, not simply invert it. A family whose members collectively hold five Lok Sabha and five Vidhan Sabha seats while hosting Bollywood stars at lavish gatherings cannot credibly claim socialist ideology.
The Bihar case is a warning for Indian democracy: promises of identity politics can win elections for 15 years while infrastructure collapses, crime becomes the governance mechanism, and talented young people flee. Sharma closes with Nitish Kumar — a genuine reformer whose administrative capability was ultimately overwhelmed by political opportunism — as Bihar’s great unfulfilled potential.

About The Speaker:
Mrityunjay Sharma, a first-gen entrepreneur and social activist, holds degrees from BIT Mesra and XLRI Jamshedpur. Formerly in senior HR roles, he later worked with CM Dr. Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh before returning to Jharkhand for grassroots work. Co-founder of biofie and founder of Kartavyapath, teaching math to underprivileged kids, he also teaches at IIMs.