Political Career
In the early 1990s, Shahabuddin came into the political limelight, joining the Janata Dal youth wing under Lalu Prasad Yadav. He won the 1990 and 1995 elections to the Vidhan Sabha (state legislative assembly), and was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1996 on the JD ticket, after which he grew in stature. In 1996, Shahabuddin was named as a Minister of State for the Home Ministry (which oversees law and order) in the H.D. Deve Gowda government, but he had to be dropped after the media highlighted his criminal background.
With Lalu Prasad continuing at the state government, and the formation of the Rashtriya Janata Dal in 1997, Shahabuddin's power increased dramatically. A report by the People's Union for Civil Liberties in 2001 states:
- The patronage and defacto immunity from legal action offered to him by the RJD government gradually made him a law unto himself and gave him an aura of invincibility. Since the police turned a blind eye to his criminal activities and allowed him to turn Siwan district into his fiefdom where his fiat ran.... Shahabuddin's reign of terror has been so complete that nobody dared depose against him in cases in which he was an accused.
Read more about this topic: Mohammad Shahabuddin
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or career:
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)