He has been charged with two dozen crimes, voted into parliament three times and even from inside a jail cell Mohammed Shahabuddin reigns supreme over his lawless district where only the potholes outnumber his portraits.
Shahabuddin epitomizes the rough politics in the eastern Indian state of Bihar where candidates for elections that start tomorrow include suspected murderers, alleged rapists and fugitives who somehow manage to file nomination papers.
Shahabuddin, who turns 37 on May 10, the last of five dates of the staggered national election, is in jail pending trial over the murder of Munna Chowdhary, a 17-year-old local political activist whose body was allegedly thrown into the furnace of a brick kiln.
But Shahabuddin remains the undisputed king of Siwan, a dusty town 200km northwest of Bihar's capital Patna, where his deep-set eyes stare out from pictures on the motorcycles and cycle-rickshaws which plough the beat-up streets.
"Such is his fear and clout that no other political party candidate, though they are contesting, have dared to put up their flags or posters," said Ajit Kumar Singh, a doctor.
His party office has a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, the icon of India's non-violent independence struggle.
But Gandhi would be unlikely to win an election in Bihar, a state of 83 million people where voting is colored by gun-slinging, tough-talking and open brawls.
"No one can win an election in Bihar without firing even a single bullet," said veteran Bihar journalist Kanhaiya Bhellary of The Week magazine.
Shahabuddin has denied involvement in all the criminal cases brought against him and has never been convicted, depriving the federal Election Commission of a possible way to bar him.
The only other political office in Siwan belongs to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML), a far-left agrarian party that is Shahabuddin's only credible rival and was the root of one of the most notorious cases against Shahabuddin.
In 1997, Chandrashekhar, a charismatic CPI-ML youth leader at New Delhi's prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, died in a hail of bullets when he was addressing a meeting on the busy market street in Siwan.
Four years later, when Shahabuddin and his posse led a drive against cheating during college exams, he clashed with a senior police officer who said he was in charge of the tests.
The police officer was reportedly slapped on the cheek, enraging him to such an extent that he launched an operation against Shahabuddin in his ancestral village of Pratapgarh.
"It was a 10-hour gun battle in which Shahabuddin's men fired from all kinds of automatic weapons," said a local witness.
"Shahabuddin managed to escape in the night after 11 of his men were killed," the witness said.
Shahabuddin's evasion of the law ended last year when a new state police chief, D.P. Ojha, reopened his file and slapped a slew of cases against him.
Ojha even sent a report to the federal home ministry claiming Shahabuddin had links with rival Pakistan's spy agency and gunrunners in violence-torn Kashmir.
After months of remaining underground, Shahabuddin surrendered with fanfare in August and vowed to "teach a lesson to madman Ojha."
Ojha was soon sacked by the state government.
Laloo Prasad Yadav, head of Shahabuddin's Rashtriya Janata Dal party and Bihar's de facto ruler, called Shahabuddin his "younger brother" and personally escorted him to file his election nomination.
RSS