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.
