THIS is the season of hope in Bihar, generated largely by the thoughtful leadership of Nitish Kumar, even if the initial euphoria is giving way to more moderate, reasoned expectations about the trajectory of the state. But the questions – what are the origins of our present crisis and what went wrong remain as relevant as ever.

To refresh our memory, when Laloo Prasad Yadav came into power on the plank of ‘social justice’ and the Mandal Commission, Bihar had already been in crisis for more than two decades. There was immense enthusiasm for the twin political ideals of ‘secularism’ and ‘social justice’ that he claimed to represent, particularly among the socialist and liberal intelligentsia and political commentators. Indeed, it did appear to be a major step towards the enrichment of political democracy.

But as the politics of ‘social justice’ unfolded (undoing much of its ideals and most of the norms) and Bihar went through one general election after another, there should have been some reconsideration of the nature of the regime, and the cultural and political forces that it represented. Leading commentators like Arvind Das and M.J. Akbar seem never to have thought hard enough before saying ‘Amen’ to every statement of Laloo and leading the chorus of social justice. It is depressing to read their many articles of the 1990s, rationalizing, and perhaps promoting, the demolition of our system. Even accounting for their understandable enthusiasm for the political empowerment of the intermediate castes (or was it hope for reward?), it is difficult to understand how they could have been so cynical in dismissing all criticism of the emerging disorder as simply ‘upper caste’ resentment at the loss of power and authority.

The purpose of this note is to reorient the discourse on Bihar. Most of the writings on Bihar in recent years have focused on agrarian struggles and dalit movements in their various phases and their cultural and ideological moorings, but without relating them to the larger project of modernity. As such, they fail to notice the crucial fact that the rise of Laloo Prasad to pre-eminence in the politics of Bihar is discontinuous with the politics of the socialist movement in Bihar. Put simply, there is no continuity between Karpoori Thakur and Laloo Prasad; the latter represents an important break, the disintegration of the socialist project and its transformation into tribalism, pure and simple.

 

The socialist project is based upon a recognition that the dispossession of different subaltern groups may be constructed in different ways, but their resolution surely will be the same: that of stepping into the realm of civil society as sovereign subject-agent. Our concern must be to trace both the power relations that maintain their subordination and the cracks and fissures in the organization of hegemony that could potentially lead to its overcoming. In other words, what keeps the subalterns in their subordinate position, and how might their subalternity be overcome. The question is – does Laloo belong to the socialist project? I believe that Laloo Yadav is better understood as an effective, aggressive mobilizer of certain social groups, but without any social programme of reconstruction or any appreciation whatsoever of the institutions of civil society. Further, with a limited, instrumental understanding of the electoral process, he comes across as a typical product of a political and cultural process that has disarticulated empowerment from enlightenment.

Laloo Yadav is thus a symptom of a deeper crisis, one which may outlive his political career and fast spread to other areas, unless we begin addressing the problems of Bihar with some seriousness at the national level. After all, Bihar in the 1950s, while being economically backward was, in relative terms, just as well-equipped as several other states in the country to embark on the path of development and modernization.

 

It would be unfair to hold Laloo responsible for all of Bihar’s ills; the rot had indeed begun much earlier, and a proper narrative of our descent into this chaos would have many villains – too many, in fact, from various castes, and from various parts of the state – and it is for this reason that I believe that Laloo is a product of that process rather than its cause. But he is of great significance in Bihar’s trajectory, and it is critical that we explore his significance with some rigour. The widely shared view that he is a lower-caste populist, though partly illuminating, does not go far enough.

As Ernesto Laclau argued in his study of populism in Latin America (and the Third World generally),¹ it is the primary characteristic of populist discourses that they have an indeterminate political character, and therefore demand a close attention to the various ideologemes (ideological elements) constituting them (Peronism, Nasserism, and others). As we look at Laloo-speak, we cannot but be struck by the complete absence of any ideolgeme which might suggest a broad social or political ideal. The concept of ‘social justice’ – vague and abstract, at best – becomes in his arti-culation a notion void of any content, reconstructive or redistributive, along the lines of liberal modernity, and is reduced to tribalism, pure and simple.

 

I am labouring this point because in my view it is important to explore the deeper crisis of Bihar, of which the crisis of governance is only the most obvious symptom. Ever since the general elections of 1967, Bihar has suffered from chronic political instability, and even though the Congress or non-Congress coalitions succeeded in forming governments, for shorter or longer duration, no political leader can be said to have any real political authority. The tale of how the Congress high command under Indira Gandhi treated the chief ministers of various states, particularly in our region, is too well-known to be retold. What is remarkable about Laloo is the long spell of political power –15 years – that he enjoyed (longer than even Sri Babu). But what did he do for his own political constituency, let alone the state in general?

This dissonance between the two discursive worlds – the world of democratic empowerment and the world of enabling development – is, in my view, constitutive of the crisis of Bihar, and is itself part of a larger crisis of cognitive dissonance that afflicts our culture as a whole. The roots of this crisis should be located in the broader cultural processes in the state and not limited to the land system and struggles for its transformation, or political arrangements at one point or another.

 

It is important in any discussion of the current situation in Bihar to be alert to the pitfall of falling into one of the two extremes: one, that there was a ‘golden age’ from which we have descended into the present chaos largely due to Laloo’s leadership and two, that Bihar was culturally bankrupt anyway, and therefore Laloo had little to do with the all-round decline of the state. The truth lies somewhere between these extremes, and by exploring the trajectory of modernizing institutions in the state – their decay in the period 1967-1974, the populist intervention of the JP movement and the prolonged crisis of the Congress governments and the political institutions in general, and the emergence of Laloo and his consolidation of power all through the 1990s – one might gain some insight into the processes that have created the crisis of parliamentary democracy in our region.

Bihar indeed shares this predicament, to a greater or lesser degree, with Uttar Pradesh. Equally the new states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh too have long been peripheral regions in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh respectively, and are understandably subject to the same processes at work. But it must be said that in the case of Bihar (and possibly Uttar Pradesh), what we have is a retreat from modernization and development, rather than a simple case of slower development.

The reason why we must focus upon Laloo’s leadership is simple: unlike his predecessors, whether of the Congress or the United Front, he enjoyed complete control over the legislature and his party; his political legitimacy was never in doubt. Other chief ministers of Bihar, after the government led by K.B. Sahay, had always been subject to very real political instability. The coalition chief ministers were never sure if their governments would last through the next week, and the Congress chief ministers were constantly flying to Delhi to see ‘Madam’ or later ‘Rajiv ji’. The end of internal democracy in the Congress led to devastating consequences in several states, including Bihar. An exploration of the milieu from which not only Laloo but also his party legislators and supporters in the civil service and in other institutions (colleges, media) come, might offer us some understanding of the mentality they have brought into play and the society they have created. The cultural poverty of the power elite in Bihar at this point is indeed scandalous.

 

It is certainly true that modernity, under the aegis of British colonial power, entered Bihar and Uttar Pradesh relatively late. But until the mid-1960s, Bihar, in relative terms, could not have been described as ‘culturally poor’. It had a fairly good university (others had just been set up) and a few colleges that could have ranked among the better ones in the country.

There was the Bhartiya Kala Mandir headed by Hari Uppal offering excellent training to young artists. Remember Upendra Maharathi, who with Abindranath Tagore pioneered the swadeshi style of painting that came to be known as the Bengal School. Shivpujan Sahay, Dinkar, Rahula Sankrityayana, Nagarjuna, Nalin Vilochana Sharma, Renu and Rajkamal Chaudhari were widely regarded as important writers and critics of their generation. Institutions like the Rashtrabhasha Parishad, Bihar Research Society, Khuda Bakhsh Khan Oriental Library and the Sachchidananda Sinha Library enjoyed an enviable reputation.

The state had two newspapers that would have compared favourably with regional newspapers elsewhere (one has only to look at the coverage of the Bihar famine of 1965-66 in The Indian Nation, and the political coverage of 1965 in The Searchlight under the editorship of T.J.S. George to get some idea of the quality of journalistic coverage then). Nor can one forget the activities at the university – major speakers at the Wheeler Senate House, the extramural lecture series in Patna College, the lectures and talks at Hindi Sahitya Sammelan as well as Rashtrabhasha Parishad.

I could go on listing more institutions and people and occasions in the same vein – I was a kid growing up in Patna in the early 1960s, and remember regularly participating in many of these activities. But I hope one would get the point that it is not helpful to approach the situation in Bihar in terms of a lack of vibrant culture, the absence of cultural resources. Surely, there should have been more institutions, integrating more and more people, a greater vibrancy in our civil society, and a more nurturing environment for younger people. But cultural life was neither absent, nor too little, speaking in relative terms.

 

It would be more helpful to explore the gradual decay of these institutions, perhaps from the mid-1960s. I vividly recall the Patna University convocation of 1966. P.B. Gajendragadkar, the Chief Justice of India and one of the most thoughtful intellectuals of his time, was due to deliver the convocation address to be held at the Patna College Wilson Garden. In utter disregard of the conventions of the commencement, some ‘students’ demanded that they would receive their diploma only from the Chief Justice rather than the Vice-Chancellor, K.K. Datta. They behaved abominably, and the convocation turned into a Saathiyon, Saath Do rally.

Earlier, Sujit Mukherjee, an excellent and popular teacher in the English Department at Patna College (who regularly played on the College cricket team every Sunday all through the cricket season), was assaulted by a student who had been hauled up for impersonating a friend during the roll call. I am sure that people who were at the university in that period would recall any number of similar episodes.

 

What is significant about these incidents is that the institution failed to take any action against the students involved, and certainly did nothing to uphold the norms of the institution. Second, none of the leaders sought any redressal of specific grievances; nor did they focus upon the concrete issues affecting the student body. Nothing indicates the lack of seriousness about education more than the fact that the academic session which became irregular in 1967 – our MA examinations for 1972 were held in 1974 – has not been fixed even now! It is embarrassing, but true, that we ourselves as well as the power elite of Bihar today are products of the same decaying system which had been under constant attack, as it were, from that crucial period, 1966-67.

The same lumpen elements from the colleges were courted and mobilized in the 1967 election and thereafter. The JP movement of 1974-1975 lent them further respectability, but without offering them any ideological content and training, and certainly without disciplining them in the process of mobilization. Jaiprakash Narayan’s ‘socialism’, picked up in the heady environment of populism in the United States,² which led to the emergence of Fr. Coughlin in the Midwest and Huey Long in the South, lacked any deep appreciation of the fact that the work of the socialist movement, like the work of education, is constructive, not merely offering a critique. The danger is that in dismantling existing social and cultural norms, there is a tendency to assume that there need be no such norms (leading to a curious nihilism that we have seen in Laloo’s rule), or to rely on comforting and unquestioned orthodoxies (as we have seen in the support of left parties and leftist commentators), or to remain silent about proposed alternatives (JP’s own original response to his interlocutors).

 

To conclude, like JP’s slogan of sampoorna kranti – an idea remarkable for its lack of specifics – the notion of ‘social justice’ in Laloo’s project is bereft of any content and programme. To make a new beginning in Bihar in the realm of political thought and theory, both these ideas need to be radically questioned. It is high time that Laloo’s political project was critically assessed in terms of ‘social justice’ itself. A new beginning can only be made by critically interrogating the total revolution of JP in its different versions found in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and some other states. This is a continuing project that cannot be completed in a hurry as it requires a number of perspectives to address the problem. Those concerned with Bihar need to squarely confront JP’s lineage, delineate its various political ramifications and admit past mistakes as explicitly as possible.

 

* The author passed away in April 2007.

 

Footnotes:

1. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, New Left Books, London, 1977. Many of the ideas first outlined in this essay remain central to Laclau and Mouffe’s later post-Marxist writings. See their widely influential work, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso, London, 1984.

2. See Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest, Random House, New York, 1985 for an excellent study of American populism of the period. Jaiprakash Narayan was studying for a degree in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison at the time.