IT’S a Bihari paradox: In a state of hectic political motion, it is far easier to count the ways in which the social and political landscape has remained unchanged. Every new ferment seems to reinforce the older pattern. Players swap roles, but the saga of power and powerlessness remains the same. Significantly, the churning hasn’t yet stopped in Bihar.

The process of Mandalisation that Lalu Prasad Yadav catalysed and reaped since the mid-1990s carries on. A new cast of characters has climbed political centrestage in the last assembly elections. The Extremely Backward Castes – about 108 in all and making up an estimated 33 per cent of the electorate, and for long subsumed in the undifferentiated category of Other Backward Classes – showed signs of an unprecedented electoral consolidation in the assembly election that Yadav lost in November 2005. But over the years, caste churning has become an end in itself in Bihar, unable to transcend its own ineffectual motion. Social justice has neither sought nor found the vital linkages with governance.

The decade of the 1990s signalled a transition in literacy rates across states in India – but not in Bihar. As per Census 2001, in 1991-2001, the number of illiterates declined in the country by almost 32 million in absolute terms, the first time since the Census of 1951. While all the states that had a literacy rate of less than 50 per cent had climbed above that line in 2001, the literacy rate remained less than 50 per cent in Bihar.

But statistics sanitise. They don’t say anything about the peculiar vulnerability of the school without a boundary wall. In most schools in rural areas, classes are conducted in unbounded spaces criss-crossed by stray animals and passers-by. Across the state, government schools are decrepit places while private tuition shops buzz with activity. Till large-scale appointments of school teachers were made in 2006 to fill up posts left vacant for years, the teacher was called upon to perform the feat of ‘combined teaching’ – a euphemism for one ageing man or woman ‘teaching’ all subjects to as many as five classes simultaneously, in decrepit classrooms bare of teaching aids, when he or she is not required to double up as the cook and procurer-in-chief of ration for the midday meal.

Cities in Bihar throb to the same settled hum of generators. In the countryside, village after village is blanketed in darkness after sunset and electricity poles stand tall and dead for months, and sometimes years. In the capital city of Patna, the rickshaw appears to be the fastest growing mode of transport. Come election time and politics simply lifts off the ground in helicopter campaigns in a state where the highway is mostly a patchwork track between potholes.

Getting to know Bihar is to get accustomed to the lack of scandal and even dry humour with which people talk about both the missing public goods and the ubiquitous bahubalis. The local bahubali or politically connected muscleman is the accessible dispenser of fear and favour: he and his cohorts flaunt their weapons, but he also lends money for weddings and funerals.

 

Yet Biharis will not give up on politics. On the contrary, as any roadside conversation will testify, they invest politics with a consuming ardour. At one level, this is difficult to explain. The state has withered away as provider of public goods and the political party is only a platform overrun by assorted political entrepreneurs and bahubalis, apart from the party supremo’s cronies and family. In many constituencies this has reflected in the growing obsession about the local candidate, almost to the exclusion of party affiliation. A constituency like Araria is known to change parties with every successive election, plumping for independents in between.

It could be that the unflagging centrality of politics in the Bihari imagination speaks of a poverty of options. But perhaps it also draws upon the state’s unique and largely neglected resource. An army of grassroots activists responded to JP’s call for Total Revolution in the 1970s and have worked ceaselessly in their small spheres ever since. The nature of party politics and the march of social justice in Lalu’s Bihar has alienated them from the grand political narrative. But go to any district and you will find them hard at work, forging and tending supportive networks, steeped in the small struggle for a large ideal – be it equal access to land, water, or education. Their secession from the political mainstream means that all these struggles don’t add up to systemic change. But down the years, it has also meant a fount of ground-level vitality, one that could possibly be harnessed to re-energise the dwindled political vision at the upper echelons one day.

 

When Lalu Prasad Yadav was voted out of power in November 2005, after ruling the state, directly and by proxy, for 15 years, it was difficult to believe that regime change in Patna could mark a break in the state. Yet as I travelled again in Bihar in November 2006 to report on one year of the Nitish Kumar government, it was impossible to miss the frisson. The 2005 election had been about the loser, not the winner. But one year later, in diverse settings, people conceded mahaul badla hai, the atmosphere has changed. There was only a flickering sense of a more engaged government, but it seemed to be there across castes.

Admittedly, the subject seemed to have changed in Patna most of all. The Nitish Kumar government is far more media savvy than the previous regime. Anecdotes abounded in the capital of high-level agonising in the corridors of power over catchwords and slogans – should it be vikas ke saath nyay, development with social justice, or in the reverse order, nyay ke saath vikas? Press releases were delivered to newspaper offices with a brand new regularity, all proclaiming the imminent dawn of ‘Nootan Bihar’.

Yet even outside Patna, it was more than the fact that Lalu Prasad Yadav no longer occupied the centre of political discussion. In Lalu raj, governance had slowly but surely lost legitimacy as a measure of government, rendering Lalu’s historic and most spectacular achievement terribly lonely and fragile 15 years later – ‘but he gave the poor and the backward a voice’. Now, questions of governance were finding their way on to the table. Where were the roads that the new government had promised? Was it only talking about reviving the university and the school? Most of all, law and order had become the topic of daily conversation.

Significantly, it was also on the law and order front that the Nitish Kumar government had notched some early snapshots of visible success. From Gaya district south of the Ganga to Darbhanga in the north, a message was received and tentatively registered: The new government was breaking some of the old circles of impunity. In Belaganj constituency, distinctive for being represented in the assembly by a bahubali since 1971, except for one term in between, the people had noted that the rifle butt was no longer jutting as prominently from the window of the local bahubali-MLA’s Bolero. When a prominent businessman was murdered in Darbhanga, people spoke about how the killers were nabbed within a month. According to the Indian Medical Association, about 20 per cent of doctors in Patna had given up their private security between November 2005 and 2006.

 

There was little difference in the incidence of crime. But official conviction rates had gone up. What was more irrefutable was this – Sunil Pandey, sitting MLA of the ruling party had been sent to jail in an extortion case. A dent had been made in public skepticism; many were willing to overlook the fact that he had not yet been expelled from the party.

The government had apparently worked to a pragmatic plan: From the vast backlog of cases, pick out some showpiece cases and those that were easiest to carry to a conclusion. An estimated 25 per cent of all cases fell in the latter category, a senior police official told me in Patna, but their demonstration effect was more difficult to quantify. Select the cases that fall under the Arms Act, for one, in which only the evidence of the seizing authority, the police, is required. Bring these cases to a speedy trial, send out a message.

In another area, however, this policy of concentration on the low-hanging fruit seemed less persuasive even then. A pursuit of the quickest results in the field of primary education, it was being noted with some alarm, could saddle the system with long-term disabilities. The regularization of an army of shiksha mitras or para teachers – though accompanied by a provision of a review at a later stage – and the short-circuiting of procedures to fill up the sanctioned grand total of 3.40 lakh posts in state schools could end up becoming part of the problem.

 

The problem that the Nitish Kumar government faces in Bihar in the future does not merely flow from its own impatient pursuit of high-visibility results and the personality cult being cultivated around the chief minister. In many places, governance still seems like a one-man show, and there is continuing inattention to the need to revamp the administrative set-up, especially at lower levels. But in the long run, the challenge for the new government will also be this: Nitish Kumar will have to prove that he is not simply an accidental beneficiary, momentarily the right man at the time in Bihar.

In a sense, Lalu Prasad Yadav had played out his historical role in the state. In a setting of raging inequalities, he had almost single-handedly shifted the centre of gravity in favour of the historically disprivileged castes. But as his achievement became less reversible, it became more and more difficult to paper over the terrible limitations of his politics and vision. He could not give the politics of social justice a grammar of good governance. Even for its chosen beneficiaries, his conception of social justice turned out to be a sagging blessing in as much as it meant only the occupation of the limited structures of state. Fifteen years after he first came to power, one of the main problems that confronted Lalu was the explosion of ambitions in the ranks of his own caste, the Yadavs.

 

Nitish Kumar’s government has the opportunity of addressing the disillusion Lalu has left behind by redefining social justice in more spacious and plural ways. Paradoxically, to do this Nitish must first firm up his own political base. His election victory was delivered by the unlikely coming together of upper caste groups such as the Bhumihars and the Extremely Backward Castes. He must carry them both with him, without stoking subterranean fears of a return of upper caste dominance in the state. At the same time, even as he relies on the BJP for political support, he must court the Muslims, particularly the increasingly assertive pasmanda or backward sections of the community, to shore up a political coalition in time for the next election.

Nitish Kumar has both a challenge and an opportunity. To a large extent, it is still outlined for him by his predecessor’s achievements and failures. It remains to be seen whether Bihar’s new leadership can take ownership of its moment.