Book Excerpt: Bihar Before Nitish

Not too many people around the world, or even in the rest of the country, were holding their breath when Bihar elected a new government in October 2005. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government ended a fifteen-year rule by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) led by Lalu Prasad Yadav followed by a few months of President’s rule.

Few shed a tear for Lalu failing to regain power, but equally few had any serious expectations from the new chief minister, the relatively quiet former railways minister, Nitish Kumar. …. After all, Bihar had been poor, uneducated, feudal, lawless, violent and caste-ridden for as long as one could remember. As Arvind Das says in his book The Republic of Bihar. ‘All that seems to emanate from this benighted state are stories of horror: economic backwardness, social inequity, electoral banditry, political cupidity, caste riots and cultural degeneration.’ In late 2005, it was outright dangerous to be in Bihar.

The phrase ‘jungle law’ was being used rampantly in the media to describe the state of affairs. Kidnapping for ransom had become an industry. Women avoided venturing out after dark even in the state capital, Patna. Politically protected gangs brazenly roamed its streets in jeeps, with firearms in open view. Six years on, all that [seemed] like the phantasmagoria of a nightmarish past. Patna [looked] more like other Indian cities now, complete with traffic snarls and crowds. The newly built

Eco Park [was] thronged by young couples—… allowed in only one part …—as well as families, and the presence of women there after nine in the evening hardly [raised] an eyebrow. When the first Domino’s Pizza store opened in Patna, it recorded the highest sales in the nation. The number of cars at the P&M Mall—Bihar’s first mall that opened in 2011—[was] often twice as many as the 150 parking spaces available. The price of land in the Patliputra Industrial Area [had] shot up from Rs 6 lakh per acre to Rs 2.5 crore ... In five years, Bihar [had] clocked close to the highest growth rate in the nation. [By 2012] it [had] the fastest growing market for mobile phones…

For the first two decades after independence, power was in the hands of upper caste chief ministers, with the first switch coming with the election of Karpoori Thakur … for two short stints—first in 1970 and then in 1977. ... Hailing from the barber caste, he broke the grip of both the Congress party and, more importantly, the upper caste hold on state politics. From a historic perspective, Thakur heralded a shift in power in Bihar to the lower and middle castes and served as an inspiration to a whole generation of middle-caste socialist leaders keen on remedying the prevalent social injustice in the state.

So much so that even his stubble survived as a recognizable symbol among his followers in today’s Bihar politics. While his rule ended with the nation-wide collapse of the Janata Party experiment, a decade later Bihar again swung away from the Congress party to middle-caste combinations soon after the V.P. Singh-led Janata Dal combination of centrist parties captured power in Delhi in 1989. Meanwhile, Thakur passed away in 1988.

The flamboyant and charismatic Lalu Prasad Yadav became chief minister in 1990 and held power for much longer than V.P. Singh could at the Centre. Forced to step down after his arrest following a CBI investigation into a corruption scandal, Lalu installed his wife as the chief minister in 1997 and continued to effectively rule Bihar uninterrupted … [D]uring these years, the state government’s agenda was almost completely that of ‘social justice’, meaning empowerment of backward castes—almost exclusively that of Yadavs in reality—and the utter neglect of governance and economic development. ... It was in this situation that Nitish Kumar came to power … in November 2005, … his political and ideological roots … largely the same as Lalu’s. Both … were protégés of Karpoori Thakur and … in the same party—the Janata Dal—in the early 1990s and shared a strong political partnership till they parted ways… As the hold of the Congress over the Bihar electorate waned in the late 1980s and early 1990s Lalu, with his socialism, social justice and secularism plank, captured the OBC and Muslim combination. ... Nitish’s Kurmis were

numerically not strong enough to ensure his entry into office, but the NDA alliance … helped him get the upper caste votes—from a people severely antagonized by Lalu—together with the non-Yadav OBC votes. Consequently, now the Dalit votes were of key importance in the equation. …Despite all the lawlessness and economic backwardness of Bihar in 2005, the end of the Lalu–Rabri era had more to do with Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan of Lok Janshakti Party (LJP)—once again of similar political lineage as Lalu and Nitish—who was then an important force in Bihar politics. It was his hesitation in supporting Lalu after the February 2005 elections that led to a hung assembly. Paswan teamed up with Lalu again before the 2010 elections; but had he supported Lalu after the first 2005 elections, Bihar’s history would have been very different. …

It would be unjust to lay the entire blame for Bihar’s sad state of affairs in 2005 at Lalu’s door. ... Bihar was in very bad shape in the late 1980s. ... A person was killed every three hours during Jagannath Mishra’s first stint. Gun-making had become a growing industry in several districts near Patna. Corruption was rampant with fixed rates for appointments, transfers and promotions.

Perhaps the worst came in the form of the notorious Bhagalpur riots of October 1989, when a procession carrying bricks for the proposed Ram Mandir in Ayodhya sparked a riot that spread like wildfire to 250 villages around Bhagalpur and consumed over 1,200 lives according to official statistics. Most of the victims were poor Muslim weavers.

The civil administration was paralyzed and the army had to be called in ... Lalu symbolized and championed a complete break in the style of Bihar politics… flaunt[ing] his rustic background with characteristic wit and nonchalance. He held Cabinet meetings in the open, like in a village chaupal.… Lalu accomplished something that decades of socialist speeches had failed to do in Bihar—he made being a backward caste an acceptable and respectable identity construction. And therein lay the secret of the Lalu brand of charisma. At the time Lalu came to power, lower castes in Bihar still lacked a human existence—… he gave them dignity and a voice almost from the first instance. It would be a mistake to allow the government statistics on material changes mask this powerful sociological effect

The February [2005] elections … returned a hung assembly—broadly split three ways between the RJD, Paswan’s LJP and the NDA. Soon a group of MLAs from the Paswan camp defected to the NDA side, but before NDA could stake claim for the government, the Governor, Buta Singh, recommended President’s rule in an extremely controversial decision that later earned him severe reprimand from the Supreme Court. Nitish lost his chance then, but this denial worked in his favour … in November in the form of a significant sympathy vote