Déjà Vu: Outlook Editor Writes On Bihar's Law and Order

I lived through those times. Of chaos and gunshots, kidnappings and a lot of fear. It was 1999 when my school senior Shilpi Jain’s semi-naked body was found in a car in Patna. The case remains unsolved and for years, we have lived with that memory of a rape. She had been gang-raped. She was only 22. I have repeated this story many times over, in the hope that talking about it will release it from my body. But stories like that hardly leave you. They refer to those times as “jungle raj” and when Nitish Kumar took over in 2005, he said he would end the “jungle raj”. It is true that he did sort out many things and the streets became less dangerous for us.

It is 2025 now, and the lines between the past and the present have blurred. Patna, my city, has had a facelift and we have shiny bridges and metro and flyovers and malls and cafés, but now we are again reliving the past, the one where lawlessness prevailed.

Every day, we have incidents of murder in Bihar. The witch-hunting case in Purnea, where five members of a family were killed, the case of six people breaking into a hospital in Patna and killing a murder convict are a few among the many cases of unchecked violence that are now signalling a return to that chaos.

“Jungle raj” was once synonymous with the collapse of governance during Lalu Prasad’s regime. Now, it is a phrase to describe what’s happening in Bihar ahead of the 2025 elections.

Is this a crisis that seems to be the fate of our state?

Will Nitish Kumar, the Chief Minister of Bihar, hold it together? Or is he too old and undermined by the alliance to do anything at all? For years, Kumar changed sides to keep himself in power and navigated the polarising politics of religion outside and with it came compromises. Will Bihar change? Will that change be for good?

Or will the “jungle raj” take over and will Lalu Prasad share that burden with Nitish Kumar now?

In Jungle Raj, Outlook’s August 1 issue, we explored why the Bihar elections matter so much. Our reporters delved into the state’s caste equations, governance records, electoral controversies and national ambitions, along with taking a hard look at the law and order situation— all of which make the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections one of the most consequential state polls of this electoral cycle.