Unbounded: An Elegiac Biography Of ‘Naya Bihar’

Interweaving personal and professional commitments and convictions in a rapturous language of memoir, Unbounded is an honest and iconoclastic portrait of triumphs and travails of a police officer whose passion for teaching Physics has become a folk tale in Bihar and beyond.  Visit any IIT campus, you will come across his students sipping tea at the campus dhaba and reminiscing about him as ‘Abhayanand sir’ who inspired them to pursue their dreams of joining IIT through his conceptualisation of Super30.  If Bihar is today called ‘the sunshine state’ and land of phenomenal talent, at least a morsel of credit must be given to Abhayanand who donned the police uniform but used his transformative vision of teaching Physics to galvanise aspirants in Bihar.

Written in conversational prose, with shyness and humility, Unbounded tells a delightfully unique, personal tale of a cop surmounting routine bureaucratic and professional challenges to achieve a ‘near miracle’ in fixing a recalcitrant state. It sounds like a fantasy film but Abhaya­nand’s unconventional implementation of ‘speedy trials’ and creating India’s first contractual police force, the State Auxiliary Police (SAP) comprising retired army men, led to the liberation of Bihar from the infamous ‘jungle raj’, an info­rmal reign of terror by kidnappers and criminals.

Abhayanand says that he never used the law as a ‘weapon of offence as well as defence - never even the lathi (baton)’, but he succeeded in neutralising crime and criminals, including mafiosi politicians or what I call Violent Political Entrepreneurs (VPEs). It was almost like conquering a different country and establishing the rule of law in what late Arvind Das famously called the “mini- crime capitals’ of Bihar. For those unfamiliar  with Bihar, Unbounded is also a elegiac  biography of ‘Naya Bihar’.

For a political scientist like me who has worked decades on decoding the paradoxes of state power in Bihar, Unbounded is a tour de force about the rise, decline and restoration of what political sociologist Michael Mann calls the ‘autonomous infrastructural power of the state’.  Though there are some interesting examples of the so-called ‘weak state’s success in tackling crime, such as the presence of the state: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; building strategic capacity in the police: Sierra Leone; organising the return of government to conflict zones: Colombia; or reclaiming the city in Mexico City, the ‘near -miracle’ of restoring the Leviathan’s centrality - territorially, administratively, and socially in ending ‘the war of all against all’, and reviving the civic and associational life by the comboination of Nitish Kumar and Abhayanand is an unrivalled story in the literature of state, law, governance and ethnic peace.

Abhayanand’s ‘experiments with law’ were not hidden behind any administrative or legal orders – he simply brought a more scientific and forensic approach to policing and criminal investigation to fight the menace of crime in Bihar. In fact, Unbounded could be potentially a standard text for social scientists and policy makers about understanding how deeply entrenched organised armed gangs, roving bandits, kidnappers, caste armies and insurgent groups were dislodged so quickly in Bihar. Therefore, Unbounded is more than a memoir; it is a seminal contribution to exploring how ‘low-capacity state order’ can exercise its authority and regain its autonomy in places like Latin America, Asia and Africa.

In the twenty-five brilliantly curated chapters, Abhayanand reveals the layers of his identity, familial emotions, and his commitments to personal and professional integrity, despite the odds stacked against him. Using the flash-bulb memory technique of story-telling, he narrates real incidents and experiences of policing from his training days in the Hyderabad police academy to his posting at different levels of police bureaucracy and places like Dehri-on Sone, Sasaram, Madhepura, Aurangabad and Dhanbad. In this process, he illuminates the everyday challenges of last-mile policing and how it affects the poor and underprivileged. For young entrants to the coveted Indian Police Service, Unbounded is a compelling manual to understand the new age challenges of criminal investigation such as the economics of crime. His sage advice is ‘ In the job of a policeman, there are many lives, including his own, that are put at stake every day. One wrong move can cost a human life. It is important not  just to be alert but to be aware and also right’.

(This appeared in the print edition as "The Physics Of Policing")

Ashwani Kumar the writer is a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai