National

Look Past The Mirage

The more things Nitish changes, the more they stay the same

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Look Past The Mirage
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Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s chief minister and would-be kingmaker at the Centre, remains an enigma even in his state. He is known to be squeaky-clean, but his government, it might be said, is as corrupt as any the state has had. There has been much talk of a crackdown on criminals, but his government looks the other way when dons like Suraj Bhan, Anant Singh and Sunil Singh grab houses and land. In fact, Nitish publicly thanked another don, Ranbir Yadav, for saving his life: Ranbir had grabbed the carbine of his wife’s bodyguard and opened fire to scare away a mob demonstrating agai­nst the chief minister. And for all his condemnations of Laloo Prasad Yadav’s “jungle raj”, Nitish has shown little hesitation in rehabilitating many close associates of the former chief minister, whom he calls his “bade bhai”.

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The list of contrasts could go on. Nitish has received much praise for distributing bicycles to girl students and motivating them to attend school. But, by all accounts, school and college education have themselves collapsed in Bihar. He complains that the Centre discriminates against Bihar in funds allocation; yet he himself is accused of favouring his home district Nalanda over others in development. And while projecting himself as a democrat, he has arrogated to himself the right to spend MLAs’ development funds, worth Rs 600 crore annually, as he pleases.

For all his talk of a hands-on approach, the chief minister has not bothered to visit a single spot that witnessed a police firing. And there are times when he is insensitive, as when he declared in the assembly that if the leader of the opposition could persuade the CBI to take up the investigation of a girl missing from Muzaffarpur, he would have no objection to such a probe, knowing well that only the government can request the central agency to take up a case.

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Patna’s Gandhi Maidan on the day ‘Bihar Divas’ was organised on a grand scale. (Photograph by Manoj Sinha)

On the national centrestage, Nitish is being courted both by the NDA and the UPA in the run-up to 2014, and in the same manner, in Bihar, you see two aspects to whatever change Nitish has wrought. New roads are visible, no doubt. Damodar Mishra, a retired central government employee, says, “Once, it took a two-hour ride on a motorcycle to cover 30 km and reach my son’s sasural in Madhubani; today, it takes barely 25 minutes.” But the distance between Bakhtiarpur and Patna, barely 50 km, still takes three hours because of the chicken-necks on the road. 

Improved law and order is another plus. At Bakhtiarpur, a waiter at the iconic Mamata dhaba, actually a motel, is unequivocal. Returning home late at night was a nightmare ten years ago. Carrying cash and valuables was a strict no-no. It was advisable to form a group before venturing out into the dark. “All that has changed,” he says, grinning. “It’s now safe.”

In Patna, film critic Subhash K. Jha concurs: “Earlier, we constantly worried when children stepped out of home. But that oppressive level of fear is behind us.” The circulation head of a national newspaper, who recently relocated from Chandigarh, says he is enjoying his stay. “I can go out with my wife, return late, eat out, socialise, attend functions without a worry. What more can one ask for?” Indeed, if the unending rows of shops and eateries and the surge of vehicular traffic are indicators of prosperity, if not progress, Bihar’s capital is basking in its new-found freedom after what the chief minister keeps reminding people of—the “jungle raj” of 1990-2005.

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(Photograph by Manoj Sinha)

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Police records, however, reveal a fairly high incidence of crime. Strangely, the number of kidnappings in the state has actually gone up since 2004, from 2,566 to over 3,700 in 2012. But the number of “kidnappings for ransom” is said to have come down from 411 to just about 70. Murders, road robberies, burglaries and so on have however declined by 15 to 25 per cent (see box). What has happened is that criminals have become contractors, says a perceptive resident not willing to be named. “Bihar is now a republic of event managers and contractors and people are making more money than they did before,” he says. An employee in the state’s department of culture elaborates: “Whenever artistes are contacted in Delhi, Mumbai etc for performances and asked to specify fees, costs and conditions for performing, an undersecretary in the department calls them up individually and asks them to jack up the rates. ‘Why have you quoted Rs 60,000? You’ll be left with nothing because our share will be Rs 40,000. So revise the quotation, make it a neat, round figure of one lakh rupees.’” Everyone doubles up in laughter at his mimicry of the undersecretary. Similarly, estimates for construction work and roads are jacked up to ensure everyone gets his cut while spending a reasonable amount on construction. “Under the earlier regime, people were not sophisticated enough,” says a superintending engineer, explaining the tactics.

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Nothing in Bihar today gets done without bribes, Chandra Uday Kumar, a diehard Nitish supporter from the chief minister’s Harnaut constituency, grudgingly admits. Kumar, who is on the nine-member committee constituted by the administration to monitor health centres, is frustrated by what he has seen. “The safai karmachari at a PHC has an additional earning of some Rs 1,000 daily. The nurse, the auxiliary nurse-midwife and even the ambulance driver—all of them charge patients. Complaints have led to nothing. The nurse in fact threatened to accuse a doctor of molestation if he dared proceed against her,” he says. But in a state where health centres were till recently rented out to accommodate wedding guests and for use as godowns to store mangoes in summer, people take the palm-greasing in their stride.

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The PHC in Harnaut is impressive. Two ambulances can be seen ferrying patients. A doctor, an Ayurveda specialist, is in attendance. A separate wing has been set up for expectant women and a nurse is bustling around. But of course this is in the chief minister’s home district and in his own constituency. Elsewhere, the PHCs are not as functional, claim people.

Actually, there is no dearth of horror stories. A 23-year-old woman was left bleeding at one of these health centres while the attendants refused to cut the umbilical cord till they were adequately compensated, recalls Dr Shakeel, executive director of  CHARM (Centre for Health & Resource Management). A Planning Commission report, he points out, has recorded why Muslim women stopped going to government hospitals in Biharsharif—because the staff would taunt them for producing too many children. At Maner, a Dalit woman complained that the medical officer would not touch her because she was a Dalit. Clearly, Nitish is no Jayaprakash Narain. While he has tried to rally people round a “Bihari identity” and “Bihari pride”, the state is still plagued by both casteism and communal hatred.

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The chief minister himself reflects the paradox that is Bihar. He had the sensitivity to order that disability certificates be issued from PHCs (and not only from district hospitals) so that the disabled do not have to take umpteen trips to the district headquarters. Similarly, when a delegation of SAWM (South Asian Women in Media) called on him and complained that even as the number of women in the media had gone up, many media organisations still did not have a separate toilet on their premises for women, he was quick to enquire whether they existed in the state secretariats. They did not—and the chief minister thanked the women for drawing his attention to the problem. But when a member of the delegation from Calcutta drew his attention to the “best parts of Patna being so dirty”, he lost his cool and retorted, “Is that my job, to clean the city?” and refused to take further questions.

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Visitors, however, cannot help but be struck by the contrast. As Sonu Nigam, Ronu Mozumdar and Malvika Sarukkai performed at the iconic Gandhi Maidan as part of the state’s foundation day celebration last month, a stench wafted about. It was the stink of garbage piled outside the Bankipore Club (established in 1865 as the ‘European Club’), a stone’s throw from Gandhi Maidan. It made people wonder why the government couldn’t get the basics right. Crores were spent on the celebrations but it did not occur to anyone to clean up the city, remove the garbage or spend some money on garbage bins.

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Bad prioritisation is also visible opposite the railway station. It’s a chaos of vehicles of all sizes and shapes: there’s no place for parking and pedestrians. But the Rs 150 crore Buddha Smriti Park, where people can park vehicles for a fee and go inside to meditate, has come up on 21 acres nearby. Nitish himself planned the park, chose the site and approved the design. For an analogy to grasp mentally the incongruity of it, imagine a meditation park near the Paharganj side of the New Delhi railway station. The incongruity of it all did not strike the chief minister.

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Many well-intentioned schemes have led to unexpected outcomes: an activist working closely with UNICEF pointed out that fake enrolments in schools are made to gather bicycles, uniforms and textbooks given as freebies. Radio sets distributed to Mahadalits to enable them to listen to programmes meant for them get sold in days—an evening’s liquor is preferred over the progra­mmes. Panch­ayats, allowed to appoint primary school teachers, got some 3 lakh appointed on contracts that gave them Rs 6,000 as monthly salaries. But now they are demanding parity with government teachers, who draw salaries four to five times more. The state government is yet to bow to the pressure, and bureaucrats privately ack­nowledge that the scheme has come a cropper because the panchayats appointed teachers who did not have the qualifications, the ability or the inclination to teach. Many were not qualified but got through by producing fake certificates and greasing the palms of the mukhias or panchayat heads. Not surprisingly, many of them flunked the test they were put through and private TV channels have had a field day showing them up as a primary school teacher pronounced ‘father’ as “phatey-haar”. What the mispronounced word means in Hindi (torn and defeated), say critics, could well be descriptive of Bihar.

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By Uttam Sengupta in Patna and Nalanda

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