Bihar’s boat people

He was a Punjabi friend of a Punjabi friend of mine. He ran a shop that washed cars and filled oils in them. We had gathered at our friend’s place to celebrate his birthday and the birthday boy, who was also my boss then, told the face-recognition master how I did not look like a Bihari. “Oh, he does,” the businessman said, raising his hand in an announcement of certain knowledge. “I can tell a Bihari in a second.”

I did not know how one could. I still don’t. And my boss was perhaps too decent to have such acute forensic skills.

This skill, I noticed over the next several years till I left India in 1999, was quite common to the ‘native’ citizens of Delhi. Some had refined it to the extent that they could tell a Bihari from a human from, say, Madhya Pradesh or Orissa.

A Bihari, it turned out, was dark-skinned (like most Indians), thin (like most poor people), sported a moustache (like most Indian men) and spoke a version of Hindi heavily influenced by his local dialects (like most north Indians). But a Bihari was also seen to have crude manners and was nearly always found doing menial jobs, keeping gates in Gulmohar Park, pulling rickshaws in Patparganj and washing chhole-kulche plates in Nehru Place.

And this has been the trouble — their poverty and resultant talent for monopolising menial jobs in the cities of a largely poor country.

Immigrants are hated for two reasons — for being prosperous and for being destitute. Jews and Gypsies. Marwaris and Biharis. While talent for business is limited to a small class of migrants, the poor move in swarms. So for every Marwari who left his district to settle in Chandil in Jharkhand, there are a hundred hungry peasants in Samastipur buying tickets to Delhi and Mumbai as we talk. The risk of suffering away appears more palatable than the permanent pain of penury at home. Cities offer hope, for their children if not for themselves.

But our cities are also poor places. This means their capacity to nurture hope for such large numbers is very limited. There is competition at the basic level and the ‘native’ people feel threatened — economically, sometimes also culturally.

A politician’s cynical tactic to win over a constituency by targeting ‘outsiders’ is not hard to understand. But in India, it will not succeed. Because the poor are just too many. And they have a constitution to back them. The Hajipur peasant’s need to feed his five children backed by his right to go anywhere he can earn the money to buy food is too forceful a reality for a political ploy to negate.

Perhaps many Marathis too can tell a Bihari just by looking at his face. But that would not expel him from his quarter-roomer in Mumbai. As my friend’s friend’s certain knowledge of my maligned origin failed to send me back to Bihar.

In fact, with some education and with the help of a state that let me earn a livelihood by honest means, I went further West. Where Biharis write software and Gujaratis sit their young children. Where they all have health insurance.

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