Gandhari’s curse lives on

Gandhari cursed that the Yadavas would destroy themselves through internecine conflict. And Gandhari’s curse came to pass in myth as well as in reality. Even after escaping to Dwaraka, the Yadavas could not avert the curse: they did destroy themselves by fighting with each other.Today, Laloo Prasad Yadav and Sharad Yadav are making sure that Gandhari’s curse remains potent.

There is a constituency in Bihar known as Madhepura. It is better known as the Vatican of the Yadavas: Rome hai Pope ka; Madhepura hai Gope ka (Rome belongs to the Pope; Madhepura belongs to the Gopes (Yadavas)). Among the very few illustrious people who have originated from Madhepura, the best known name is that of Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal, the man after whom the Mandal Commission was named. The eminent historian R.S. Sharma tells the story of when he was a student in Patna University. In Patna College hostel, he recalls, there was only one student who had his personal servants to cater to his needs: B.P. Mandal. R.S. Sharma recalls wryly: “His class was right even if his caste was wrong” As it turned out, B.P. Mandal’s caste was right. The scion of the 5000-acre landlord got immortalised as the author of the famous Mandal Commission Report.

But there is more to the fight between the two modern Yadavapotentates. They also reflect what is happening in contemporary politics in general and in Bihar in particular. And the metropolitan media have never been able to make a realistic assessment of Laloo Prasad Yadav and, therefore, they have portrayed him either as a clown or as a hero. They have been wrong on both counts. Sharad Yadav too has been wrongly portrayed. He has been seen either as the principal disciple of Jayaprakash Narayan or as a bumptious politician who can insult his own prime minister on the floor of the Lok Sabha.

The analysis of Laloo Prasad Yadav’s native state and Sharad Yadav’s adopted political abode has been similarly uninformed. Bihar has been so obscured by the cliches of poverty, backwardness and degeneration that cover it that significant developments there have been ignored.

The OBC vote bloc has split and it is that fragmentation which explains more about the electoral results than the appeal of ideology either of the Hindutva or Mandal variety. In the last elections, theKurmis endorsed the BJP-Samata combine not because they developed a sudden love for Ram but because many of them are upwardly mobile, wannabe upper castes who feel uncomfortable with Laloo Prasad’s cultivation of poverty.

Another feature of Bihar is that while the poor have remained where they were or, at best, become only marginally less poor, the rich have got immensely richer. The apparent paradox is that this affluence is exhibiting itself in a situation where economists conclude that there is no growth. The stagnation of Bihar has become such a commonplace that it is indeed difficult to note accumulation and explain its sources. And yet there are startling facts. The money market is booming in Bihar. Thousands of crore are put into the banking sector and even larger amounts are being garnered by institutions which claim that they are engaged in “para-banking”.

This phenomenon has not been sufficiently analysed but it holds the key to much of what is happening in Bihar and similar regions of thecountry. According to official statistics, Bihar has a more than 3 per cent rate of growth in the agricultural sector. This is among the highest growth rates in the country. Add to the wealth created by this to the substantial but largely unaccounted remittances which flow into Bihar. The remittances flow not only from the hundreds of thousands of Bihari workers who toil outside the state but, increasingly, also from the NRIs who migrated in substantial numbers two or three decades ago.

In all there is a fair amount of money in Bihar and it desperately seeks investment opportunities. The problem is that much of this money is outside the tax net and its owners cannot risk inclusion in the tax system. The provision that banks have to deduct tax at source on interest above Rs 10,000, therefore, propels this money towards “para-banking”. In turn, these institutions acquire enormous liquidity in times when the regular financial sector is beset with a debilitating cash crunch a phenomenon that enables them tolend out money at rates of interest of 36 per cent or more. Such usury also gives them tremendous political clout since they can also be used to disguise large deposits by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats by showing these as having come from many small depositors. Such benami money gives a new dimension to the political economy of beimani.This “modernised” usury fits in with the overall nature of the political economy of Bihar. It enables the upper caste landlords to diversify their operations, aids accumulation among the emergent kulaks, and effortlessly replaces sustained growth and redistribution with speculation. It also assists political “Sanskritisation”: witness the success of the BJP-Samata combine.

On the other side, Laloo Prasad Yadav has made a political virtue of stagnation. His rhetoric of anti-developmentalism amuses the observers from the big cities and he even gets some rural laughs when he proclaims that power can be dangerous for the poor since their cattle can getelectrocuted.

The combination of such speculator finance capital and political cretinism makes it very difficult for Bihar to break out of the vicious cycle into which it is caught.

And, to the best of their ability, Sharad Yadav and Laloo Prasad Yadav will make sure that even as they destroy one another, they also destroy Bihar.