‘Rome mein Pope, Bihar mein Gope’

Laloo says he expects his coalition to win all of the state’s 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar. His Rashtriya Janata Dal has joined forces in Bihar with the Lok Janshakti party and the Congress to fight a coalition of Janata Dal United and the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Analysts in Bihar say Laloo has little to boast of after 14 years at the helm of the state. His party has mounted a deplorable effort to bring development to the state, and his divisive politics has helped to turn Bihar into a caste battleground, they say.

‘‘Development has not even been attempted,’’ says Shaibal Gupta, head of the Asian Development Research Institute in Bihar. ‘‘Their vision has been very small.’’

Bihar is in dismal shape. More than half its citizens live below the poverty line. With a per capita income of about Rs 4000—less than half of the national average—it is the poorest state in the country. More than half of Biharis are illiterate.

The RJD is not entirely to blame. The state has been unwittingly estranged from the central government and the local bureaucracy, both of whose cooperation are vital to initiating development projects. Distrust between the RJD and the state bureaucracy, which is drawn largely from upper caste elites, has been particularly strained.

Meanwhile, the central government has been notoriously stingy with Bihar. The economist Mohan Guruswamy found that, state by state, the central government consistently doles the least amount of investment in Bihar. In fiscal year 2000-2001, for example, he found that assistance to Bihar ranked the lowest in the country at Rs 2,293 crore, about half the amount given to Andhra Pradesh. Laloo has distributed campaign posters that list Guruswamy’s findings throughout the state.

‘‘This is a federal system,’’ says Laloo. ‘‘From where will money come?’’ RJD General Secretary Ram Bacham Roy suggests that the party has been the victim of conspiring upper castes and media to trash the party. ‘‘Their jealousy,’’ says Roy, has driven the government to withhold Bihar’s share of investment. ‘‘They hate Dalits and backwards.’’

The RJD’s self-portrayal as victim, despite its long-dominance of the state, is not surprising. Post-independence politics in Bihar has long been shaped by the conflict between peasant castes and landowners. Bihar— India’s ‘‘cradle of socialism’’ as some call it—was the site of the pro-farmer agitations and quota politics that would help define the path of Indian socialism. Indeed, while the national parties talk of opening markets and exploiting the global economy, avowed socialists are fighting on both sides of Bihar’s opposing Lok Sabha coalitions.

Where previous movements failed though the RJD’s appeal to caste succeeded in redrawing power equations in the state. Spurred on by the demise of the Congress and the passions of the Mandal commission, the party was able to slash upper caste representation in the parliament by half in the early 1990s.

But the RJD has failed at widening the political field beyond its own caste group. Assignments to government posts in Bihar continue to favour Yadavs and a fair representation of Muslims, but exclude other OBCs and Dalits.

While ADRI estimates their population in Bihar at less than 15 per cent, Yadavs held nearly one-third of government posts between 1995 and 2000, according to historian Christophe Jaffrelot. Half of the RJD’s 26 Lok Sabha candidates for the current elections are Yadavs, who have on average voted 80 percent in favour of their own.

Would-be allies of the RJD, like Bihar’s communist parties, have grown weary of the party’s failure to accommodate other poor sections of Bihar. ‘‘Caste is the only slogan for these parties,’’ says Santosh Sahar, state committee member of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). The RJD’s fraternisation with criminals has too damaged its reputation. Small-level mafias dominate most neighbourhoods in Bihar. Many of them have sought political office. In the current round of elections, the leaders of rival militias— Rameshwar Prasad, a former Naxalite, and Brameshwar Singh, head of the brutal landlord militia Ranvir Sena—are contesting the same seat in Ara district.

In particular, the RJD’s connection to murder accused Mohammed Shahabuddin, who is running on an RJD ticket, has raised many eyebrows. Shahabuddin is currently in jail for allegedly throwing a 17-year-old political activist into a furnace. Laloo considers him a friend.

RJD secretary Roy offers this defence: ‘‘More were killed in Lucknow than by Shahabuddin,’’ referring to the sari stampede which killed at least 20. ‘‘He may have done some wrong…but that doesn’t make him a hard-core criminal.’’ The BJP, meanwhile, is seeking to capitalise on frustrations with the RJD, which it says has only hurt the poor. The BJP has benefited most though from the demise of the Congress, which left a generous political constituency for the BJP—upper caste elites who constitute about 15 percent of the state.

‘‘We are quite optimistic,’’ says BJP spokeswoman Kiran Ghai. ‘‘The BJP has been able to take advantage.’’ The RJD has done nothing for the state, adds Ghai, and the polls will show that even minorities and the poor have defected to the BJP.

But Laloo is dismissive. ‘‘If I’ve done no development than why am I still here?’’ he says. ‘‘The outcome will show you how popular I am.’’