The Bihar Laloo lost

To go to Bihar on poll-eve is to be forced to count the unsavouries that have been swallowed whole for decades. To say there has been a de-institutionalisation in Bihar is not to express it fully. There has been an institutionalisation, in fact, of the distortion and corruption.

You can sense it in the settled hum of the generator mafia in the towns and the accepted routines of genuflection to the local bahubali in the countryside. You hear it constantly in the lack of scandal and the dry humour with which they speak of such things in Bihar.

There is an institutionalisation of absenteeism framed in derelict buildings that are the government-run schools and hospitals, and in the flourishing tuition shops and private practices. Petty thuggery has been institutionalised, so also kidnapping for large ransoms.

Migration is a natural phenomenon and it is not just the middle classes who pack off their children before they strike roots at home, nor merely skilled labour that seeks more enabling environments. Bihar cannot hold back its unskilled labour either. On beaten paths, they move from villages and small towns pockmarked with closed mills, abandoned factories and lapsed foundation stones, to pull rickshaws in Patna 8212; perhaps the country8217;s only capital city where the rickshaw is the fastest growing mode of transport 8212; or to fill up trains to other states. The Intercity from Saharsa to Patna is crammed with about 15,000 passengers daily, mostly migrants.

Years of those debilitating habits and routines have taken their toll on the citizen8217;s political imagination. It seemed most glaring this poll-eve, even more than it did during a visit to the state on the eve of the last election in February, in the conspicuous obsessing about local candidates.

In another place, the voter8217;s concentration on the candidate near him could be read as a welcome thing 8212; as a sharper tug at the line of accountability that stretches between the government and people. In Bihar, it spoke of a sad dissembling.

As you moved away from Patna, and from town to village, the political party was a blurring image. Even in Patna, the election was mostly a horse race and the local media preoccupied with studious measurements of the body language of Laloo Yadav and Nitish Kumar. But the diverting buzz around party offices and the routine invocations of party symbols were token reminders at least of the remains of an institution.

The increased focus on the local candidate bares yet another disbelief perhaps 8212; in the power of the overarching political idea and slogan. The last slogan in Bihar, one that straddled the largest part of the state for the longest time, was Laloo8217;s 8220;social justice8221;, with 8220;secularism8221; added on. Now that idea lies besieged and splintered 8212; by its own limited success, by its many terrible failures.

In a crucial sense, Laloo8217;s contribution is valuable and must be acknowledged to be so if Bihar is ever to move on from its past. Across the state, men and women from the backward castes still stand up and defend the RJD8217;s record by that one irrefutable declaration: 8220;He gave us a voice.8221; But it is also apparent that 15 years later, many in his own constituency are clamouring for more and Laloo hasn8217;t the political vision nor his party the organisational fibre to respond to their demands.

The RJD has been spectacularly unable to coopt or manage the explosion of ambitions among the Yadavs. The panchayat elections held after a gap of 23 years in 2001 threw up an army of half-empowered mukhiyas who wanted to be MLAs. No one party could have satisfied so many ticket-seekers at one go. But had the RJD been more than Laloo8217;s private fief overrun by his family and favoured bahubalis, it may have been able to accommodate these impatient hordes in other ways. It could have tempered their ambitions.

Laloo8217;s inadequacy runs much deeper. He has failed to show his own constituency of Backward Castes and Muslims that empowerment could mean something more than their kinsmen occupying the state. This may have seemed to be the easier promise to make in a state whose capacities to mobilise resources for any form of public development have always been deeply suspect. But it has left the messiah holding an impossibly sagging bag of goodies 15 years later.

Laloo8217;s failure is also that he has been unable to use his rootedness in his own constituency to reach out and become a larger leader. The progressive paring down of his own following, 1995 onwards, underlines just how untouched he is by the skill or imperative of linkage politics.

The irony is, it8217;s not yet done, the process that Laloo triggered and reaped for 15 years, this process that so lost its way. Be it the increasing pressure exerted on the main players in this election by the Extremely Backward Castes 8212; about 108 in all, they make up an estimated 33 per cent of the total population 8212; or the Pasmanda Backward Muslim voice demanding a separate hearing, Bihar8217;s social churning hasn8217;t stilled. And the danger is this: if these new assertions are to settle into the old paradigms of social justice, they will also lose their claim to deepening democracy and bringing empowerment.

Whichever way the election goes, the urgent challenge that awaits Bihar8217;s new government is the same: to rescue the notion of social justice from its thinning tatters. To re-energise it by guiding it into more spacious places, from where it can enter into broader social coalitions and partake of larger economic agendas. The challenge is to imbue the vocabulary of social justice with a grammar of good governance.