The plot thickens

On January 4, 1980, the day of the general elections to the 11th Lok Sabha, seven voters were hacked to death in Sitamarhi constituency. Booths were captured wholesale, and the then district magistrate-cum-returning officer Patna declared the result at 6 am amid enraged telegrams to the election commission in Delhi, but the EC slept through the flurry of the anguished messages. It was the pre-Seshan, pre-STD, pre-mobile era.

That was 1980, 10 years before Laloo Yadav.

In the ’84 Assembly elections, 21 Dalits were roasted alive in the Vaishali area. That was six years before Laloo Yadav’s reign commenced.

Bindeswar Singh, a khawas (landlord’s valet and major domo) was caught six years after a murder in Madhubani district and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was 59 years old when he received the life sentence. I was asked to draft a mercy petition to the governor to commute his sentence, but owing to sketchy details about the murder, I couldn’t make progress.

A week later I was summoned by the landlord on whose behalf Bindeswar Singh had committed the murder, and saw the murderer standing respectfully bare-footed in the feudal’s presence. He had been spirited out of Beur jail in Patna, and transported to Delhi to supply details of the murder.

This was 15 years before Laloo Yadav was chief minister.

At about that time in the interior villages of Nawada and Gaya districts, I could use only three categories to classify the population: those who had had one meal today; those who had not eaten today, but had had a meal yesterday; and those who hadn’t eaten today or yesterday, but had had a meal the day before; and nobody fell into the fourth category, those who were sure they would eat one meal tomorrow.

White-knuckled hunger, Bhukhmari, stalked the interiors a decade prior to the Laloo era. Criminally, Laloo played on each of these trends to his own ends, while he proclaimed himself the Messiah of the Oppressed. In fact, his and Rabri’s governments inflicted the deepest welts on the poorest.

Before you consider the evidence of Laloo’s betrayal of the poor, a digression. The Wall Street Journal recently reported the case of about 2,000 squatters in a Buenos Aires barrio, who occupied a square mile of public land, constructed shanties, and lived in unspeakable squalor for years. Then 50 per cent of the squatters were given land titles to the encroached land, but due to an administrative quirk, the others were denied the titles. A survey conducted some years later discovered that households with pattas had built robust houses, had children at high school, and had become entrepreneurial because they were not afraid of being tossed off the land. Those without land titles had leaking asbestos roofs, excreta floated in open drains, and their glum children wasted away in the bylanes.

Laloo, the Saviour of the Poor, Downtrodden and Exploited knows that a little land unshackles the poorest families and galvanises all economic processes in their favour. But Laloo did not, as chief minister or as ipso-facto chief minister, distribute land to the poorest. According to information with the Patna Secretariat, as much as 4 lakh acres of land are lying with the Bhoodan Yagna Committees for redistribution. Not even an acre was distributed, until a PIL was filed in the Patna High Court. The court passed strictures on the government, but the land remained undistributed. Laloo also ignored land consolidation completely, and again the babus in the Patna Sachivalaya will tell you that there was a tacit directive to go slow.

But the central question is, where do we go from Laloo-bashing, or to stand the question on its head, is Laloo’s misrule alone responsible for Bihar’s pathos and its pathetic indices? The answer is buried in the feudal underpinnings of Bihar, where the British gave unbridled powers to rent collectors, zamindars, who grabbed other’s human rights to fill their own coffers and those of the British. This appropriation had disastrous consequences for the Bihari mind-set, where people began to see ‘‘grabbing’’ and violence as the only reliable tools for survival. Witness Rabri Devi’s insistence on staying on at 1, Anne Marg.

Man-made scarcity and strong-arm solutions to life’s problems are the leitmotif of Bihar today. Most Biharis have not been able to discard feudal hierarchies even 55 years after zamindari was abolished. This scarcity has been intensified by Laloo, who has presided over the downslide in agriculture, industry and services, while trying to deflect the anxieties over scarcity to ‘‘communal forces’’ or faraway Delhi.

But Laloo is not the root of Bihar’s rot. He is its perpetrator. Skewed relationships in the public and private space in Bihar predate him. Nitish Kumar understands this, and is aware that he will cover only a short distance on a tide of anti-Lalooism. His battle for Bihar is both structural and psychological, and success in one will feed into the other.

Low-hanging fruit awaits Nitish’s administration: the primary one being a three-year tenure for fearless DMs and SPs in each district. Other prescriptions abound: investment in infrastructure, attracting capital.

But Nitish must simultaneously reach out for the high-hanging fruit — land consolidation, land distribution, statutory minimum wages. Even if half of the claimed four lakh acres are available for distribution and land consolidation begins all over the state in January 2006, a major revolution in agricultural productivity will ensue in three years.

The writer is a well known TV producer and anchor