Two CMs, no governance

For many of us, Bihar is but a metaphor. For endemic corruption, decay, violence, feudalism, for all Things That Don’t Work. But metaphors are abstracted from raw reality; like statistics, they sanitise. They don’t speak of the pain of one Paritosh Bhattacharya, for instance, whose son just died after setting himself aflame on Independence Day in a futile protest against the Bihar Agro Industries Development Corporation’s refusal to pay his father a salary for the last 10 years. As a series carried by this paper has bared to public view, the senior Bhattacharya is only one of the 40,000 employees of the government of Bihar, including workers of public sector units, who have not been paid salaries for at least 10 years. Nor can the metaphor express the daily unrelenting horror of lives spent knocking on unyielding doors, empty pockets stuffed with prayer petitions, men and women begging for payments the government owes for the labour it had extracted for years. No, Bihar, the metaphor, does not even begin to describe the tragedy of a state that has two chief ministers, de jure and de facto, but no governance.

The chief minister of Bihar (de jure) most recently made headlines for her noisy outrage at being pushed back from the first to the third row on an Indian Airlines flight to Patna. It was deemed as ‘insult and humiliation’ heaped not on Rabri Devi, but on a backward leader and the state of Bihar. Not long ago, Mr and Mrs Yadav were in the news for presiding over the Wedding Of The Year, a star-studded extravaganza in which big cars were ‘borrowed’ by RJD enthusiasts from private showrooms to ferry in shiny upholstered comfort all those who had been flown down to Patna to bless their daughter. Laloo Yadav has always managed to remain in the news for reasons of another kind as well. He, everybody knows, is the mascot of the movement for ‘social justice’. He is the leader of the Yadavs in particular and the other backward classes in general, whose ascent to power has automatically lent dignity and self-esteem to the toiling disprivileged. The state of Bihar almost never makes it to the headlines anymore for its weary army of unpaid government employees.

We the people have been sickened into submission when it comes to Bihar. We expect an administration that is feudal and slow moving. We expect a corrupt bureaucracy that does not deliver. A political leadership that offers only slogans. And a poverty of options for the common man. We expect it, we have even come to accept it. This is dangerous. We need to retrieve Bihar from its metaphor. We need to see it as a rotting state where the Constitutional injunction against begar (unpaid labour) is being flouted with impunity. The RJD that forms the government, and the Congress that supports it, must be held accountable for this crime.