Uncivil society

Bihar is elsewhere. It's a place beyond the natural laws of governance. Distant, remote and autonomous. It's a place where generalisation...

Bihar is elsewhere. It8217;s a place beyond the natural laws of governance. Distant, remote and autonomous. It8217;s a place where generalisations about injustice, bloodlust, and corruption sound so mild, so much of an understatement.

Bihar is another country. Its terror is raw, its politics is elemental, its ruling aesthetic is kitsch. Our correspondent8217;s despatches from the badlands of Bihar only revisit the wreckage of civil society, make the stereotype frighteningly true. The landless massacred by the landlords8217; militia. The zamindar8217;s rage against the Marxist-Leninist8217;s revolution. The total collapse of infrastructure, employees without salaries and politicians for whom power flows from the barrel of a gun. A chronology of events from Bihar may look banal and brutal, but Bihar is falling off the map of modern India. Still, Bihar has been reduced to a subject of rhetoric, a victim of political desperation.

President8217;s rule could have been an initiative in restoring popular confidence. It was defeated bypolitical arithmetic and ruthless personal agenda. Bihar is back to Laloo Yadav also spelt as Rabri Devi. Ideally, Bihar should have gone back to its people.

People and Bihar are remote from each other, one doesn8217;t exist for the other. Laloo Yadav also spelt as Rabri Devi has made his politics spectacularly popular. He is janata8217;s neta, he is so self-consciously rural, a designer maverick. He plays out his pastoral showbiz on a stage of poverty, brutality and embezzlement. Development means family, democracy means a total repudiation of popular will, and privilege means politics. In the state of Bihar, people are subordinated to the pagan celebration of power, which is vulgar, sanguineous and masculine despite the other spelling of Laloo Yadav. In Laloo8217;s case, it8217;s pure kitsch, a spectacular deception that plays with the people but enhances only the entertainer8217;s survival. In the landlord8217;s case, it is power, paranoia and terror. In the case of fringe revolutionaries, Maoists or Marxists, itis the elimination of the class enemy. How archaic. Well, class theories are of little help in Bihar. What is at work is a cocktail of class, caste, money, muscle, and blood. It is so cosy to talk Bihar from the party offices of Delhi.

Bihar is falling apart, and Patna cannot hold. It8217;s a sad situation where a state is allowed to rot, where people are held hostage by a handful of political parties. What is happening over there is not the primordial terror of some tribal society. It8217;s terror born out of some kind of confidence, or privilege. This confidence of the powerful is legitimised by the so-called bucolic redeemer who swears by the poorest of the poor, who lies orphaned outside democratic decency. When civil society collapses so visibly, so outrageously, the Union government has a responsibility to intervene, to rescue. Governance has failed, and people are not being allowed to say so. The one who has the say is either a killer or a thief. The state of Bihar is sinking, and all the life boats are withthe politicians.