Bihar will be transformed

Bihar was a test case. If things are changing in Bihar,it shows the country the way forward. In fact,to understand the nation,you must first understand Bihar. Historically,Bihar has always been a part of Indias mainstream,never away from it.

The challenge for Bihar will be to stabilise population growth. There are limits to the demographic dividend. Today,we have an action plan to impart skills and training to the young to respond to the demand in the market. But in a changing world,policies are increasingly technology-driven. We need to be alert lest our advantage turns into a disadvantage.

In Bihar,we are reaching out to the young separately. Because it is the new generation that has aspirations. The real problem was that the young had stopped dreaming or hoping for a better life in Bihar. It had become a state for labour export. Today,dreams have grown wings in Bihar. Look at the girls,who are riding bicycles,going to school. They are forcing their parents to think in new ways. We are aware that if we dont take the aspirations that we have awakened to the stage of fulfillment,we could be swallowed by them.

BJP: Secular party?
Certainly,there can be no untouchability in politics. At the same time,the mainstream in India can only be secular. By and large,we are a people with a secular ethos. The hardliners have not had a lasting impact in our history.

I said I am with the BJP but I will follow the secular agenda. In this,the BJP also helped me and now they have reaped the maximum gains. The BJP should think about this. They were never as strong in Bihar as they are now. In undivided Bihar,they were strong in the Jharkhand region. If you look at the partys career,it has become strong whenever it has aligned with the secular stream. At the Centre,it jumped to 182 seats in 1999 only when Atalji was the leader who reached out to everyone.

The Bihar experiment has been noted at the national level. The BJP is with us and yet there is no discontent among Muslims vis-a-vis our government. In fact,Muslims voted not just for me,but also for the BJP because they knew that it was I who would form the government. This is not a small change.

Congress: National party?
Where is the national party today? There are only multi-state parties. The era of Congress dominance is over and the BJP never had an all-India expanse to begin with.

The Congress remained strong till it functioned as a federal party. But as it got centralised,it lost in region after region. Recently,after it crossed 200 seats in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls,the Congress again began nursing delusions of achieving a majority on its own. We saw the return of the old Congress arrogance. But look at what has happened. There have been so many high-profile visits this year the US president,the French president and the Chinese premier came to India. But they have all been eclipsed by Adarsh,CWG,2G.

Today,the Congress is not even in a position to cope with the power that it has,or to retain it,much less fantasise about increasing it.

Consider the vocabulary of the Congress-led Centre. We give to the states,they say. They forget that it was when they started changing chief ministers wantonly that they were diminished as a party. This language is dangerous in a democracy,especially one as diverse as ours.

At the national level,the coalition era will continue. And the Congresss political graph is going down. Despite an honest prime minister,there is no governance,and the Congress will continue to shoot itself in the foot.

Caste: Not the only identity
In times to come,people will observe and practise their

caste in the confines of their homes. We cant erase caste. But in the public sphere,people will get more succour and they will draw more pride from a more spacious identity the Bihari identity.

In this Bihar election,the significant thing was that the people of the state,whichever part of the country they were in,and whichever caste they belonged to,felt proud of the change in Bihar. There has been a grand transformation in the terms of identification now there is kinship with the girl on the cycle,or with the woman engaged in decision-making,and with the pride every Bihari feels in the state.

Slowly people will find it meaningless to harp on caste in the old ways. In history,there have been times when caste has receded from direct view,and then come back into focus.

Now another line has been drawn,and it is becoming more salient. The pull of old identities may still be there but attention is shifting to something larger. The Mandal and mandir cards can be used no longer.

Once everyones participation is ensured in development,what remains to be exploited? Mandir came as a counter to Mandal. Now something larger is growing. It is for social scientists to analyse. But there are larger issues now,and larger identities. In this election,it was proved that voters have raced far ahead of the old frameworks of analysis of their voting behaviour.

Muslim vote: Still in Blocs?
The people of the minority community are shedding the old mindset that if you are with the BJP,you are untouchable by association. Secondly,earlier the specific concerns of the Pasmanda Muslims or backward Muslims were not recognised. Now there is growing acknowledgement of their existence. Pasmanda Muslims point out that whenever they raise the demand for Scheduled Caste status,they dont find any support from upper caste Muslims.

Thirdly,it used to be said that Muslims either vote strategically or emotionally to defeat the BJP. That is no longer the case. It is a positive development that must be understood.

Muslims need employment and modern education too. They cannot be asked to forget everything else in the name of security.

Welfare: Cash will be King
I believe that direct cash transfers are the way forward. Give money to the people and give them the choice to buy what they want from the market. Otherwise,corruption is all-pervasive in tenders,in bids,and the quality of material.

You also involve the individual more in this way. In the free uniform scheme,for instance,the government only gave the final approval for the design and the colour code,but the individual buys the cloth,then goes to the tailor to get the uniform made. Trade in cloth has increased,tailors who were previously idle have got work again. Only corruption would have increased if government had placed bulk orders and distributed readymade uniforms.

I followed the same pattern for Kosi relief. I said I will not distribute readymade clothes. It was also a way to nudge them out of the trauma after the disaster.

For the cycle scheme,there was a temptation to provide cycles to the people instead of the money for them. In that way,the argument went,all cycles would be of one colour,and they would all carry the state government logo. But if I had invited tenders from manufacturers,you would not be talking of cycles today,but of the cycle scam.

When cycle factories come to Bihar,we will ensure that the people,not the government,will buy the cycles. I am patronising industry by giving it a large and assured market 12 lakh cycles were bought in one year and the number will only grow.

This is a scheme with 92 per cent success remarkable for any scheme. Now the girl demands a cycle,even in the face of family opposition. My policy will be to provide mostly cash transfers in state schemes in the future as well.

Graft: A Backlash Brewing
I held 300 meetings in the election campaign and at each meeting,there was a huge response when I would tell the people that if I returned to power,I would seize the property of the corrupt and open schools in them.

Two years ago,during my Vikas Yatra in January 2009,I invited people to come forward and criticise the government we called this interactive session samvad or dialogue. At each meeting,10-15 people would come forward and speak on corruption in the lower levels of government. And the rest would applaud. I brought in the Bihar Special Courts Act to ensure speedy trial of corruption cases against government officials after the Vikas Yatra.

I have seen the earlier political moments when the issue of corruption became large the JP movement,and then the VP Singh era in the late 80s. I sense something similar now.

The political class cannot afford to be complacent and cynical about this. We have to be more transparent. Many people would like to see this as a passing phase. But that is wishful thinking. The young see corruption as their biggest enemy.

My future
I am serving the national interest by serving Bihar. I have already been in the central government and in Parliament. Now I want to serve my state.

Nothing comes your way if you only aspire for it it comes through your work. I am getting national recognition through my work. What more could I ask for? From where I am placed,I feel the blessings of the whole nation. Everyone was overjoyed by the Bihar result. Has that happened in any other state election?

In conversation with Vandita Mishra

amp; The Last Decade

Incumbents can win
And win convincingly,if they govern reasonably well: that was the idea that defined politics in 2001-2010. And the message is clear if we compare election results of 2001-2010 with the previous decade,1991-2000.

Parliamentary Elections
The 1991-2000 decade saw four Lok Sabha elections,in 1991,1996,1998 and 1999. In 1999,the BJP-led coalition came back to power. In the other three elections,the incumbents lost power. The 2001-2010 decade has seen two Lok Sabha elections,in 2004 and 2009. In 2004,the incumbent NDA lost. In 2009,the incumbent UPA won,and the Congress,convincingly improved its performance. However,Lok Sabha elections offer too small a comparison base for this thesis. Its in assembly elections,where the story plays out.

Assembly Elections
There were 55 assembly elections in the 1991-2000 period,and 56 in the 2001-2010 period. In 1991-2000,in 37 assembly elections over 67 per cent,the incumbent did not return to power. If we exclude the first Delhi assembly elections and the polls in Jammu and Kashmir held after a long period of Presidents rule,anti-incumbency jumps to around 70 per cent incumbents lost 37 of 53 state elections.

Contrast that with 2001-2010. Incumbents lost in only 26 elections in this period. The anti-incumbency rule was satisfied in less than 50 per cent of the state elections 46.5 per cent of the incumbents lost.

This is a big change,in fact,the biggest change in Indian politics,where even parliamentary poll verdicts are dependent largely on state-specific electoral moods.

The trend is borne out by a study conducted by Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar published in 2009 in the EPW. They found that state-level incumbents lost 77 per cent of elections between 1989 and 1998,62 per cent between 1999 and 2003,and just 46 per cent between 2004 and 2008.

The Faces
Nitish Kumar,the author of the future of politics essay in this issue,is the most recent and perhaps the most inspirational face of the new trend. Sheila Dikshit in Delhi,Shivraj Singh Chouhan in MP,Narendra Modi in Gujarat are the others. The late YSR Reddy,who won in Andhra Pradesh for the second time in 2009,would have been a poster boy as well.

Ravish Tiwari