Opinion As new government takes charge in Bihar, Sachchidanand Sinha’s wisdom will be deeply missed

It is often believed that ideas generated in academia rarely reach the people for whom or with whom they are collaboratively produced. They find a space in political discourse only when they resonate with the lived realities of the people in ways that do not require conceptual unpacking. “Internal colonialism” — a framework that explores regional exploitation and disparities within a country — is one such idea. Since the 1970s, political parties in the Bihar-Jharkhand region have not only embraced it as one of their core concerns, but it has also fed into social justice politics. The framework was first used in 1973 by socialist thinker  to understand Bihar’s political economy. Sinha died on November 19, a day before Nitish Kumar took oath for the 10th time, in a landslide verdict that endorsed his promises of further “development”. For his government, the message from Sinha’s works couldn’t be more timely — it needs to introspect, even in victory.

Born in 1929, at Parsawani in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar, Sinha began engaging in politics at an early age. He joined the Quit India movement and, after Independence, met the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, worked as an editorial member of his journal, Mankind, and participated in the JP movement. However, Sinha was more an ideologue than a political activist. He used Lohia’s critique of Karl Marx to understand the economic crisis of Bihar, which gives massive resources to help the Indian state achieve its dreams of “development”, but receives minimal support — a political contention that shaped the state’s demands for special category status.

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Lohia argued that Marx underplayed the role of surplus generated by workers in the colonies to feed the Industrial Revolution. So, imperialism was not the final stage of capitalism; it was, rather, its first stage. This critique, extended and contextualised by Sinha in his book The Internal Colony: A Study in Regional Exploitation, was also invoked by the scholars and political leaders in Jharkhand to emphasise exploitation by Dikus, mostly feudal lords from Bihar and white-collar workers.

Sinha’s impeccable political understanding is reflected in two consecutive works — Emergency in Perspective: Reprieve and Challenge (1977) and The Permanent Crisis: After Janata What? (1978). While in the former, he criticised the Emergency, in the latter, after observing the political rumblings within the Janata Party for power, he captured the uncertainty of its political future.

A staunch critic of consumerism and a believer in Gandhi’s idea of “development”, he embraced an austere lifestyle. For him, development must be “non-violent”. Overconsumption is violence against nature; it could never serve the interests of the marginalised. One of the last Lohiaite titans, a person who neither aspired to a smartphone nor to live in a smart city, Sinha’s life offers clues to a society that is yet to find a balance between consumption and sustainability.

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The writer is a senior assistant editor, The Indian Express, abhik.bhattacharya@expressindia.com