Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: In Bihar, can the election remain old if a new player comes?

When an election comes to Bihar, even in the most denuded and impoverished settings, and especially vividly in those, you sense the power of the vote. You are likely to come across voters who say that, for them, winnability may not be the overriding criterion — that they will vote not for the government, as is conventionally done, but for the Opposition, because a democracy needs a strong opposition. Or that they will calibrate their Lok Sabha-assembly choices to ensure that power is not concentrated in the hands of one individual or party, because that is not good for democracy.

For years now, though, this state of the engaged and discerning voter has been trapped in a prolonged political plateau. The Mandal mobilisations of the 1990s led to the radical upending of caste equations by Lalu Prasad. The Lalu era came to an end because he did not have the imagination or vision to take his own magnificent achievements to the next step, link them to an agenda of governance. He was complicit, therefore, in the shrinking of his formidable 1995 coalition of the backward and poor into spectres of deinstitutionalisation, “Yadav raj” and “jungle raj”, which still haunt the Tejashwi-led RJD.

The Lalu era paved the way for the quieter reconfigurations wrought by Nitish Kumar. Nitish put together a social coalition of extremes and carved out valuable political space in the middle — for restoring the authority of the state and underlining the importance of development or “vikas” alongside “samajik nyay” or social justice.

But the Nitish transformations have also long hit a dead end. Stories of change were scattered across the state in the 2010 election that brought him his most fulsome mandate — from dramatic improvements on the law and order front to the building of bridges; from the cycles for girls that enabled them to cover the distance to school instead of being forced to drop out to new stirrings among the EBCs relegated by the dominant OBCs. In the last few years, however, Nitish has been in power as a wan figure hidden from public view by a coterie, switching sides and running out of ideas, resorting to proliferating cash transfers and the strong-armed prohibition policy.

Now, the entry of a third player, Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj, in the broadly bipolar contest in Bihar — NDA vs Mahagathbandhan — brings with it a promise. It may or may not shape a new outcome, but it could put the older players on notice. It is an opportunity, also, to remake “the people”.

For too long, “the people” of Bihar have been defined in fixed and unmoving ways, all the better to fit the established players’ formulas and strategies. The gap between the churn on the ground and the political framing has been growing. A new player, asking uncomfortable questions, calling out solidified pieties and hurling challenges — as Kishor seems to be doing while playing expertly to the media gallery — could bring a welcome disruption in the older ways of seeing.

It is true, for instance, that caste identities are salient in Bihar. They are etched into the land, spatially dividing the village into caste clusters, apart from providing bounded categories of political and electoral mobilisation. It is true that to remove inequalities on the basis of caste, it is necessary to foreground caste. But the reality also is that “the people” are more varied and fluid. Just as caste chips away at Hindutva’s imagined monolith, people across castes can also be defined and addressed along other intersecting axes — as the migrants and the unemployed, and as parents of children who receive a sub-standard education in schools.

To travel in Bihar in the last few years has been to encounter a growing clamour by parents at the lower ends of the caste and class ladder who say that they want a better quality of learning in the sarkari school — it must be a place where teachers teach, they say, instead of being the site for primarily dispensing the free midday meal or khichdi. Waiting to be punctured in Bihar, as in other states, is a stereotype that is convenient both to the political player and the election analyst — that the citizen, and especially the woman voter, can be reduced fully and unresistingly into the labharthi or passive beneficiary of the designed-by-government welfare scheme.

The welfare architecture put in place in 20 years of Nitish Kumar in the state and 11 years of Narendra Modi at the Centre — from free foodgrain to the latest cash transfer of Rs 10,000 to women under the Mahila Rojgar Yojana — is ambitious in its sprawl. But the people of Bihar, including and especially its women, may be far more ambitious and aspirational, and much less willing to be taken in by the largesse-distributing state that evades its more fundamental responsibilities.

Both in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, where post-poll analysis found it all too easy to credit the BJP’s latest election victories almost entirely to its governments’ women-centric cash transfer schemes, this reporter, among others, found many women voters on the ground who said that the scheme is not enough. They asked for more and better — jobs, lower prices of essential commodities, a higher quality of life, for themselves and their children.

Here, then, is the best version of the contest that lies ahead: Regardless of who wins and who loses, the new player in Bihar could help enlarge the possibilities of “badlav” or change in a state that has lived too long with a dispiriting sense of its limits.

Till next week,

Vandita