The most important aspect of the election whose results come today got drowned out by sound and fury. This election was in its fullest sense a battle between old politics and new politics, an old India and a new India. So while political pundits pondered over equations of caste and creed in Delhi’s television studios, young Biharis whenever allowed to speak, said in the clearest terms that what Bihar needed most was good schools, hospitals, roads and above all, jobs. This is true of other states but more true of Bihar because it has been more held back by old politics. I say this from having covered politics, elections, bonded labour rescues, caste massacres and communal riots in Bihar for a very long time. The first story I did out of Bihar was from Bhagalpur where I went to investigate what had happened to the young men that local policemen blinded by pouring acid into their eyes.
This was in the early eighties when Bihar was a place of casual brutality and unspeakable barbarism. Whole communities were enslaved by the system that we euphemistically called bonded labour. It was possible to meet people who had never seen money or had the freedom to visit the nearest town. Their landlord masters kept them alive to work in their fields but in such awful conditions that they sold their children to the first agent who came looking for child slaves for the sweatshops of Mumbai. Bihar has changed since then but not as much as it should have. It is still possible to meet people from the Musahar community who live as badly as bonded labourers once did. And more Biharis flock to metropolises in search of menial work than almost anyone else.
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Twenty-five years of rule by Mr and Mrs Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar represent decades wasted on equations of caste, creed and criminals. On travels during this election campaign, I met people who said the only person who had done anything for Bihar was Nitish Kumar, but despite this I found schools that were just empty rooms. In the village of Dharamsati-Gandaman where 23 children died from eating poisoned lunch two years ago, there is a memorial for the dead children, but the nearest hospital is still 10 kilometres away. Parents whose children died had cellphones and access to the Internet but not enough access to their chief minister to demand better healthcare.
So when the Prime Minister began his campaign this time by promising development and better governance, he struck an instant chord. His meetings drew vast crowds and it forced the leaders of the grand ‘secular’ alliance to also start talking about ‘vikas’ or at least Nitish Kumar did. Lalu talked as he has always done about the poor and about stopping ‘comnal phorces’ and Rahul Gandhi talked mostly about the Prime Minister’s clothes. Then came Lalu’s remark about Hindus eating beef and this caused the Bharatiya Janata Party to revert to old politics, so we were back to cows and caste.
It is Bihar’s tragedy that this happened because only a new kind of political conversation will bring this most backward of India’s states on a par with more developed states. Nitish Kumar’s spokesmen like to hold forth on prime time chat shows about how Bihar has been the fastest growing state in India in the past decade, but they forget that it starts from a very low base. They forget that at every level, whether it is access to sanitation, clean water, electricity or ‘pucca’ houses, Bihar lags shamefully behind. The main reason for this is that Bihar’s leaders have remained trapped by old politics and old ideas. They demand a special status for Bihar and more reservations to keep alive the economy of handouts that they have assiduously built instead of building better infrastructure and a real economy. Had these been priorities, there would have been more investment from the private sector, and this would have created the jobs that Biharis so badly need.
Political pundits have pronounced that if the grand secular alliance wins Bihar, it will be a great blow to Narendra Modi because it will be seen as the first real sign that the Modi wave has ebbed. What they overlook is that the real consequence of old politics winning in Bihar will be for Bihar itself. You do not need even to travel in rural parts to see this because you see it from the moment you land in Patna. In this city of ugly residential quarters, filth and open drains, there is one street that is spotlessly clean and very salubrious. It is the street in which ex-chief ministers live out the rest of their lives in vast mansions paid for by taxpayers. It is a fine symbol of old politics and an older India.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter: @ tavleen_singh
