Opinion Fifth Column: India deserves better

Old equations in one of India’s largest and poorest states are entirely to do with caste. Old politics involves frightening Bihar’s large Muslim population into voting for ‘secular’ parties. This time these parties have banded together in the hope that the allure of secularism will give them yet another chance to govern Bihar. In the name of secularism they offer only old politics.

Nitish Kumar’s Bihar is so dismal a place that every time I drive through Patna’s filthy, wretched bazaars, I gloomily conclude that India will never become even a middle-income country. Rural Bihar is much, much more disheartening. Lalu’s political raison d’etre has been reduced to promoting his heirs. Can you remember the last time you saw him on a public platform without his sons, daughter and wife? And, the less said about Congress reasons for being in this ‘secular’ alliance the better.

Having had the dubious privilege of travelling in Bihar many times over decades to cover elections, caste massacres, bonded labour liberations, Naxalite violence, police atrocities and communal riots in Bhagalpur, I can report improvement in these specific areas. Under Nitish Kumar law and order recovered but that is all that really changed. Otherwise, like eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar remains a place of hideous poverty, ugly urbanisation and cynical, old-style politics.

So the Prime Minister was right to dictate the agenda for the coming assembly elections by putting ‘vikas’ as priority number one. In announcing that he was going to order the Central government to invest Rs 1.25 lakh crore in highways, airports, railways, education and health services, he indicated that he saw clearly that these were things that Bihar needed most. Other states in India’s eastern half need these things as well and we must hope that regional leaders in these states understand the importance of ‘vikas’ over caste, creed and those eternal cries for ‘special status’. If they have not already changed their agenda it is only because they remain too deeply mired in old politics and old equations. And, trapped by that old economic idea that people crushed under the awful weight of extreme poverty only need ‘poverty alleviation’. So instead of serious efforts to eliminate poverty, what we have seen is alleviation exercises in the form of cheap food grain and sham jobs.

This despite ample proof in the past 20 years that the only way to rid India of the curse of poverty is to invest in creating real prosperity. The massive investment that the Prime Minister has promised Bihar is a good start but what is also needed is massive private investment. This is the only way to create new jobs since the public sector and governments across India have created all the employment they can. If today more than 300 million people count as middle class it is because of the prosperity that came after the licence raj was abolished in the nineties and private investment boomed. The new jobs came entirely in the private sector. The Prime Minister needs to remember this.

While he deserves fulsome praise for putting ‘vikas’ at the top of his election campaign for Bihar, he deserves criticism for not emphasising the importance of jobs in his Independence Day address. Why did he not mention the link between new jobs and the private sector? Has he been intimidated by his Nehruvian socialist critics? For India’s sake, we must hope not. And, for the sake of Bihar, we must hope that in the coming election campaign we see real competition on the ‘vikas’ front from local leaders instead of the usual calculations of caste, creed and inverted communalism. As someone who has travelled in most of our eastern states, I can report that Bihar lags behind even by their dismal standards of poverty and deprivation. It has been held back by old politics and old equations.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter at @tavleen_singh