In invoking Pakistan in his speech at Raxaul and suggesting that a vote against the BJP in Bihar would be pro-terror, BJP president Amit Shah seemed to be nervously reaching out for an old weapon to bolster his campaign in a hard-fought election. Travel through Araria in the Seemanchal region of the state, one of the most backward districts with a high concentration of the Muslim vote, to get a sense of what makes the BJP strategist skittish about this election — and why he could be misreading the opportunity for the Narendra Modi-led BJP in Bihar. In village after village in this overwhelmingly rural district, among both Muslims and Hindus, the focus is on the Nitish Kumar government. The conversation is about what it has done, what still remains to be done. Remarkably, in a region still marked by basic absences, voters list the ways in which they have been touched by the state. [related-post] In Baluwa village in Jokihat, Shamim Akhtar, a sales representative with a tractor company, says: “The road has come to our village, and electricity. Our children get free uniforms, scholarships and the midday meal in school.” But the hospital is still two kilometres away, they say. And there is no public water supply. Or drainage or toilets in the village. In another part of Baluwa, Saba Anjum, 18 years old and a first-time voter, says she would like a “sewing centre” and a “computer centre” in her village. She also wishes the mall in Araria town were larger. “It is only a mall in name. Not like the one I have seen on the net in Kolkata,” she says. There is no road in this part of Baluwa, only a dirt track, and electricity comes for four-five hours a day, on some days. There is no government water supply here either. A pipe and a tank reached the nearby village of Dhobania six years ago, but they remain dry, the people there still wait for water. “Teachers come to school for only one or two hours. The midday meal is made of three parts water, only one part dal,” says Mohammad Masoom. But Bibirana Begum says: “We only hear Modi, but we can see Nitish’s work.” In the nearby village of Baghdahara, Mohammad Aftab Alam agrees: “Modi has just come to power. Earlier we had nothing. Now, after Nitish, we have got the road, the school, the midday meal.” In Baghdahara as well as in Baluwa, any mention of the midday meal quickly divides the group into two: those who say that the khichdi makes it possible for their children to go to school and that the problem with the programme is the siphoning of rations by middlemen, and those who contend that the programme is fundamentally flawed because it allows the school to be taken over by the activity of making the meal and consuming it. The midday meal debate is not heard in the village in Araria alone, it is part of the poll conversation in other districts as well. In Baghdahara, Mohammad Shoib Akhtar lays out the dilemma and offers a solution: “It would be better if we discontinued the midday meal because then everyone would not be busy only with their plates in school. But it is also true that attendance would drop if no khichdi was served. So why doesn’t the government give children something that is nutritious but doesn’t require the fuss of cooking — like roasted gram?” In fact, in the Bihar village, both among the backward castes and Muslims, the effect of the midday meal on the quality of education in school is the subject of many more arguments than any of the so-called polarising issues in this election so far. It generates more contention among the backward castes than RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s comments on the need to review reservations — or, among Muslims, the lynching at Dadri. You could say that the receding of the polarising issue, and the Nitish government becoming the centre of the poll conversation in a place like Araria, is itself the outcome of an underlying polarisation. If in the days of Nitish’s tie-up with the BJP, a coalition of extremes created room for governance matters to take centrestage, now the consolidation of ostensibly like-minded and self-professedly secular and pro-backward caste forces is having the same effect. With the main “secular” parties all fighting together this time, it could well be that there is less Muslim anxiety and insecurity about the stacking up of the anti-BJP numbers. Spoiler parties, be it Asaduddin Owaisi’s MIM, or Pappu Yadav’s Jan Adhikar Morcha, don’t seem to be having the intended effect — in Raniganj, the only constituency in Araria where the MIM has put up a candidate, a straw poll indicates that many voters have not even heard of the MIM, or don’t take it seriously as a contender. That is, a more robust consolidation against the BJP this time may have freed up room for a discussion on government delivery, and for a shifting of attention from electoral math to governance. But the visible centering of the Nitish government in the imagination of the Bihar voter could also speak of a new phenomenon: in its two terms in power, the Nitish government has slowly but surely carved out a governance vote in Bihar. It is fragile yet, and in places, as where minorities have a significant presence, it may still need the prop and assurance of electoral numbers for it to show through, but it is there. If the latter is true, if governance is indeed becoming a constituency in its own right, which is still aligned with a social coalition but is no more to be seen to be helpless hostage to it, then it has implications, not just for the Mahagathbandhan, but also for the BJP. For the Mahagathbandhan, it means that raising the spectre of backward-castes-in-danger may be a less fruitful proposition than flashing the Nitish scorecard in government. For the Modi-led BJP, it means the Amit Shah strategy in Raxaul misunderstands the real opening for the party in Bihar. Making inroads into Muslim-dominated areas like Araria may be a relatively more arduous task for the BJP, but across a state in which the Nitish government has wrought large transformations — from restoring law and order to building roads and ensuring greater access to electricity, apart from implementing targeted programmes for disprivileged groups — Modi has carved out a space for himself that is not simply an effect of upper caste prejudice, anti-minorityism, or the pull of Hindutva. In a state in which the two-term government faces little or no anti-incumbency, his is the remarkable achievement of hardselling “parivartan” or change. The Modi promise in Bihar is made up of a mix of factors: he is the untried and untested factor for the villager touched by the promise of government during the Nitish tenures, who now wants more. Nitish has worked hard, given us a lot, many say, but maybe, just maybe, Modi will give us more. He is the dynamic globetrotter forcing the world to take note of India for the young Yadav, who has only a dim appreciation of Lalu Prasad’s achievement in overturning upper caste monopoly on power in the state and does not see him as its future. Or for the half-empowered EBC youth, who is seeking a connect with a market and job opportunities that are still elusive in Nitish’s Bihar. In this context, Amit Shah’s statement at Raxaul about a BJP defeat in Bihar setting off celebrations in Pakistan speaks of the BJP’s wavering conviction in its own governance story and promise. The brandishing of the communal card could be a return to a base instinct in the face of a strong opponent. But it also shows a misunderstanding of the real change framed by this election in Bihar: if the governance narrative was dependent on the social coalition so far, the tables may be turned. To be attractive and persuasive, now the social coalition in the state needs to be placed within a framework of governance.
