It is not just India—the whole world suffers from what may only be called ‘Bihar fatigue’. All that seems to emanate from this benighted state are stories of horror: economic backwardness, social inequity, electoral banditry, political cupidity, caste riots and cultural degeneration. If not well-researched academic analyses of ‘semi-feudalism’, there are always well-documented journalistic accounts of caste-killings and other massacres available to the reader sufficiently interested in matters concerning Bihar. The tendency, then, is to declare Bihar unchanging, boring and repetitive. It is relegated to the position of an intellectual basket-case, a state so unique in its characteristics that its study holds little relevance to what is happening in the rest of India and even less to what is happening in the rest of the world.

And yet Bihar cannot be dismissed in such a cavalier manner. Not only is it the second-most-populous state of the Indian union, immensely rich in mineral and other resources, but also its very size and history make it crucial to political-economic development in India. Indeed, in many respects, Bihar represents the extreme case of what has happened to a region subjected to societal stagnation, economic exploitation and cultural degeneration under conditions of long and stifling feudalism, external and internal colonialism and the most brutalizing experience of a late capitalism which has acquired the habits of senility without ever having witnessed the optimism of its youth. As such, Bihar holds lessons for the rest of the world too; as problems of post-industrial dehumanization are addressed and as the pragmatically-reared ideological hybrids like ‘market socialism’ on the one hand and ‘collective consumerism’ on the other, obscure the fact that mankind still has to make a choice between progress to scientific humanism and regress to social barbarism. Bihar holds both possibilities and that is why knowing Bihar is important.

In any event, as established unions of peoples have broken up elsewhere on the issue of regional autonomy, the state of Bihar becomes of vital importance for India. Every Bihari schoolchild is told in his first geography lesson that Bihar is the size of France. And, every Bihari schoolchild must therefore have wondered why France is an independent nation, proud of its identity, while Bihar, which is immeasurably richer in terms of natural and human resources, is a mere state of the Indian union, bringing up the rear in terms of per capita income and leading in terms of poverty, exploitation and oppression. It is not as if Bihar lacks a long and proud historical tradition either. Even in today’s philistine times, the Biharis constantly recall that history. The serial Chanakya stirs them in the demand for renaming Patna arouses passion. Even Laloo Prasad Yadav made a reference to Bihar’s proud history in his very first press conference as Chief Minister. When asked about the role of king-makers in his party, he retorted, ‘I don’t care who wants to play Kautilya as long as I become Chandragupta.’

It is such a people who have to scrounge mineral royalties, beg for development funds and confront their own degradation and brutalization.

It is also obvious from statistics relating to Bihar’s position in India that while in several respects Bihar represents the ‘worst-case’ scenario in India, in many matters its position is not too far below the average. Indeed, it would not be wrong to say that Bihar is not only India’s ‘worst case’ but is at the same time the ‘test case’. What happens in Bihar will have a profound effect on the rest of India.

A History of the Future

Bihar has given India its best over centuries. The first region of the subcontinent to evolve a civilization after the Indus Valley cities had been destroyed, the republics, monarchies and urban centres of Bihar contributed the Buddha, Mahavira, Chandragupta Maurya, Asoka, Sher Shah Suri, Sufi saints and Bhakti poets, Lokayata philosophers and social revolutionaries—all of whom contributed toward the making of the glorious variegated culture of India.

What has happened in the state to degrade it to the extent that now despair are today its hallmark? Endemic violence and economic backwardness, gruelling poverty and exploitation characterize social existence in a region that is one of the most richly-endowed in the world. Is it that, tired after centuries of trying, Bihar has dropped out of the framework of civilization? Is Bihar the exception to India’s rule? Or is it, indeed, the trendsetter, showing the way to India’s future now, as it did in the past?

Recent reports of horrific killings and kidnappings, murder and mayhem, civic unrest and uncivil turmoil in the state have once again turned the focus of public attention to Bihar. The rulers of the country are, however, still busy with what they consider to be more urgent concerns: clinging precariously to unstable seats of power, wheeling and dealing for petty political prizes, pretending preoccupation with what are considered ‘abnormal’ situations in Assam, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir, even as the virus of violence has penetrated the arteries which lead to the very heart of the body politic, to Bihar where the abnormal has become the norm.

Let us consider a few figures to show just how meaningless much of the political leaders’ pontifications are. Police statistics show that in 1989–90 crime went up in Bihar by an alarming fourteen per cent, resulting in the death of at least 4,500 people. Compared to this, Assam with a toll of 650 lives appears idyllically peaceful and even Punjab with 4,479 killings, lags behind. In Bihar, dacoities went up from 2,767 in 1987 to 3,172 in 1989; kidnappings rose from 1,325 to 1,746 in the same period and the total ransom collected by hoodlums was estimated at more than five crore rupees annually. Loot, abduction and even dowry deaths are running riot in Bihar.

All this has happened while the leaders of various hues, the Congress, the Janata Dal (JD), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Janata Dal (S), continue to play their political games, often trading in the misery of the people. A glaring example of such politicking was exhibited by Subodh Kant Sahay who rose to national prominence by espousing Bihar’s cause, was rewarded with the portfolio of law and order in Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s government and, by deft political footwork, came to occupy the same seat in the regime of Chandra Shekhar. Even from that position, as late as in March 1991, he held forth airily on the backwardness of Bihar at a seminar in New Delhi while completely ignoring the murder at Dhanbad, a few days earlier of one of Bihar’s most outstanding law enforcement officers. This is an eloquent commentary on the state of affairs in the home state of the former Minister of State for Home Affairs! 

Of course, it is not that the central establishment is not bothered about Bihar. It is. However, its preoccupation has been with Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav rather than with improving the economic, social and political situation of the people of the state. In this context, it has to be noted that, for all the failings of Laloo Yadav, and admittedly there are many, he did intrepidly stop Lal Krishna Advani's Ram juggernaut and also managed to control the communal conflagration which might well have engulfed Bihar as it consumed other pans of the country. However. the cause of the malaise of Bihar is deeper than even communalism. The problem arises from the very nature of the state's political economy. 

The criminalization of Bihar grows out of the distorted. 'Iumpen capitalism' that has been imposed upon it and the internal and external exploitation to which it has been subjected. And this distorted capitalism inevitably leads to 'lumpen development', meaning the proliferation of non-productive and socially injurious activities geared to the interests of internal and external parasitic elements. It is a truism that it is the scum which floats to the top in a stagnant pond. 

Bihar's economy has been at a standstill for decades. While the immense mineral and manpower resources have been used by other pans of India to climb up the development ladder, its own progress has been hindered. The blatantly unfair system of freight equalization; the discriminatory nature of public and private investments: the Green Revolution bypassing the state principally on account of non-implementation of land reforms; the adverse deposit-credit ratios imposed by the banking system; the gross neglect of the state's physical infrastructure; the wilful subversion of whatever traditional or institutional social security system existed there—all these have pushed the people into poverty, the economy into backwardness, the society into violence and the culture into despair. 

In a situation of economic stagnation. the sources of accumulation are necessarily primitive. When there are neither avenues for legitimate investment nor remunerative returns on what little investment takes place. the alternative methods of accumulation are devised by those in power. Dacoity and kidnapping for ransom, loot and corruption have this economic rationale.

The processes of such primitive accumulation are intensified when the State and society lose their social conscience. In a condition of Gruelling poverty and inhuman exploitation, when yuppie 'liberalizers' gain the upper hand and turn social concern and welfare into dirty words, when agrarian reform is shelved in order to pander to the electorally powerful rural rich, when the baby of social equity is thrown out with the bathwater of bureaucratism, the economy further degenerates, society becomes increasingly violent, culture turns to barbarism and the State loses its legitimacy. It is this that has happened in Bihar. 

The compounding of economic backwardness through the institutionalization of crime as the most paying proposition is illustrated by the flourishing arms trade in Bihar. There may be an overall technological paucity in the state but there exists a lively weapons industry which manufactures guns for as little as fifteen rupees a piece. In such a situation, the band of a gun does not merely symbolize power, it ensures survival. While those who can afford it adopt the trappings of the Kalashnikov culture, the poor make do with the cult of the country-made katta. 

The frightening aspect, of course, is that guns know no boundaries. The trans-regionalization of violence has been demonstrated by the involvement of Amritsar outlaws in far-away Dhanbad. The emergence of an all-India network of violence is not inconceivable in a context where guns are procured in Bihar for booth capture in Ball ia and beyond. In any event, the fact that crime has been joined by politics as a mode of speedy private accumulation leads to the creation of the criminal ization of politics and the politicization of crime. This phenomenon is not restricted to Bihar. 

When a substitute for sustained productive economic activity is sought through the easy alternative of domestic or international borrowing by pledging the future, the present becomes nasty, brutish and short. This is how it is in Bihar.

Excerpt from The Republic of Bihar by Arvind N. Das, first published in 1992