Commentary/Janardan Thakur

If India is destined to become a real State, it must face up to Bihar's plight

As the Central Bureau of Investigation goes on with its seemingly unending probe into the unbelievably large misappropriation of government funds something still more hard to believe, a sort of long-drawn-out nightmare for the people, seems to be unfolding itself relentlessly. For anyone with a modicum of intelligence, the connection between the gigantic loot and the people's nightmare should not be hard to perceive at all.

By the end of the mid-eighties, subsequent to the collapse of the last Congress ministry in the state, Bihar had already turned into a symbol and image of a situation ruled and ridden by an endemic casteism, corruption and graft, and an appalling inefficiency and neglect leading to a virtual breakdown of government at all levels. And yet, by hindsight, it appears today that the process had barely begun at that point.

What makes it particularly difficult to describe the situation in Bihar today is the all-pervasive collapse of the values by which people live, like the corrosion of the very air that one cannot help breathing in. One has simply to take any one of the different spheres of people's life to see how a vicious circle has taken it over to an extent and in a magnitude that individual effort to break it is doomed to remain an exercise in futility.

From government offices to corporations to universities, from the administration of law and order in towns and cities to the police in rural areas, from law courts to the farms and fields, all areas of life in the state are under the spell of anarchy.

Indeed, the perception of the people themselves about the conditions in their home state tends to drive them to such despair that large numbers of the young have begun looking for their livelihood outside. The numbers of the young from Bihar in the capital, the fields and factories around Delhi and in Punjab and Haryana, may be an indication of the alienation of the people from their place.

The collapse and the resulting alienation have together rendered the situation fit to be ruled by groups of opportunists who could be better described as gangs or mafias out for power rather than political parties with an ideology or a programme. Somehow, however, even this sort of rule of the lawless seems to have begun to be paralysed and breaking down every now and then.

Meanwhile, the long nightmare continues and people suffer and yet, hardly 'know' or 'realise' they suffer, as in a nightmare, there being little to do about it. For the large bulk of people, there is no escape from this misery and the traditional notion of 'fate' or destiny' or 'Karma' is accentuated and given a new, dangerous and contemporary dimension which the original ideologue probably never even dreamed of.

By an odd, though perfectly justifiable, logic, it is an area of darkness, but of course in a different sense from the one that gave rise to the title of the well-known book by Naipaul. It is interesting that the agony of the people is shared by those who live outside it, and yet not shared by them in depth, since it is not only they who have changed, but more significantly, it is Bihar that has changed.

But one might ask in what concrete ways has Bihar changed? One way of answering this question would be to consider in what way Patna has changed during the last four decades and a half.

In the late Forties Patna was a nice quiet small town by the Ganga with an oval maidan joining (and dividing) the old and new towns where people knew and recognised one another, had a cultural life and character, with a university and elite, a distinct identity and personality.

Today, Patna has grown enormous and overcrowed, squalid, anonymous and impossible. It has proliferated into a number of large new colonies, with many apartment houses and even some high-rise buildings, but it has lost character and its personality has no touch of elegance, no sense of beauty.

The state which had made its contribution to the freedom struggle and thrown up several outstanding national figures is a byword for backwardness and confusion, for lawlessness and terror, for poverty and medievalism. It has inherited caste-ridden politicking and false populism which has all but sealed its future among the forward-looking regions of a fast developing country.

While Bihar provided leadership to the nation and came to be a bastion of the freedom movement in the Thirties and the Forties, it has at the same time become, through the succeding decades, typical of some of the most dangerous trends of our democratic venture.

Thus, it could even be that Bihar represents the epitome of the Indian situation itself and the agony of its people gives us a measure of the suffering of the people of India as a whole. If this is true, and if this country is destined to become a real state, it must face up to the plight in which Bihar finds itself and lift it out of its characteristic morass.

The people must get to know then that they have been let down and betrayed by their own, that they have been plundered and hurt and then abandoned by the enemy within, not struct by some 'fate' or 'destiny' outside and beyond themselves.

Bihar's agony must be seen as a necessary and inevitable part of the political process, as the travail involved in the process of the coming of age of a people, the travail of a nation attaining maturity.