The electoral roll revision in poll-bound Bihar had sparked a narrative war over the state of democracy, citizenship and the people. Predictably, at a time when demography is intensely weaponised all around the country, political opponents are trading barbs over it. There is talk of the alleged death of democracy, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s refusal to stay the process.
Amid this bitter debate dominated by Lutyens’ elites and mofussil YouTubers, secular messiahs and Hindutva votaries, the opposition and the ruling party, one needs to delineate the most tangible stakeholders—Bihar and the Biharis— who now stand at a crossroads.
Bihar has been ruled by two post-Mandal ruling families from Other Backward Classes—Lalu Yadav along with Rabri Devi/ Tejaswi Yadav and Nitish Kumar—since 1990. In the same period, while neighbouring Uttar Pradesh saw multiple stints of chief ministers like Mayawati, Ram Prakash Gupta, Rajnath Singh and Yogi Adityanath, Bihar remained true to the spirit of the Mandal discourse, exhibiting the political preponderance of intermediate castes. Therefore, the dynamics between Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav have been more about intra-backward-caste faultlines rather than ideological or programmatic divergences, barring during the first tenure of the former.
Hence, the shared legacy of the two satraps and absolute dominance of OBCs brings Bihar closer to the southern states, where the prospect of an upper caste member becoming chief minister is quite remote. This democratic reversal of power configuration in Bihar will be the enduring legacy of the two leaders who are in the twilight of their political careers.
One needs to pause here and unfold the intricacies of the democratic power shift in Bihar in the last 35 years. For instance, a cursory look at the caste profile of the public representatives reveals that during the Lalu era, 1990-2005, while the share of dominant backward caste MLAs and MPs kept on rising, the extremely backward castes (EBCs) found themselves at the receiving end. The EBCs started acquiring center stage only after the ascendancy of Nitish Kumar. Hence, Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar represent the political battle between feudal backwardism and egalitarian social justice.
These divergent templates between the two leaders are a continuum from the 1960s when B P Mandal and Karpoori Thakur heralded a mutually exclusive model of backward-caste politics. On the one hand were the dominant backward caste leaders with a feudal outlook. They aimed to replace the upper caste as the state’s political elite, but acquired a domineering attitude vis-a-vis the EBCs and the Dalits, as has been the case with Mandal, the chairman of the Mandal Commission. He opposed special provisions for EBCs in Bihar.
On the other end was Karpoori Thakur, an EBC, who fought a two-pronged battle— one against the upper castes and the other against the feudal-minded dominant intermediate castes who saw the position of backward-caste leadership as their natural right. Thus, the coherent legacy of Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar on the entrenched primacy of the backward castes in Bihar has a deep contradiction on the question of EBCs. The Lalu era has been a phase of feudal backwardism shaped around the template offered by B P Mandal, while Nitish Kumar endeavoured to emulate Karpoori Thakur’s political model, albeit loosely.
Economically, under the shared reign of the two leaders in the last 35 years, Bihar has remained one of India’s most populous and economically-challenged states. Since the 1990s, when major states of India infused social-justice politics with a developmental agenda, Bihar lacked a development agenda, and as a result, emerged as the laboursupplying state for the rest of India. It is one of India’s poorest states, having a per capita net state domestic product of ₹28,485, which is not only the lowest among all Indian states but comparable to the GDP of the Central African Republic, a civil war-torn country.
In Niti Aayog’s SDG Index, Bihar is at the bottom in terms of progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals; has the poorest performance on national health indicators; and has been consistently at the bottom of the Human Development Index. While its neighbours like UP and Jharkhand are investment destinations, corporate India seems to have completely abandoned Bihar on account of the colossal unease of doing business there.
The shared and enduring legacy of the Lalu-Nitish duo, high on social justice, mute on economic development and oblivious to the frustrations of the youths is haunting Bihar.
The state is neither in transitory mode, nor in a state of flux. Rather, from the vantage of the youth, it is stuck in the year 1990. Here, identity politics has been the perfect cover up for the lack of good governance and development. This brings up the question of demography, which is underpinning the heated debates around the electoral roll revision. One has to factor in that around 58 percent of Bihar’s population is under the age of 25. Thirty-five years of economic precarity and identity politics have left the state’s youth feeling semantically stigmatised and economically abandoned. There is no real substantive choice for them in the coming election that may be the last direct battle between two Biharis who have defined the state for so long.
Sajjan Kumar | Founding director of PRACCIS, a Delhi-based research institution studying contemporary India
(Views are personal)