We don’t talk anymore

We don’t talk anymore

As Bihar goes to polls, have you listened to the national debate?

Vandita Mishra

Angry voices filled television screens. Shared outrage at the abduction of school-going children in Bihar was only broken by the comment from one of the talking heads. So electorally futile, he shrugged. Laloo has yoked nearly 17 per cent Yadav to 16.5 per cent Muslim and that adds up to a 33.5 per cent vote which is mostly rural — outside the pale of Patna and TV and outrage over kidnapped children. Kishalay is back home and after the first round of voting, exit pollsters have predicted cracks in the Muslim Vote. But as a crucial state in the world’s largest democracy goes to polls in the year 2005, the picture remains the same: it features a dehumanised rogue creature and bloodless calculations of electoral math. It is ghoulish, this easy oscillation from apolcalypse-now to political sums. We need to ask whether the tenor of public debate on Bihar reflects unhealthy things not just about Laloo and his Bihar but also about the terms of national debate. We need to wonder about the larger complicities in Bihar’s much advertised secession from the nation’s heart, its imagination. The danger, once more, is this: Laloo Prasad Yadav will have his day out — that process began on February 3. But the ways in which we talk about Bihar, the ways in which we imagine its future, will remain unexamined. For all our sound and fury, we are content to sketch the contest in such apolitical ways. It is, always, Laloo versus Anyone But Laloo. The state languishes at the bottom of the development heap. Laloo’s been in charge, directly and by proxy, for the last 15 years. So where is the alternative leader, what is the alternative agenda? The poverty of options in Bihar is only matched by the reluctance of public debate to dwell on the matter. Look around Laloo, it’s the same difference. Nitish Kumar is presumably striving for a ‘‘secret’’ pact with Ram Vilas, as he told the media recently, with that remarkable lack of bashfulness about keeping secrets from the voter. Paswan? He’s fighting Laloo but supporting Congress which fights and supports Laloo. Paswan has got a number of local strongmen to switch sides to his party to match the RJD’s menagerie of local mafiosi. We view this lack of alternative at ground level with implacable inevitability. We have surrendered all the deliberative spaces at our disposal to interrogate the lack of responsible leadership in Bihar, possibly even to coax it out of its traps. What explains the great estrangement of Bihar from the national debate? It is the state’s ‘‘sunset’’ politics, centred on the state, economist Shaibal Gupta argued in this paper recently. Bihar remains un-integrated with states where a ‘‘sunrise’’ politics flourishes, the market at its centre. This is the ‘‘burden of history’’ argument. It plays back the fact that Bihar was among the states saddled with the more iniquitous land tenurial system — the zamindari system — as opposed to the ryotwari system which allowed the growth of incentive structures for investment and entrepreneurship. This argument dips into colonial history. But the story of Bihar’s terrible alienation from the national mindscape can also be told from a nearer vantage point in the 1990s. Beginning in the 1990s, Indian politics was reconfigured in deep and structural ways. The one-party dominance system, which had the Congress as centrepiece, collapsed and splintered. Politics shifted its primary locale from the Centre to the states. Mandalisation reframed the rules of the political game with backward castes breaking free from the patron-client relationships forged by the Congress and announcing their political independence through parties like the RJD, SP, BSP. Political competition became more intense at the Centre and in the states. At the Centre, national parties were forced to make space for regional parties. The urban middle classes, keepers of the national debate, have had to come to terms with a shift in the centre of gravity away from themselves: away from the Centre to the states; from national party to regional parties; from upper castes/classes to backward castes/classes. But a decade and half after the political dynamic became apparent, the discomfort persists. It comes up in proposals of electoral reform that lobby for closing the field to new entrants and smaller players. It was there recently in CEC’s Krishnamurthy’s recommendation to make it mandatory for regional parties to tie up with a national party and to fight on the latter’s symbol in parliamentary elections. The onus is still on regional parties to prove their innocence. This story has taken a few reassuring turns of late from the perspective of the urban middle classes, there are signs of a return to order. At the Centre, the contest is settling down between two coalitions, each run by a national party that seeks to domesticate regional partners. After the churning, a process of bipolarisation is visible in most states. Either a straight two-party competition or a competition between two coalitions has become the format of political competition in the states. But not in Bihar. Bihar remains an obstinate exception to many rules. The state where the electoral field remains carved out in many mutinous pieces. A state where the national parties remain bystanders as regional parties slug it out. Where the fight for power has become an internal matter to the bloc of backward castes and the small percentage of upper castes may not manage a casting vote. At the same time, Bihar is also a state where this intense social churning has neither stilled nor delivered. It goes on and on, an end in itself, unwilling to transcend its own ineffectual motion. The politics of empowerment is tragically stillborn in Bihar. It has yet to find a purpose larger than itself. Empowerment for what, we could ask, in a state where the universities are dying and entrepreneurs are discouraged? But we don’t ask. So upset are we at Bihar for being the recalcitrant state, we don’t talk to it anymore. Except at election time, and then with a bare civility. We certainly don’t engage with its vexed questions that might suck us into the hard search for answers. Leading democratisation theorist Alfred Stepan recently proposed a more ‘‘useable grammar’’ to meet the maturing practice of federalism in countries like India. ‘‘National’’ parties could be called ‘‘Polity-Wide’’ parties and ‘‘Regional’’ parties renamed as ‘‘Centric-Regional’’. As we stare unseeingly at Bihar going to the polls, the distinction is less esoteric than it seems.

URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=64417