Gulf News (Dubai) | 24-11-2003
Migration and poverty go hand-in-hand in Bihar
by M.J. Akbar
It was the time of Lagaan. My grandfather was 11 or 12, when famine hit Bihar and made him an orphan. Starving, he left his village near Hajipur and reached the outskirts of Kolkata, to a labour colony called Telinipara. It existed entirely because of the presence of a new factory built by Scotsmen from Dundee and named, appropriately for the era, Victoria Jute Mill.
My grandfather was fortunate; he could easily have become one of the hundreds of thousands of Biharis who were being shipped off as indentured labourer for European planters in the West Indies, Fiji or Mauritius. Biharis have been India's foremost economic refugees for many generations.
The European treated the Bihari with unconcealed contempt. The Indian converted him into an unconcealed caricature. Caricature too is a form of hatred. In the old days, docility was the preferred Bihari response. Fear of hunger ensured as much.
But over the years docility had to evolve, and discover less supine manifestations. In different societies, local realities shaped this evolution. But in a very fundamental sense, the writer-polemicist V.S. Naipaul and the comedian-politician Laloo Yadav are two sides of the same coin.
Bouts of intellectual self-loathing
Naipaul, a Bihari (the term, of course, extends to Bhojpuri-speaking eastern Uttar Pradesh) driven to the West Indies, is a genius who has never been able to outgrow his insecurity, which in turn induces bouts of intellectual self-loathing. Naipaul has two answers to his insecurity. First, he needs someone safe to love, and finds the British in Oxbridge.
Protected by this security blanket, he then goes out in search of someone safe to hate. And so in An Area of Darkness he shines his torch upon the defecating Indian. It is the 1960s, and it is safe to hate the Indian who has won independence but is not yet showing much evidence of being able to do anything apart from groan under self-inflicted wounds. But gradually, India discovers a dynamic, and sneering is no longer very safe. So Naipaul transfers his disaffections towards Muslims.
Laloo Yadav, who must live or die by public support, turns caricature on its head by an extreme form of self-caricature. By living out the distorted image, he is also taking on those who have painted the Bihari into a psychological corner: "I will become what you have made me, and then deal with you on my terms." But he too needs safety, a perch into which he can retreat when threatened.
That social fortress is a limited alliance between the two most populous Bihari castes, Yadavs and Muslims (Bihari Muslims are, predominantly, a backward caste and therefore comfortable with Yadavs). Laloo Yadav's success is both explosive and limiting.
He can succeed where he stands, but he cannot move out. He can draw an audience, like any star (or filmstar); but he cannot draw a vote except in a demographic borough of Bihar. Wherever the Bihari went, circumstances forced him to survive in a ghetto. Today, Bihar itself has become a ghetto of India.
Why? It is silly to say that there is an IQ problem, although that is what the caricature suggests. Genes do not make a Bihari foolish, or, worse, a criminal. But history does.
The most startling fact of Bihar is that it has not been a centre of significant political power since the end of the Ashoka empire. Perhaps such glory demands the compensation of centuries of defeat: who knows.
The political map of modern India began to form during the two hundred years of stability in the north created by the Mughal empire, and in its chaotic aftermath when regional and sub-regional powers turned India into a complex chessboard. The only time when Bihar became a knight on this chessboard was when Sher Shah Suri took his Afghans to Delhi.
The British, who set the course for the twentieth century, had no regional power to contend with when they converted Bihar into a swamp from which they periodically drained human labour. Ironically, Bihar had great natural resources (now transferred to Jharkhand), but they were exploited for industries that branched up along the Hooghly from the British capital of Kolkata.
Indian nationalism
British Calcutta denied, and thereby destroyed, Bihar. It was entirely in order that Mahatma Gandhi should make Bihar the battleground of Indian nationalism, because the Bihari, without either people's power or feudal power to defend his interests, was decimated by British colonialism.
Gandhiji's first victory against the British (surprisingly unknown) was the abolition of indentured labour. His second, historic, fight for indigo farmers launched the Independence Movement.
Could Bihar have reversed its history after freedom? "Could" is not the correct word; "should" is more appropriate. But during the first three decades after freedom Bihar fell into an abyss of corruption and sleaze, complemented by public sector decadence and private sector loot.
The only golden lining was land reform, which, despite sabotage by grasping landlords, worked sufficiently to ensure agricultural growth. But agriculture by itself cannot meet the aspirations of Bihar. Since there was nothing else, the migrations continued.
The tensions that are now in ferment in places as far apart as Assam and Maharashtra come from a twist in the tale. As long as the Bihari in Mumbai or Guwahati filled the void left for cheap, manual labour, he was left undisturbed in the urban slum.
But those "coolies"who went in search of sustenance now have adult children who want better, because they have the education that their parents missed. They also have the hunger for achievement that burns in the deprived. That is why they compete and get jobs. This turns into resentment that explodes into violence.
The Bihari is trapped between stagnation in Bihar and anger outside. In principle, a greater law should prevail: Indian unity is cemented by the spirit of a free job market.
An Indian has equal rights anywhere in India. In practice, no region can continue to be a parasite on the rest of the body politic. There is only one way to stop Bihari deaths in Assam: Bihar must be reborn.
The writer is the Editor of The Asian Age.
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