COMMENTARY

Economic & Political Weekly EPW november 3, 2012 vol xlviI no 44 23

Fallacy of the State in Bihar

Avinash Kumar

Nitish Kumar’s rule in Bihar has been lauded for the return of “law and order”. An overview of some recent events involving dalits, pasmanda Muslims and the sway of landlords and their mafi a reveals that little has changed.

The crowning of Nitish Kumar as the chief minister of Bihar in 2005 was greeted with expectations and

optimism. The rule of Lalu Prasad in the 1990s despite symbolising victory of the oppressed and the marginalised in a state wretched by the feudal upper caste militias, had failed to bring in an age of fairness, prosperity and instead did little to change the situation on law and order. To resuscitate the situation and take B ihar “out of the darkness” was always going to be diffi cult for Nitish Kumar’s regime. The Janata Dal (United) – JD(U) regime – its leader Nitish Kumar in par-ticular – however, responded to the situ-ation very cleverly announcing program-mes such as the janata durbar (people’s court) and successfully impressed the people of the state and outside by pos-turing as a leader committed to develop-ment. Consequently, fi ve years later, the alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) once again won the assembly elec-tion, this time with 63 more seats and a 3% positive swing in its favour. Many well meaning progressives welcomed this transition from a negative vote against “Lalu Raj” to a positive support “for econo-mic d eve lopment and good governance”.

However, when viewed critically, the same was not true necessarily in terms of the best indicators of development and the “rule of law” in the state. Growth-based economic development has never been the best measurement tool to analyse the performance of any state, and Bihar, where the growth story itself is pretty skewed (Dasgupta 2010; Nagaraj and Rahman 2010; Tsujita, Oda and Ghosh: 2010; Jha and Singh 2010), is no different. The picture of Bihar, with reference to the most reasoned expec tations about political economy, has remained quite depressing.

Bihar’s sociopolitical problems have deep historical roots. No government in the state ever since Independence has actually attempted to address the root causes for the problems. With short-term political strategy – sans addressing

historical reasons – by small groups of the power elite (even those with the changed social composition since 1990s) whose sole purpose has been to remain the un-contested king of the land have tipped Bihar into a perverse pattern of govern-ance and made the state look more like a fallacy than truth (Kumar forthcoming).

The argument made here is based on the premise that state’s legitimacy is a dialectic process in which the power elites not only have to create institutions but also to resist undermining them. Unfortunately, adherence to this dialectic process has never been strictly followed in Bihar. On the contrary, they have worked to use the state in their own interests and made the social contract between the govern-ment and the citizens, appear truly ille-gitimate. This article by exploring and testing a series of incidents that have taken place in the last few years makes an attempt to explain that the authority of the state in Bihar, even under Nitish Kumar is a fallacy.

The Khagaria Massacre

The fi rst of this series was a murderous incident featuring caste violence in which 16 people (all from the upper backward castes Kurmis and Koeris) were murdered in the Khagaria district, 175 km east of Patna on 2 October 2009. The govern-ment (read Nitish Kumar) quickly dec-lared the violence as a handiwork of the Maoists without substantive evidence. However, it soon reversed its theory by ruling out the possibility of Naxalite involvement only to link it to a “war of attrition between two groups of anti-socials”. Expectations were raised that Nitish K umar would handle this fallout differently as o pposed to the lax ap-proach of the earlier governments in Bihar (Kumar 2009).

The local court in Khagaria on 14 Feb-ruary 2012 awarded death sentence to 10 mahadalits (all Musahars),1 including the popular leader Bodhan Sada, and life sentence to four others. The prosecu-tion had also termed Bodhan Sada as a Maoist.

Thousands of mahadalits, reacting to this judgment protested before the Bihar assembly. The protestors also pointed out that Bodhan Sada had no connection

This is a shorter version of a paper presented at a National Conference on “ Traversing Bihar: The Politics of Social Justice and Development”, 5-6 July 2012, Tata I nstitute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. The author is grateful to C P Bhambri for his c omments on an earlier draft. The usual disclaimers apply.

Avinash Kumar (avinashmishra.jnu@gmail.com) teaches Political Science at SBS College, New Delhi.

COMMENTARY

november 3, 2012 vol xlviI no 44 EPW Economic & Political Weekly24

with the Maoists. His wife Amla Devi who had been elected the head of the Barai panchayat was killed by a Maoist squad.2

The Khagaria massacre was not the result of mere negligence. It was because of the adamant refusal to address the land question in Bihar.3 Nitish Kumar, after coming to power set up the D Bandyo-padhyay Commission for Land Reforms only to sweep its report under the carpet. Big landowners were explicitly assured of the protection of their interests at all costs. In fact, landowners, cutting across the party and caste lines – including the dissidents of the JD(U), had spearhead-ed a campaign that land r eform of any kind would “lead Bihar towards a civil war”. In a rally held in Patna, ahead of the 2010 assembly elections, they had even warned the government of a “civil strife”, if the state planned to go ahead with the reforms. Such was the pressure that JD(U) spokesperson Shivanand Tiwary had to offi cially announce that “the gov-ernment will never take a decision that is inimical to the interests of the land-owners”.4 The BJP, in any case had not accepted the proposal at all.

The government soon thereafter under the veil of mahadalit policy diluted the land distribution by a signifi cant margin (from 10 decimals, as suggested by the Bandyopadhyay Commission, to just 3 decimal plots). This was despite the fact that the commission had very pointedly marked that the marginal and small far mers that constituted roughly 96.5% of total landowners, owned only about 66% of the total land; whereas the medium and large farmers constituting only 3.5% of the landowning community owned the rest 33% of the total land. These prescriptions, however, found no place in Nitish Kumar’s scheme of “good governance”.

The Forbesganj Violence

There have been no episodes of serious religious riots in the state during Nitish Kumar’s regime, but the secular credentials of the state have been highly compromised by the alliance of JD(U) with the BJP. The brutality of violence on the Muslims of Forbesganj displayed by the state police on 3 June 2011 over an issue of land ac-quisition, in connivance with the state

leadership of the BJP is a clear indication of this direction. The police in Forbesganj shot and thrashed to death four unarmed pasmanda Muslims and injured many others. The pasmanda Muslims have played a major role in facilitating the crowning of Nitish Kumar as chief minister in 2005 and also in 2010. Yet the direct involvement of Sushil Modi, the deputy chief minister of Bihar from the BJP (he had visited the site fi ve days before to the event), clearly indicates that Nitish Kumar has no control over the state affairs whenever it concerns the interest of the landlords. The mainstream media that had anointed him the “best chief-minister” chose to disregard this episode of violence, but the Economic & Political Weekly in its editorial note described this episode as a “wanton act of state violence”.5

While one may question the claims that “conditions were created for the re-enactment of Gujarat”,6 ignoring it only as a “minor incident” is a worrying sign. The government’s intention of not bringing the truth out is clear by its half-hearted attempt of constituting a single member judicial inquiry commis-sion u nder justice Madhavendra Saran (retired) which has not submitted its re-port even after the completion of one year of the incident.

Bathani Tola Verdict

In one of the most shocking incidents, Brahmeshwar Singh Mukhiya, the chief of the banned private militia of landlords, the Ranvir Sena was released on bail on 8 July 2011 . Few months later the accused in the Bathani Tola massacre which resulted in the deaths of 21 people (that included 11 women, 6 children and 3 in-fants, mostly dalits) were acquitted. The court cited “defective evidence” for over-turning the convictions pronounced by the Arah court in 2010.7

The incidence of caste massacre in B ihar started in Rupaspur-Chandwa in Purnea in 1971. After that, caste-based violence became so common that W eber’s theory of “state’s legitimate monopoly over means of violence” seemed irrelevant in Bihar. In all these years, the dalits, who were predominantly landless and who worked as agricultural labourers, were burnt alive, shot dead or even

butchered by several militias of the u pper/dominant castes (Kumar 2009).

Mukhiya accused in 22 criminal cases, including massacres involving the killing of 277 persons across the state between 1995 and 2002 was arrested only in the seventh year of his killing spree in Patna in 2002. However, when in April and May 2010 a Bihar court sentenced 16 persons to death and 10 others to life imprison-ment in the Laxmanpur-Bathe case and three persons to death and 20 others to life imprisonment in the Bathani Tola case, Singh escaped punishment as he was declared absconder in both the cases despite the fact that he has been lan-guishing in different jails in connection with numerous other cases since 2002. Mukhiya was acquitted in 17 (including all the massacres mentioned above) out of 22 cases registered against him. The fi ve cases pending against him included a case of murder, a recovery of a mobile phone from his prison cell and three cases under Arms Act. In fact, soon after coming to power in 2006, the JD(U)-BJP government had scrapped the Amir Das Commission set up in 1996 to probe the Ranvir Sena’s role in the Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre and its collusion with various politicians.8

The contrast between the cases of Bodhan Sada, the popular mahadalit leader (discussed above) and Brahmesh-war Singh Mukhiya, the leader of the up-per caste militia Ranvir Sena alludes not only to the ineptness of the police and the administration but also to the ever-increasing links between the political leadership and the landlords and their mafi a. For those who lost their kith and kin at the hands of the Sena, this is noth-ing but a clear betrayal by the state.

The fact that this murderous incident took place 16 years before, and yet no one is being held responsible for committing the murders even a fter such a long peri-od makes the acquittal more depressing. It clearly exhibits the sentiment that no regime can book the perpetrators of crime against the most marginalised and dispossessed sections of our popu-lation. The apathetic and detrimental approach of the state towards the lives and rights of the most marginalised helps only in claiming the argument

COMMENTARY

Economic & Political Weekly EPW november 3, 2012 vol xlviI no 44 25

more clinically that the existence of the rule of the state in Bihar is still a fallacy.

Mukhiya’s Murder

Brahmeshwar Singh Mukhiya was shot dead by unidentifi ed gunmen outside his home in Bhojpur district on 1 June 2012. This evoked large-scale protests by the still alive thousands of followers of Mukhiya, who called him Gandhi.9

During Mukhiya’s funeral procession in Patna (where he was cremated) his supporters went on a rampage for more than six hours setting on fi re, police out-posts, attacking police and media per-sonnel. This was reminiscent of the state of lawlessness that was associated with the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s rule in the 1990s in the state. It appeared that the Sena supporters were given free hand in resorting to violence. Allegations are b eing made that Nitish Kumar emulated Narendra Modi in the manner by which he restricted the police from taking stern action against the Sena supporters.

The event raises two very important questions. Why did the administration allow the supporters of a dreaded crimi-nal organise a procession from Arah to Patna; and if so, why did the police r emain a mute spectator to the mayhem caused by the Ranvir Sena supporters? The clarifi cations issued by the state i nvite only a mockery of the system. In the words of Director General of Police Abhayanand,

by not taking action against the irate mob, the police have actually ensured that the v iolence did not spill over to the rest of the state...we endured the violence so that it could be contained in Patna. Now we’ll take action against the miscreants based on video footage.10

Concluding Remarks

Lalu Prasad’s astute political commit-ment to “grass root democracy” by adopting the people’s language was no doubt a good initiative, but his regime failed to conform to the “rule of law”. Succumbing to his self-defi ned political acumen his regime outsourced law and order to the ganglords. He did not listen to the demands of the movements from below that actually had shaped his a ppeal among the people. The need for building a coalition between people’s

demand and policy initiatives (such as land reforms) was never realised even if it was in the best interest of the people in general and those of the oppressed and exploited in particular.

Expectations were raised that Nitish Kumar's regime, in addition to restoring the rule of law, would not compromise the hard-earned izzat (respect) of the margin-alised and the oppressed. But unfortu-nately, by attaching preference for land-owners and the powerful over the land-less and the weak, his regime continues to maintain the illegitimacy of the state as an arbiter in peoples’ lives in B ihar. By serving merely as a conduit to the perpetuation of the exploitation of the discriminated and the marginalised, it has in fact, reversed the path of d emo-crati sation that was brought about by a long struggle which started in the 1970s.11 Attempting economic develop-ment and good governance without rec-tifying the wrongs of the political econ-omy of the state cannot and has not brought any signifi cant change. The sto-ry of success of the state in Bihar is more a myth than truth.

Notes

1 The term mahadalit has been fi rst used in Bi-har by the Nitish government in an attempt to sub-classify the scheduled castes. It constituted a Mahadalit Commission in 2007 to identify the most deprived among the dalits and d eclared 21 out of 22 scheduled castes (except Dushadhs/Paswans) as mahadalits. The step supposedly started with good intentions proved to be polit-ical as Paswans were seen as a vote bank of Ram Vilas Paswan, a dalit leader from Bihar.

2 Ironically, in a well known case where “in the name of naxalism”, the powerful Yadav leaders of Phulwari-Korasi and Kareili of the Jamui-Munger killed six Koda tribals and took 11 others into their hostage in July 2011, the state govern-ment chose to keep mum. Shoumojit Banerjee (2011), “Munger Massacre Underscores Chang-ing Face of Bihar’s Naxal Movement”, The Hindu, 26 July, p 7.

3 A recently released fact-fi nding report by the Joshi-Adhikari Institute of Social Studies, New Delhi in April 2012 stated that those accused and convicted in the case are innocent and were involved in a legal battle to claim the Bhoodan land in the region. The Mushars in Amousi and other neighbouring villages who worked as agricultural labourers in the fi elds were allotted this land in 1998. However, in the absence of implementation of even a single or-der, many started cultivating the landholdings forcefully. This was resented by the Kurmis of Icharwa village, the de facto owners of these lands. There were reports of small skirmishes between Mushars in Amousi and the Kurmis in Icharwa. They were threatened by the goons. They were asked either to surrender their land or face the serious consequences.

4 Mamman Mathew (2010), “Troubled Lands of Bihar”, Hindustan Times, 10 May.

5 Editorial (2011), “Silence on the Killings in B ihar”, Economic & Political Weekly, 25 June, Vol XLVI, Nos 26 and 27, pp 7-8.

6 Committee for justice to Forbesganj police fi r-ing victims, Protesting at Bihar Bhavan in New Delhi on 13 June 2011.

7 The Arah court had sentenced three persons to death and awarded life sentence to another 20. See Shoumojit Banerjee (2012), “For Residents of Bathani, It Is a Horror They Cannot Forget”, The Hindu, 19 April, p 1.

8 The Commission set up after the Laxmanpur-Bathe carnage was asked to submit its report within six months from the date of its coming into existence. But it began its inquiry only in 1999 and since then had called a number of politicians, including former union ministers Murli Manohar Joshi, C P Thakur, former gov-ernor Kailashpati Mishra, BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi and RJD’s Union Minister Akhilesh Prasad Singh, former Jehanabad MP Arun K umar and RJD’s then National Spokesman Shivanand Tiwari to depose their statement in reply to the queries on the accusations against them of links with the proscribed outfi t before it. The Commission had also compiled the de-tails of the allegations against the top RJD and BJP leaders levelled by the accused in their confessional statements which formed the b asis for issuing summons to them to depose in per-son or through their lawyers.

9 Ashwani Kumar (2012), “No Gentlemen in This Army”, The Hindu, 6 June.

10 Nirala (2012), “Old Caste Wars Haunts Nitish Naya Bihar”, Tehalka, 16 June.

11 The state under Nitish’s rule has witnessed an alarming increase in crime against women, dalits and adivasis. The annual growth under the fi rst fi ve years under the JDU-BJP alliance in rapes of dalits at 14.5%, kidnapping of women at 18%, arson against dalits and adivasis at 22% and crimes recorded against dalits and/or adivasis under the Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989, at 24% are clear indication of the “reassertion of the power of Bihar’s traditional u pper caste feudal patriarchy through the front door of good gov-ernance under the NDA government”, Das Gupta (2010). However, to say that even the business class feels a sense of s ecurity, would amount to denial of reality. The story, published in The Economist, of Husk Power Systems (HPS), a company formed in 2007 by three young Biharis and an American friend, explains this more clearly. See “Bihar’s Pro-business Reforms: P aper Tiger”, The Economist, 4 November 2010, accessed at: http:// www.economist.com/node/17419805

References

Das Gupta, Chirashree (2010): “Unravelling Bihar’s ‘Growth Miracle’”, Economic & Political Weekly, 25 December, Vol XLV, No 52, pp 50-62.

Jha, Praveen and Atul Kumar Singh (2010): “Decon-structing Bihar’s Growth ‘Miracle’”, accessed at http://www.bihartimes.in/Newsbihar/2010/March/Newsbihar12March7.html

Kumar, Avinash (2009): “Illegitimacy of the State in Bihar”, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol XLIV, No 44, pp 8-11.

– (forthcoming): Criminalisation of Politics: Caste, Land and the State in Bihar.

Nagaraj, R and Andaleeb Rahman (2010): “Boom-ing Bihar: Fact or Fiction?” Economic & Political Weekly, 20 February, Vol XLV, No 8, pp 10-11.

Tsujita, Yuko, Oda, Hisaya and Ghosh, Prabhat (2010): “Development and Intra-State Dispari-ties in Bihar”, Economic & Political Weekly, 11 December, Vol XLV, No 50, pp 13-15.