Bihar : A dictionary of pain

A new meaning has been added to Bihar’s bulging dictionary of pain. It would seem that its sufferings have no end. The ancient cradle of Indian democracy, learning, and civic consciousness is today a travesty of our tryst with destiny. Bihar is the penultimate example of India’s rupture with its own soul. That is why the social fabric is most savagely sundered in this land that once gave birth to the prophet of non-violence, Vardhaman Mahavira, and the apostle of compassion, Gautam Buddha.

That is why Bihar is considered such a gone case that politicians and intellectuals alike are unanimous that nothing can meaningfully be done to restore a semblance of rule of law, fiscal decency, civic harmony, and caste tranquillity. That is why, as a nation, we have been complicit spectators to Bihar’s agonized slide from sustained, cynical Congress misrule, to its brash conquest by a soulless regime of casteist freebooters.

Rabri Devi’s resurrection is not so much a defeat of the BJP in the numbers game in the Rajya Sabha as it is an indictment of the vicarious social engineering Congress has pioneered since independence to fabricate electoral success. Hence, it is not surprising to learn that the real reason for Sonia Gandhi’s volte face from “the Rabri government has no moral right to govern” to resisting its dismissal, is her belief that it is the Muslim rather than the Dalit vote that is returning to Congress. It follows that Congress should focus on the Muslim vote, not chase an elusive Dalit vote. The fact that the brutalized Dalits are human beings before they are voters does not register on Congress consciousness. Having computed its electoral arithmetic and devised its political strategy, the party cannot allow the insensate screams of violated villagers to upset its refined calculations.

Never mind that these calculations make little sense to its own highly embarrassed state unit, let alone the rest of us. After all, this is India’s ‘natural party of governance,’ the party who’s lofty rhetoric and half-clever machinations have kept it in power for most of these turbulent decades. Sonia Gandhi’s apologists offer the inane plea that she won’t ‘forgive’ Laloo for not protecting the Dalits, and will try to get him to act against the Ranvir Sena, failing which she has ‘other means’ of opposing the RJD regime. Congress, they claim, was obliged to oppose President’s rule in Bihar as it would have amounted to a Ranvir Sena government. Even if we accept the argument for argument’s sake, we still do not know whom Laloo represents.

Certainly the RJD regime has no rapport with the Dalits. The non-Yadav groups among the OBCs have been disillusioned with the government for some time now, and Laloo himself has been proudly anti-upper caste. The middle classes and business community live in terror on account of utter lawlessness even in Patna. In the rest of the state, it is literally the law of the jungle.

Yet Congress empathy for him is entirely understandable; they are, in a sense, cousins. When Laloo rode to power by successfully carving out a backward-Muslim votebank, he validated Jawaharlal Nehru’s thesis of ‘elections by arithmetic,’ i.e., the aggregation of adequate castes and communities to get past the post. This essentially divisive planning – which negates the very idea of one nation, one people – was papered over with riveting ideological artwork.

In Nehru’s case the magic word was ‘consensus.’ It allowed him to cut even stalwarts like Acharya Kripalani, C. Rajagopalachari, P.D. Tandon to size in isolated bloodless coups, while the utter disarmament of the business community through state-sponsored socialism kept the rest of society appropriately servile, thus enabling him to maintain the façade of civilized rule. Incidentally, it has come as no surprise to me that the US cold warrior, John Foster Dulles, perceived Nehru as a secret communist, and framed American policies accordingly. It has long been my view that Nehru and the system he foisted on India were blatantly communist, minus only the gulags. Much of the malaise of Indian society – witness the vicious resistance to writing a truthful history of our civilization – makes sense only from this perspective.

To return to Laloo. In his case, the ideological veneer was provided by the vacuous, yet catchy, slogan of ‘justice for the backward classes.’ It had an amazingly successful run before it got bogged down in intense rivalry amongst the middle castes themselves. In my view, Bihar may signal the death of one of the unmarked, yet crucial, pillars of the Nehruvian system, viz., designing divisive socio-electoral blueprints while pretending to have a holistic ‘umbrella’ approach. Anyone wondering how Congress sustained itself on a minority vote would do well to recollect how Lenin turned his minority into a majority by sustained propaganda that he was the majority (Bolshevik) party!

In Laloo’s case, even ephemeral claims to morality have disappeared. Ramai Ram has extracted the price of being a Dalit, to counter which, Laloo has decided to have a Muslim Deputy Chief Minister. The RJD government is quivering on the brink of a critical vote of confidence, yet Laloo remains blissfully oblivious that the contrived parity between communities and groups no longer clicks.

It remains to be seen how long his bluster will last. The local Congress unit is humiliated and defiant. The shifting of Governor S.S. Bhandari on the eve of the vote of confidence has deprived it of even the fig leaf of opposing de facto RSS rule. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has seized both the moral and strategic initiative, upping the ante against casteism, corruption and criminalisation as opposed to constitutional rule. Congress now has to declare its position vis-à-vis those who ‘have lost the moral right to remain in power.’ Its political opportunism is doomed either way. It runs the risk of revolt if it votes for Rabri Devi; it loses face if it abstains; and it stands routed if it opposes. Signora Gandhi’s advisers will have to work overtime to get out of this one.

All said and done, however, faith in democracy assumes a greater expectation from the future than from the past. The tragedy of Bihar may still bring valuable returns to the polity as a whole, from questioning the legitimacy of caste/community-based politics, to examining the deeper issues raised by Article 356.

A political commentator claims that Rabri Devi’s resurrection is a major constitutional landmark as this is the first time that Article 356 has proved a dud. He argues that the existing system gives the Rajya Sabha a veto over the people’s will as expressed in the Lok Sabha,  which can paralyze government in the absence of consensus on major issues. To my mind, even more important than the embarrassment inflicted on the government of the day is the rebuff to the President. Mr K.R. Narayanan returned the centre’s first recommendation for central rule in Bihar even though many were alarmed at the complete breakdown of administration and fiscal discipline in the state. Although the government returned the same recommendation in the post-massacre scenario, the President’s advisers let it be known that he had satisfied himself on the merits of the case, and that Sonia Gandhi’s precipitate statement had a bearing on his decision. By refusing to endorse the presidential proclamation, Congress has put itself at odds with the First Citizen’s constitutional opinion.

The Pioneer, 16 March 99

Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.