Bihar’s wasted years

Yet the irony is that in the nineyears he and his wife provided leadership to the state, there has been no significant achievement worth the name. If at all his regime is remembered for anything, it is the fodder scam, though, to be fair to Yadav, it began during the days of Jagannath Mishra. This may be much like Yadav alone having to pay a price for massacres when the post-’74 history of Bihar is written with the blood of the Dalits. Vajpayee and Advani were part of the government and Bihar was under President’s Rule when 11 Dalits were killed at Belchi, the most widely covered incident of those days thanks to Mrs Gandhi’s dramatic visit. Even when worse massacres took place as at Dhalelchak-Baghau-ra, Article 356 was never resorted to.But that can hardly be Yadav’s excuse, particularly when the people had reposed so much confidence in him. But he forfeited it in his pursuit of vainglory. It is indeed doubtful if he would have returned to power a second time but for his ability to convert then Chief Election Commissioner T.N.

Seshan’sobduracy into a profitable Seshan vs nation’ issue. Nine years ago, he promised public roads “as smooth as the cheeks of Hema Malini” and Maruti cars for every rickshawpuller to ferry his passengers. Instead, the nine years have seen the affairs of the state go from bad to worse. In almost every sector the state has proved that the worst can be reached. Little surprise then that the garibi rallies he is fond of organising in Patna every now and then have been attracting larger and larger crowds.After all, the poor is one segment which has really grown under his rule. The illiterates whose number was put at 61 per cent of a population of 86 million as per the 1991 census is another group that has shown a similar growth.

Before and for some time after Independence, Bihar was rated as the best administered state in the whole of India. That was the time when no less a person than Nobel laureate C.V. Raman paid rich compliments to the Patna Science College for possessing the best science labs this side of theSuez. Today the same college does not have funds even to buy bunsen burners even as it has several times more professors and readers than lecturers. The large number of industrial estates that were set up in the sixties now remain permanently closed as a wholesome tribute to the likes of Yadav.There has not been a single dollar worth of investment in Bihar despite the millions of dollars in investment that Yadav promised after his business tours to Singapore, London and the US. Forget such investments, cases of Central assistance lapsing because of the state’s inability to use financial allocations in time are not few and far between. Bihar is one state where Panchayat Raj is yet to come into being, with the result that the state would be deprived of Central funds that are to be routed through the panchayats. Of course, this never bothered the Yadavs, who otherwise project themselves as the messiahs of the poor, whose plight has only worsened under them.

Take the case of atrocities on Dalits, on which countRabri Devi had to go. Between 1967 and 1974, Bihar was not even among the first 12 states which recorded the largest number of Dalit atrocities but since then it has been almost right at the top. Yadav could not turn a finger against the forces that seek to subjugate the Dalits. It is not widely known that Bihar is a pioneer in terms of land reforms but the pity is that such reforms have remained only on paper. Till the much-maligned Emergency, not even a single acre of land was distributed among the landless under the new land ceiling laws. Much of the agrarian violence in the state can be attributed to the government’s failure to implement its own laws. Like his predecessors, the Yadavs turned a blind eye to the incongruity of most of the land remaining in the hands of those for whom actual tilling is infra dig, if not an outright sin’.

If the Yadavs used a little of their legendary combativeness against the ple-thora of private militias like the Ranvir Sena, that operate in the state, they would havedone the Dalits a signal service. But tackling the senas was hardly on the RJD leader’s agenda, the cornerstone of which was how to keep the chief minister’s gaddi warm till he reoccupied it after the fodder case was over. Dismissal of the Rabri Devi’s government is hardly the end of Laloo Yadav for he still enjoys the support of the numerically preponderant Yadavs and Muslims, who still remember his courage in stopping the rath yatra. But that is hardly a compliment for a person, who alone in recent times had the political wherewithal to give Bihar a new direction.