Heart of the nation

Heart of the nation
Arvind n. Das

The response of the metropolitan unintelligentsia to the news regarding one more massacre in Bihar is both touching and infuriating. It is touching because it reveals an amazing naiveti, one that suggests that Bihar is a far, far away land whose horrible existence needs to be pitied more than censured. It is infuriating also because it presumes that Bihar is exotic, exceptional, it is the "Other" that is different from the rest of India.

The fact is that Bihar is India: and there is no point pretending that the barbarism of Biharis does not reside within all Indians. After all, a state comprising one in every tenth citizen of the democratic republic cannot become brutal, a land where women are raped before being eviscerated and children are beheaded to establish some grisly notion of social power, without turning the whole country into a macabre theatre of the bizarre.

The violence of Bihar does not only atrophy the sensibilities of Biharis, it also callouses the conscience of those Indians too who ghoulishly watch the pictures of the latest carnage on the boob tube as they chomp through their dinners against the rhythmic chatter of newscasters and analysts pontificating on the causes and consequences of the brutalisation of Bihar.

The camera does not lie; the pictures of dismembered corpses are true enough. It is viewers who lie to themselves. They lie to themselves, thinking that the killings are about something called "Jungle Raj", when they see a grinning Jaya Jaitley walking hand in hand with George, the sometime Giant killer, and a low-angle camera catches Nitish Kumar's well-starched silk kurta. They lie to themselves, thinking that the killings are about something called "social justice", when they see the many-ringed fingers of Laloo Prasad Yadav protrude from his long-sleeved kurta and stab the air in defence of the regime of his spouse.

Bihar is no Sierra Leone from where the news of the abduction of scores of soldiers of peace can sound a romantic melody to make Indians puff up their collective chests in pride even as the P-5 talk big and keep their warriors safe and dry. It is also no Fiji where coup leaders wear neatly knotted ties over well-pressed shirts and skirts and demand in charming English the disenfranchisement of nearly half the population. Bihar is altogether more ugly, far more dangerous, and terribly more painful precisely because it is so much closer. Bihar is Us and every murdered Christian priest, every strangled witness, every raped woman, every branded Dalit, every bonded child is witness to the fact that Bihar is India just as India is Bihar.

Don't forget sheer size. Bihar is not only the second biggest state of the republic but it also occupies the space where the very heart of India would be located. Many metaphors have been spun about the heart bypass of India but the fact is that such a diversion is impossible. Bihar is no peripheral organ that can be allowed to hang on even after it shows symptoms of gangrene. It cannot be wished away: every time the World Bank, for instance, gives a loan of US $500 million or more as indeed it did recently to improve the road infrastructure between Delhi and Calcutta, at least a part of the money will be spent in the bloodied fields of Bihar from where radiate the highways built by Ashoka and Sher Shah, arteries that vitalise India.

The map of Bihar can be chopped and changed but the lines of the Grand Trunk Road and those of the Grand Chord of the Indian Railways cannot be bent out of Bihar. If it is not history then it is geography; Bihar is India by the fact of its sheer political economy.

We are not even talking of the vast mineral and agricultural wealth of Bihar, the resources on which rested the very civilisation of India. Today, like the rest of the state, that wealth too is being devalued and its mica and bauxite, iron ore and manganese are of less and less use as the de-industrialisation of Bihar proceeds apace. Its copper mines are closed and fire rages underground reducing its coal deposits to ashes.

De-industrialisation is accompanied by agricultural degradation with the amazingly fertile riverine tracts of North Bihar becoming waterlogged and the Central Bihar plains getting soaked in blood. That industrial and agricultural production in Bihar is at a discount is also neither accidental nor without political, economic significance. It does appear that if there is a plan to convert Bihar into a mere catchment area for labour, a storehouse for manpower resources, to use the fashionable term to tap from the state's "comparative advantage" as it were.

Bihar produces food and metals, industrial goods and agricultural products with difficulty and at a relatively high cost. By comparison, it appears to produce people without too much trouble: its plumbers and policemen, prostitutes and politicians flow out of the state in an unceasing torrent and the system can always do with more. There is no harm therefore to India if Bihar is pauperised, even brutalised, if it continues to supply enough labour to service the many generational economic reforms of Yashwant Sinha and others. Indeed, an occasional doctor or a software engineer, labourers in the modern service sector, among the millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers pouring out of Bihar only legitimises its turning into a mere human reservoir.

The problem arises when it comes to defining the content of that putrid tank. Its beings are not homogeneous: they constitute mutually exclusive and indeed hostile groups which prey on each other. Their poverty degrades culture and the culture of poverty further fragments and brutalises society.

The defining units of the brute gangs are caste and both the arrogance of the junker and the brashness of the kulak, the feudal barbarity of the Ranbir Sena and the cultivated violence of the groups promoted by Laloo Yadav, are articulated through the medium of caste. The problem also arises because such caste conflicts over the pathetic little litties and chokha of power in Bihar do not remain confined within well-set boundaries: thus the bhumihar hordes that have been on the rampage recently have attacked yadavs, kurmis and dusadhs alike, not realising perhaps that Laloo Prasad, Nitish Kumar and Ram Vilas Paswan have long fallen out with each other! But then the logic of caste-based violence is only one of short-term and shortsighted domination based on artificial notions of power.

It is necessarily barbaric, as is evidenced by the fact that "professional rapists" are recruited as part of the attacking armies when gohar is carried out as at Miyanpur and skilled arsonists light the fires that rage through the huts of the poor. And as the flames rise, the rest of India watches bemused, oblivious to the fact that the fire rages in its very backyard. It is not fashionable to cite Karl Marx today but it is perhaps worthwhile recalling that he said that there is an inevitability about progress; there is always the possibility of human beings achieving barbarism.