And this has been the trouble — their poverty and resultant talent for monopolising menial jobs in the cities of a largely poor country.

Immigrants are hated for two reasons — for being prosperous and for being destitute. Jews and Gypsies. Marwaris and Biharis. While talent for business is limited to a small class of migrants, the poor move in swarms. So for every Marwari who left his district to settle in Chandil in Jharkhand, there are a hundred hungry peasants in Samastipur buying tickets to Delhi and Mumbai as we talk. The risk of suffering away appears more palatable than the permanent pain of penury at home. Cities offer hope, for their children if not for themselves.

But our cities are also poor places. This means their capacity to nurture hope for such large numbers is very limited. There is competition at the basic level and the ‘native’ people feel threatened — economically, sometimes also culturally.

A politician’s cynical tactic to win over a constituency by targeting ‘outsiders’ is not hard to understand. But in India, it will not succeed. Because the poor are just too many. And they have a constitution to back them. The Hajipur peasant’s need to feed his five children backed by his right to go anywhere he can earn the money to buy food is too forceful a reality for a political ploy to negate.

Perhaps many Marathis too can tell a Bihari just by looking at his face. But that would not expel him from his quarter-roomer in Mumbai. As my friend’s friend’s certain knowledge of my maligned origin failed to send me back to Bihar.

... contd.