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 Bhagar Yadav was on the run for three decades; he ultimately surrendered before the Superintendent of Police of Bihar’s West Champaran District, K.S. Anupam. The surrender was not without its drama and make-believe. The drama was provided by his slogan shouting retinue under the leadership of his son, Amar Yadav, the former chairman of the zila parishad. Only two members of his famed gang went to jail with him. The weapons they laid down amounted to only one carbine, one single barrel gun and one rifle.

But the surrender of Bhagar is an epoch-making event for the state administration. If in India the state is considered to be ‘soft’, it used to be considered to be ‘pulp’ in Bihar till recently. Even during the British period, the reach and authority of the state was limited in this region. In the last 60 years, even the remnants of the relatively weak British authoritarian state structure in Bihar had withered away.

In the last two and a half years, however, the authority of the state as an independent agent is being established. The triad of legislature, judiciary and executive has converged to restore the non-existent ‘law’ and elusive ‘order’ in the state. The immediate result of this convergence has been the dramatic increase in the conviction rate where even ‘law makers’ from the ruling party are not spared. The surrender of a person like Bhagar is yet more proof of the growing might of the state.

The phenomenon of Bhagar cannot be understood without reference to his setting. In Bihar as a whole and specifically in Champaran, there was very little by way of concerted social movements to break settled feudal structures. Old Champaran district, the birth place of George Orwell, and now divided between East and West, was home to some of the biggest beneficiaries of the ‘permanent settlement’ (zamindari), like the Bettiah Raj and the Ram Nagar Raj. Leakages from the estate administration could be so staggering that the managers of some of the estates could acquire massive amounts of land and ultimate social hegemony, like the Dewanjee of Sikarpur Estate. The story of crime, brigandage and primitive accumulation was thus embedded in the social structure of the district. Bhagar is a product of this milieu.

Except for the Bettiah Raj, other estates had clear lines of succession. Consequently, the Bettiah Raj came under the ‘court of wards’, and this mammoth estate became the object of accumulation and greed, earlier by the pre-Independence administrators and later by our indigenous governing elites. Fallow land of the Bettiah Raj in Sathi was distributed amongst the elite, instead of the landless, for various considerations in the early fifties. A huge amount of land was settled with a notorious excise commissioner infamous for the molasses scam, allegedly for the matrimonial consideration of his son with regard to the adopted daughter of the then chief minister. Bipin Biharee Verma, the manager of Bettiah Raj, who scripted most of the primitive accumulation and leakage, was said to have had direct patronage from a very prestigious address in Delhi.

When this major scam was detected in Bihar, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel forced the leadership of the state to return the land acquired through stealth, through the Sathi Land Restoration Act in the early fifties. This bill was possibly the first of its kind in the state whereby organised institutional loot was undone through a legislative measure. However, the judicial court later nullified the act and restored the land to the original buyer, putting a seal on that diabolic transaction. The entire story was laid bare in a book named Bapu Ke Saputo Ka Raj by Chandradeo Sharma. This book, published by Chand Press, Jehanabad, was banned by the then government of Bihar.

The plunder and loot of Bettiah Raj continued unabated. But with the change in the power structure in the last two decades, the social base and sophistication of the primitive accumulator changed. The character of the landed elite changed to the trading elite, with substantial interests in sugarcane production and the sugarcane industry. This new elite coopted and promoted several henchmen from the subaltern background. The story goes that in the guesthouse of Udaipur jungle, built originally by the Bettiah Raj, now patronised by the new elite, the innovation of the kidnapping industry was given shape under the supervision of an IPS officer of Andhra Pradesh cadre posted in the district in the early eighties. Kidnapping got precedence, as dacoity was not considered to be a risk-free operation.

Bhagar started his career as a cattle guard from the Udaipur jungle, where he finetuned his kidnapping skill. Over the years, he diversified his accumulation, apart from eyeing the left-overs of the Bettiah Raj. He is said to now control the cultivation of about 10,000 acres of diara land, ghats, contracts and levies on the incoming and outgoing goods of the region. In this way, the subalterns emulate the traditional elites. In the case of Champaran, the pattern of primitive accumulation was not only the same but even the object of accumulation was identical, for criminals of the traditional as well as the subaltern elite.

Now, for the first time in Bihar, the state is emerging as an autonomous social mediator. The numerous power centres that functioned independently in Bihar, are now slowly capitulating before the authority of the state. Bhagar’s surrender has to be seen in this broader social matrix.

The writer is member secretary, Asian Development Research Institute, Patna