Biharis don't dream anymore of a better life: Nitish Kumar and Lalu know why
It is difficult to picture a shared Bihari dream as the Bihari identity is largely fragmented.
In the imaginarium of Bihar, chief minister Nitish Kumar sees himself as a social reformer. Lalu Prasad Yadav sees himself as the voice of the oppressed, a one-man bastion of secularism. Tejaswi Yadav sees himself as the young leader who will one day sit on the CM’s chair. The BJP sees itself as a party set to rule the state sooner. The only question that remains to be answered is about the people of Bihar, how they imagine their future as Biharis.
It’s a difficult question, specifically in a land where harsh realities of life often take a toll on imagination. There are always individual dreams; of class mobilisation, of work, and a life of dignity. But these are only individual dreams, varying from person to person. It would be difficult to picture a shared Bihari dream as the Bihari identity is largely fragmented. A Brahmin Bihari belongs to a different world than a Dalit Bihari. Some Biharis dream of providing their children proper education, while others are too frightened to dream so far. They only dream a day when their houses won’t be razed in an act of caste violence. So, there are many factors like caste, class and gender, defining Bihari imagination and the list is only increasing.
It is also difficult to dream when you have been ruled by someone all your life. “Rule” seems to be an undemocratic word. But it’s something deeply rooted inside Bihar and maybe the rest of India, too. Jagannath Mishra ruled Bihar for years. Then there was Lalu and now Nitish Kumar. They really “ruled” the state. Bihar’s destiny depended on their ideas and sometimes on their whims.
When they went for “Brahmanical domination and corruption”, people accepted it as part of their fate. When they were for superficial assertion and charwaha vidyalayas (school for cattle grazers), Bihar adopted that. When they opted for development schemes, Bihar went to work, making a class of politicians and babus opulent. All the while, there were always many sarkars; there were collector sahib, BDO sahib, MLA sahib and dabang sahib, contractor sahib and engineer sahib. There was never a dearth of rulers in Bihar, no matter whose government it was. And most of the population, willingly or unwillingly, got ruled by these sahibs.
Also, it is difficult to dream when your life is full of immediate constraints. For example, it is difficult to imagine a future when you don’t know if you will find work in the next season or not; whether the cities you go to in search of work will be hospitable or not; whether someone falls ill or not; whether you will have to take them to a big hospital for treatment or not; whether you will have any savings or not; whether you will be able to send your child to a private school or not.
It is also difficult to find dignity when you are constantly abused and targeted. Your labour empowers big cities, yet you are the one targeted for crimes in the city, for “snatching” jobs from the local people; for being poor.
You come to AIIMS and unnecessarily crowd it. You are dependent on welfare schemes. You don’t know how to dress, how to speak, how to behave.
You are ridiculed for what you are and you are poor.
There are days when you come across Biharis who, away from their homeland, have been working for fourteen hours a day on the roads or at the construction sites of Delhi or Mumbai.
You want to say, “See, Biharis are so hardworking. They deserve their dreams. They deserve a better life.” But then, someone retorts, “What has stopped them from that?”
What has stopped Biharis from dreaming, for a better life? Is it the fact that our education system is non-existent? Is it the fact that the health system in the state is unreliable? Is it the fact that the state can’t provide even minimum work to its people? Or is it the fact that we have trapped ourselves in the feudal structures where we fail to see ourselves beyond caste?
Ask Nitish Kumar. Health, education and job guarantee during his “rule” would have made Bihar a better society, isn’t it? It might even have helped to eliminate dowry, child marriage and other evils that he fights these days.
Ask Lalu Prasad Yadav. Would anything have changed for Dalit children, had they received good education? Would things have been better if Bihar had good roads twenty five years ago? Or, should we be satisfied with token secularism and assertion for some castes? Actually, there are no answers coming. To be frank, Biharis have seldom asked any of these questions. They are busy playing caste configurations and waiting for a good sahib to replace a bad one.
Some dreams still live on, in the annual report of the Super-30 coaching institute or in the civil services results. But many dreams die, too, when you hear that Dalit slums are still being razed in Bihar, in 2017; when you hear about another education scam; when you hear how the health infrastructure fails people every day; when you come across Bihari rickshaw-pullers, hawkers and labours in Delhi, Mumbai, Nagpur, Manipur, Ludhiana, Ahmedabad and Bangalore, wandering in search for a living, far away from their families.
Dreams continue to be out of reach for common Biharis as our “rulers” keep themselves afloat in a sea of endless dreams. It seems that the imaginarium only exists for them.