HVK Archives: Sauce for the goose
Sauce for the goose - The Telegraph
Arvind N. Das
()
29 July 1997
Title: Sauce for the goose
Author: Arvind N. Das
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: July 29, 1997
By anointing his wife as successor, Laloo Prasad Yadav has gone beyond both
politics and the theatre of the absurd.
The installation of the proxy government in Bihar has caused both
consternation and amusement. Those who are shocked profess faith in
political morality and are aghast that a thoroughly amoral but distinctly
cunning politician can so stretch the system to its extremes as to have his
rabri and eat it too. Those who are amused admire the cleverness of it all:
they find even the effrontery of Laloo Prasad Yadav endearing. Thus have
the elite always reacted to peasant cunning.
The other amoral politicians who hide their pusillanimity under safari
suits or stiffly starched angavastrams cannot wash their hands off the
developments in India's second most populous state. They have not only
connived with Yadav in subverting the processes of governance and the law
of the land but are accessories to the fact of instituting a dynasty in Bihar.
For the people of Bihar, however, this is neither cleverness nor adroit
realpolitik. It is nothing more than one more cruel joke being played on
them, one more attempt to prolong their agony, one more instance of making
them the laughing stock of the world.
When Yadav was first elected chief minister, he resented being reminded of
the role of kingmakers who had elevated him to that position. He is
reported to have remarked, "Chanakya jo bhi ho, Chandragupta ham hi na
hain" - whoever might be Chanakya, I am Chandragupta. He achieved two ends
through that: he asserted his superordinate position in the state system
and, at the same time, satisfied the Bihari urge for using historical
metaphor to disguise the sordid present.
Today, when the dreams of his charwaha vidyalaya have turned into the
nightmares of the fodder scandal, Yadav is once again invoking history. He
has now converted himself from Chandragupta to Chanakya. No quick change
artist could have shown greater agility.
This is, however, not strange in Bihar. The changing nature of the state
itself determined by the changing contours of power. In feudal and
semi-feudal Bihar, property was power, but power was also conditioned and
moderated by social legitimacy In Bihar under lumpen capitalism, social
legitimacy has been replaced by political position. It would not be too
wrong to say that electoral politics has today taken on the role of the
erstwhile feudal jousts and tournaments, except that they have become
bloodier.
There is of course a prize at the end of the bout: the winner takes hold of
a principality where near absolute rule can be practised. The holders of
such principalities grace the legislative buildings of Patna and it is
apposite that in those imposing buildings the doors marked with the Latin
word, PVBLIC, should be permanently blocked up. Thus, Bihar has urban
growth without industrialization; wealth without production; money without
culture; and at the other end it has gruelling poverty, misery and
brutalization of a large segment of its population. And Yadav has grasped
this reality from the end of the privileged. It is this knowledge that
enables him to play king now, kingmaker now.
The ways in which the metropolitan intelligentsia reacts to Bihar is,
however, distinctly odd. It exhibits greater ignorance about Bihar than
about Bosnia and relates to developments in the state as if they have
happened in some strange never, never land. Stereotyping has substituted
for information and caricaturing has replaced understanding. It is no
wonder, therefore, that Bihar mystifies economic analysts and political
commentators alike.
Indeed, Yadav is himself a figure who caused immense confusion among the
chattering classes. At first, they made fun of him as a country bumpkin,
almost the village idiot of Indian politics. When those who knew better
pointed out his cunning, they were derided as having been taken in by the
ideology of Mandalization. Later, Yadav was portrayed as an intrepid
anti-communalist and a master of the art of realpolitik. Again, when those
who knew better pointed out that he had no clue about the nitty gritty of
steering the ship of state, they were dismissed as carping critics who did
not acknowledge the mastery of the great communicator.
The metropolitan media have never been able to make a realistic assessment
of Yadav and, therefore, they have portrayed him either as a clown or as a
hero. They have been wrong on both counts.
The analysis of Yadav's state has been similarly uninformed. Bihar has
been so obscured by the cliches of poverty, backwardness and degeneration
that cover it that significant developments there have been ignored and
even those features that should be apparent to the naked eye have not been
noticed. The fact is that Bihar has changed and the elements of its
economic transformation have now started making obvious impact also on its
politics. The political fragmentation of Bihar has to be analyzed in this
light.
The other backward classes bloc has split and it is that fragmentation
which explains more about the electoral results than the appeal of ideology
either of the Hindutva or Mandal variety. The Kurmis have endorsed the
Bharatiya Janata Party-Samata Party combine not because they have developed
a sudden love for Ram but because many of them are upwardly mobile, wannabe
upper castes who feel uncomfortable with Yadav's cultivation of poverty It
has been estimated that in Bihar today, there are more doctors and
engineers from among the Kurmis than any other caste. These are also among
the relatively better off professionals who are more vulnerable in the raj
where kidnapping for ransom is a major industry In this context, the urge
for law and order among Kurmis and the rejection of Laloo-led lawlessness
is understandable.
Another feature of Bihar is that while the poor have remained where they
were or, at best, become only marginally less poor, the rich have got
immensely richer. The mushrooming of multi-storeyed buildings in Patna
symbolize increasing affluence of this section and the flourishing of
boutiques in the many shopping complexes also testifies to conspicuous
consumption. Patna has even a Pierre Cardin outlet.
This paradox holds the key to much of what is happening in Bihar. In all
there is a fair amount of money in Bihar and it desperately seeks
investment opportunities. The problem is that much of this money is outside
the tax net and its owners cannot risk inclusion in the tax system. That
Rabri Devi is attempting to tackle income tax authorities on her
substantial incomes from animal husbandry in not insignificant in this
context.
The provision that banks have to deduct tax at source on interest above Rs
10,000 propels this money towards "parabanking". In turn, these
institutions acquire enormous liquidity at times when the regular financial
sector is beset with a debilitating cash crunch - a phenomenon that enables
them to lend out money at rates of interest of 36 per cent or more. Such
usury also gives them tremendous political clout since they can be used to
disguise large deposits by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats by showing
these as having come from many small depositors. This "modernized" usury
fits in with the overall nature of the political economy of Bihar. It
enables the landlords to diversify their operations, aids accumulation
among the emergent kulaks, and effortlessly replaces sustained growth and
redistribution with speculation. It also assists political
"Sanskritization": witness the change in the pronunciation of the name of
the new chief minister of Bihar, from the name of a common sweet to the
inclusion of an elongated vowel in between.
Yadav has made a political virtue of stagnation. His rhetoric of
anti-developmentalism amuses the observers from the big cities and he even
gets some rural laughs when he proclaims that power can be dangerous for
the poor since their cattle can get electrocuted.
By making his wife into the rani, he has gone beyond both politics and the
theatre of the absurd. The combination of such speculator finance capital
and political cretinism makes it difficult for Bihar to break out of the
vicious cycle in which it is caught. That is, unless the people of decide
that enough is enough.
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