I was twelve. Until that time I did not know even ABC.’
I asked: ‘How were you treated by the upper castes in your village?’
Laloo laughed. The other MPs – who had all gathered around and were listening reverently to the words of their leader – joined in with a great roar of canned laughter.
‘All my childhood I was beaten and insulted by the landlords,’ said Laloo. ‘For no reason they would punish me. Because we were from the Yadav caste we were not entitled even to sit on a chair: they would make us sit on the ground. I remember all that humiliation. Now I am in the chair and I want those people to sit on the ground. It is in my mind to teach them a lesson. I don’t hate them,’ he added. ‘But their minds have to be …’ He paused, searching for the right word: ‘Their minds have to be changed. We have been an independent country for fifty years, but there has been no alteration in the caste system, no social justice. I want to end caste. I want inter-caste marriages. But these Brahmin priests will not allow it.’
‘But how can you hope to destroy a system that has been around for three and a half thousand years?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t caste the social foundation of Hinduism?’
‘It is an evil system,’ said Laloo simply. ‘It must go.’
The plane was now wheeling above Patna. Below I could see the grey ribbon of the Ganges threading its way along the edge of the city, past the ghats and out in to the fertile floodplains of Bihar.
‘Go back to your seat now,’ said Laloo curtly. ‘I will talk to you again this afternoon.’
No one has ever called Patna a beautiful city; but revisiting it I found I had forgotten how bad things were. As you drive in through the outskirts, the treeless pavements begin to fill with occasional sackcloth shacks. The shacks expand in to slums. The slums are surrounded by garbage heaps. Around the garbage heaps goats, pigs, dogs and children compete for scraps of food. The further you go, the worse it becomes. Open drains line the road. Beside them lie emaciated migrants from famine-hit villages. Sewer-rats the size of cats scamper among the rickshaws.
Bihar is in fact one of the last areas of the subcontinent which really conforms to the image of India promoted by well-meaning Oxfam advertisements, all beggars, cripples and overpopulated leper hospitals: ‘Send £10 and help Sita regain her sight …’ For the reality after fifty years of independence is that India is now the seventh industrial power on earth, with a large, prosperous and entrepreneurial middle class.
Yet while much of the south-west of India seems to be surging purposefully towards a future of modest prosperity, health and full literacy, Bihar has begun to act as a kind of leaden counterweight, dragging the north of the country back towards the Middle Ages. One of the state’s few really profitable industries is the manufacture of counterfeit pharmaceuticals – salt pills dressed up as aspirins, sugar tablets pretending to be antibiotics – a field in which it apparently leads South Asia. Recently an enterprising Bihari counterfeiter expanded his operations to include the manufacture of great quantities of a fake chalk-based toothpaste called Colfate. Otherwise, despite exceptionally rich mineral deposits and fertile soil, the state remains the poorest in India.
Not only is the economy stagnant, crime is completely out of control: 64,085 violent offences (such as armed robbery, looting, rioting and murder) took place between January and June 1997. This figure includes 2,625 murders, 1,116 kidnappings and 127 abductions for ransom, meaning that Bihar witnesses fourteen murders every day, and a kidnapping every four hours. Whatever index of prosperity and development you choose, Bihar comes triumphantly at the bottom. It has the lowest literacy, the highest number of deaths in police custody, the worst roads, the highest crime, the fewest cinemas. Its per capita income is less than half the Indian average. Not long ago it even had a major famine. The state has withered; Bihar is now nearing a situation of anarchy.
The day I flew back in to Patna, there were six stories vying for attention on the front page of the Bihar edition of the Hindustan Times; each in its own way seemed to confirm the collapse of government in the state.
The paper led with a report about a group of tribals who were demanding an independent state in the hills of southern Bihar. They had just carried out a raid on a mine and successfully got away with ‘almost six hundred kilograms of gelignite, over a thousand detonators and fifteen hundred metres of igniting tape’.
Below this was a report of a shoot-out in which the Patna police killed ‘a notorious criminal wanted in several cases of dacoity including the kidnapping of the Gupta Biscuit Company’s proprietor’.
Next, a political piece carried a statement from the Congress opposition accusing the Bihar government of ‘ignoring the famine-like situation prevailing in the state’.
Another report, headlined ‘Crime on the Rise in Muzaffarpur’, detailed the arrest over the previous three months of ‘1,437 criminals’ during the ‘116 riots’ that the town had apparently suffered since the New Year.
At the bottom of the page was an item announcing an initiative to resuscitate the moribund Bihar tourist industry: a paramilitary Tourist Protection Force was to be set up, providing a heavily armed escort for any Japanese tourists wishing to brave a visit to the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment at Bodh Gaya.
But the most astonishing story concerned the goings-on at Patna University. There angry examinees had ‘torched a police jeep and damaged the car of the Vice Chancellor’. What had caused this? A cut in student grants? Nothing of the sort. ‘According to reports, the Vice Chancellor, in a surprise visit to the [exam] centre found all the examinees adopting unfair means. He ordered a body search and seized two gunny bags full of notes, chits and books from the examinees … In a brazen move the examinees then walked out of the examination hall and resorted to wanton vandalism.’
That afternoon I called on the Vice Chancellor, to see if the reports were exaggerated. Professor Mohinuddin was a small, wiry man with heavy black glasses. He maintained that, on the contrary, the press had played down the violence. On being caught red-handed the students had attacked him, hurling desks and chairs, and forced him to take shelter in a sandbagged police post. There, despite a valiant defence by the six policeman on duty, the mob had succeeded in driving the Vice Chancellor from his refuge with the help of a couple of crude firebombs. Later, for good measure, the students had issued a death threat against him. ‘It is lucky I am a widower,’ said the Professor. ‘I only have my own safety to worry about.’
Not far from Professor Mohinuddin’s house was the home of Uttam Sengupta, the editor of the Patna edition of the Times of India. Like his academic neighbour, Mr Sengupta had had a somewhat upsetting week. Two days previously, someone had taken a potshot at him with a sawn-off shotgun. The pellets had lodged themselves in the back door of his old Fiat. Sengupta had escaped unscathed but shaken.
According to Sengupta, what was happening in Bihar was nothing less than the death of the state. Much of the problem, he said, derived from the fact that the Bihar government was broke and unable to provide the most basic amenities. The National Thermal Power Corporation, the Indian national grid, had recently threatened to cut off Bihar’s electricity supply unless its dues were paid. In the Patna hospital there were no bedsheets, no drugs and no bandages. The only X-ray machine in the city had been out of order for a year; the hospital could not afford to buy the spare parts. Patna went black at night, as there were no lightbulbs for the street lamps. (According to the writer Arvind Das, who researched the problem in some detail, the city apparently required six thousand bulbs. On one occasion during Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, the administration managed to muster as many as 2,200; but normally only a fraction of that number were available. Occasionally businesses clubbed together to light a
