Election Commission is yet to announce the schedule for the forthcoming elections to the Bihar State Assembly. But the stage has already been set and the whole of urban Bihar is dotted with Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi billboards. Amit Shah has flagged off BJP campaign vehicles to traverse the whole of Bihar and millions of ‘NaMo’ printed saris have also been shipped from Surat to flood the state. And on July 25 Narendra Modi paid his first visit to Bihar after becoming PM to fire the BJP’s election salvo. Two days later, it was the turn of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad to respond – Lalu responded with a Bihar bandh on the SECC issue and Nitish Kumar with what he called the report card for his ten years in power. Let us take a quick look at how the battle lines are being drawn in Bihar.
Narendra Modi’s Muzaffarpur speech was just like one of his poll speeches from his 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign. Modi did not seem to remember that his party actually ruled in Bihar in alliance with Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) for as long as eight years from 2005 to 2013! He did not even care for the fact that he was speaking as the Prime Minister and that across the country people were protesting against the growing price-rise and agrarian distress under his government and demanding resignations of his own central ministers and his party’s chief ministers in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh over the very issue of corruption which he had promised to end.
Modi made the same appeal to the Bihar electorate which had failed spectacularly in Delhi in January that people should vote for the BJP in the state because it was in power at the Centre! The idea that development could be best ensured by having the same party in power in both Centre and states smacks of utter contempt for the principles and spirit of both democracy and federalism. It is time Modi’s much touted thesis of ‘cooperative federalism’ was renamed as ‘coercive federalism’ and the obnoxious attempt to browbeat the people in state elections by brandishing the powers of the central government was rejected resoundingly.
Taking a leaf out of Modi’s 2014 Lok Sabha campaign, Nitish Kumar has also launched a propaganda blitzkrieg projecting himself as the messiah for Bihar. In a report card on his ten years of rule he has claimed that his government has brought about significant progress in education and health, two sectors that are actually facing a grave crisis in Bihar. With characteristic arrogance, Nitish Kumar said that those who are questioning his development claims should get their ‘eyes operated’! The fact remains that the Nitish Kumar government continues to face sustained agitations by people engaged precisely in the two sectors where he claims significant progress – education and health. And his government has only resorted to lathis and lies to deal with the demands and agitations of contract teachers, mid-day meal workers, ASHA activists.
Nitish Kumar’s hollow claims have been exposed most recently by the rural development data of the SECC conducted between 2011 and 2013 which shows Bihar is still 90 per cent rural, and the overwhelming majority of rural households are landless. The survey conducted by the CPI(ML) among two lakh rural poor households in 2014 had found that more than 90% of the households had not got any benefit from the land reform programmes of the state government. In fact, Nitish Kumar now keeps conspicuously quiet about his abandoned promise of land redistribution and rights for share-croppers, the objective with which his government had set up the land reforms commission only to unceremoniously consign its report to the dustbin.
Nitish Kumar had promised not just ‘development’ but ‘development with justice’. And justice has been one of the biggest casualties of his tenure. He began his rule by dismantling the Justice Amir Das Commission set up in the wake of the heinous Laxmanpur Bathe massacre to bring the perpetrators of the serial massacres of the rural poor to justice and the end result was wholesale serial acquittal of culprits. A recent report on the riot survivors of Bhagalpur revealed a similar picture of injustice and neglect. Good governance or ‘sushashan’ was another catch phrase of Nitish Kumar and the recent ‘face-saving’ arrest of two notorious JDU MLAs – Anant Singh and Sunil Pandey – only exposed the true face of that ‘sushashan’ where corruption ruled the roost and politically empowered economic criminals called all the shots.
The BJP and the JD(U) are trying to reduce the Bihar elections to a spectacle of a bipolar personality-based contest between Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, thereby drowning out the real issues and burning questions haunting the people on the ground. The CPI(ML) and other Left forces in the state will have to foil this game plan by bringing to the fore the might and agenda of the fighting people of Bihar. The mass response to the July 21 Bihar bandh at the call of the Left showed the appeal and potential of the united Left campaign in Bihar. The Left ranks must carry forward this spirit and project the real agenda of democracy and social transformation with all their strength.
