| Bihar was a land of superlatives, one of India's most
learned and prosperous regions, home to universities like Nalanda, spiritual centres like
Bodh Gaya, a land of plenty. Bihar is still a land of superlatives -- but all the wrong
ones. It is India's most impoverished, most ill-educated, most wretched state. The horror
stories of a crumbling society and disintegrating administration have made Bihar, and
unfortunately its 86 million people, a metaphor for misery, frustration and mindless
violence. But more dangerously, Bihar is a cancer that can so easily consume the rest of
India To understand India's worst-case
scenario, we sent Associate Editor Harinder Baweja, Principal Correspondent Sanjay Kumar
Jha and Senior Photographer Sharad Saxena to Jehanabad, whose endless caste wars are a
disturbing case study for all that is wrong with Bihar. It was Jehanabad's escalating
massacres -- five during 1999, claiming 80 lives -- that led to the dismissal of Rabri
Devi's Government in February. Baweja, a veteran of reporting the violence of
terrorism-ravaged Punjab and Kashmir, said she had, quite simply, never seen anything as
senseless as Jehanabad. It isn't a battle between the rich and the poor: the landlords
with holdings of a sixth of an acre, are not landlords in the true sense of the word. It is a fight between the poor and the poorest. The lives of the
upper castes and lower castes revolve not around roads, schools or healthcare -- none of
which seems to exist in Jehanabad -- but around a grim war for "self-respect".
Says Jha, an old Bihar hand: "They have nothing else to fight over." Bihar's
politicians fuel this fire; this "self-respect" is their sole agenda. Nothing
else matters, not Bihar's wretchedness, not its horrifyingly low literacy (38 per cent),
not its fall from ancient glory. If India still refuses to learn the lessons Bihar offers,
she will be doomed to repeat them.
(Aroon Purie) |
