Very often in Bihar heading out seems like heading back, like an illusory time-machine ride locked in reverse mode. The present quickly lapses, the past accosts you with a jolt of the gear-box and there’s no getting away from the direction it has jolted you into. Travel this road running north of Patna, across the Ganga on the corroded spine of the Mahatma Gandhi Setu, the jaded pride of modern Bihar, and you’ll behold the blown debris of the bonfire of promises.
A steady procession has careened up and down this road through famished decades, spraying the seeds of a million pledges. More slogans have been spewed on this road than the people that populate its forsaken flanks. All well-meaning, perhaps, but few seriously meant. Mostly rotten seeds must beget a mostly rotten harvest. Crumbling mud huts, rancid ponds where the wretched must both drink and defecate, cold hearths, rusting sub-stations, mangled wiring, twisted hope.
“Sunte to hain ki badlaav ho raha hai, lekin hamare yahan aavega tan naa (We hear change is happening, but it will mean something when it arrives here).†Khir Jatan, landless farmhand whose body and spirit have begun to give way at close to 60, has a sense of the altered air of Bihar but it’s nothing intimate to him yet.
He’s heard of spanking highways under construction, he’s been told of the shine that has been put on Patna, he has watched, with mounting amazement, he admits, more and more girls get into uniform and cycle down to the nearest school. “But what have I got out of this?†he asks us, a little cheesed off that his bit of the bread hasn’t arrived, not to speak of his butter. “Vikas ka goonj hai charon taraf, lekin humko bhi to mile kuchh (Development is echoing from all sides, but I should get something too).â€
Shortly upon completing the crossing over the Ganga, we ducked left on a narrow road that gradually disintegrated until it became a dirt track merged seamlessly into the expanse of alluvial earth on either side.
Khir Jatan lives, as ever, in a crumbled shack among many other crumbled shacks clustered in this nowhere corner of the Ganga flank — bamboo and earth and cracked tile roof that leaks through the rains. The road peters away and then it’s a half-hour drive in swirling dust and little else.
“There’s Gangaji and its fertility and nothing more,†he says. “But for the river where would we be? In a lucky year I work enough to provide one meal.â€
The north bank of the Ganga is prosperous in a pre-market sort of way. Which means it is really rather backward. It lives, as it always has, by the riches and ravages of nature, by the sword of the elements that impairs and protects by turns. It lives by flood and by famine, at the mercy of the monsoon and at the feet of the mighty river that gives and takes in equal measure.
This is a piece of quintessential ante-dated India, krishi pradhan desh. It has been more than 60 seasons since the first promises of wealth and well-being were pronounced, sixty scorching summers and sixty harsh winters.
It’s tough on the ears, and tougher on credibility, when elections bring the netas blaring the same old promises of plenty again. It’s tough on Khir Jatan when they tell him change is coming, it’s just round the corner, vote for change. And chief minister Nitish Kumar has a sense of just how tough. It’s not for nothing that whenever he mounts the podium in his chopper-stopping across the state, he issues pointed caveats to his own claims — development hasn’t happened yet, it has just begun, the big challenge lies ahead.
So while Nitish has been able to drastically revise the discourse of this election — from the politics of identity to the politics of intention — he himself is circumspect about what he says he has achieved over the last five years. His is a message intoned sharply to the Khir Jatans — the goods will come, but only if you don’t reverse what has been set in motion, be strong, be patient, I have no magic wand, but what I do have is will to work.
Nitish cannot be unaware how piteously arrested development remains in vast parts of Bihar; he has roamed about enough on the many yatras he has undertaken since he took power in the winter of 2005. We are no more than a hour away from Patna and we are already in primitive setting that little clues of modernity have just begun to poke through. There are signs that something is urging to leap, but equally, there are signs that the leap is bedevilled by distortions.
Back from Khir Jatan’s beyond, back on the main road that squeezes its way out of Hajipur and into the north Bihar heartland, cable television makes an appearance. The fascinating “jugaad†of tin sheets beaten into parabolas and stuck on rooftops. Often just bicycle rims improvised to ambush satellite waves. But there is seldom any electricity. There’s coke and soda aplenty in wayside eateries, but no refrigeration. The ice has all melted away, kya karen boss, the bottled fizz is the temperature of tepid tea, frothing over at the caps. You’ll find sachet-packs of the latest detergents, as new and as improved at they advertise them in Calcutta and Delhi, but you must take your clothes to the turbid banks of the river or the nearest pond or nullah to wash your clothing in.
Dabangg is the season’s rage, but it plays on pirated CDs smuggled in from Nepal in dimly-lit diesel-run shanty theatres. There’s another show that runs in these bawdy-raucous places by night. It’s called “bhookh†(hunger) and it devours Mallika Sherawat’s body parts from newly arrived posters of Hisss, a deep desperate hunger ravaging paper, ungratified aspiration running amok. That’s the chall