Bihar to celebrate confidence with anthem and date

Young and old will exchange greeting cards, like they do at New Year’s; there will be nukkad nataks (streetside theatre) in Patna and shram daan in every village where 99 lamps will be lit to mark the number of years since the state was separated from the Bengal presidency in 1912. Schools will display a map of the state with “Hamara Bihar” inscribed in it.
The Bhojpuri film industry, which turned 50 a few days ago, will be celebrated with shows of Bhojpuri films and documentaries and films located in Bihar — like Basu Bhattacharya’s soulful Teesri Kasam, based on Renu’s short story, shot in Araria. The newly-selected “Bihar gaan” or state anthem will be played. Entries for the anthem as well as a prarthna or daily prayer have been invited from the people by the government.

These are just a few of the things planned by the Nitish Kumar government for the 99th Bihar Divas on March 22 in what is being seen as a politically innovative way to take charge of the state’s unfolding story and find an evocative symbol of pride, aspiration and confidence.
So long, said officials involved with this project, Bihar has been known as the country’s basket-case, sending migrants across the country, many to face Raj Thackeray-style hate campaigns. This is meant to begin changing that perception — at home.

According to Anjani Kumar Singh, principal secretary HRD, the Bihar Divas celebrations will extend from two to five days in Patna and other parts of the state; some events will continue into the next year. Celebrated officially for the first time last year, it is scheduled to be even grander in 2012, he says, when, “as in the case of the foundation days of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, it will be celebrated in other states as well”.

Though there is a clear difference in scale, the Bihar Divas hoopla that coincides with the beginning of Nitish’s second term builds on his invocations of Bihari pride in his previous term.

Evening programmes during the Vikas Yatra in 2009 concluded with the playing of the Bihar Gaurav Geet, a song by poet Shanti Jain specially rewritten so that it could be played at the National Youth Festival hosted by the state for the first time in 2006, soon after Nitish took over as Chief Minister.

Bihari pride was also the sub-text in Nitish’s overtly anti-Narendra Modi gesture of returning the Rs 5 crore aid from Gujarat to Bihar for Kosi flood relief in June 2010, the last year of his first term.

In fact, insistence on a kind of sub-nationalism and exhortation of pride in a region-centric identity is a motif common to the politics of Nitish and Modi, otherwise seen to be politically ranged against each other despite the formal alliance of their parties.

In Patna, in the lingering hush of Nitish’s landslide victory in last year’s Assembly polls, political opposition to the government’s feverish project to resurrect a Bihari identity or to construct it anew, is muted.

“Crime is increasing and corruption is on the rise in Bihar. But we will wait and watch for six months. Then we will take to the streets,” says Ram Vilas Paswan, humbled along with ally Lalu Yadav in the last Assembly polls. And RJD’s senior leader Jagdanand Singh says: “Bihari asmita is for every Bihari, not just Nitish Kumar. It is the result of the long-ago struggle for a separate state. It is not as if Nitish created Bihar.”

Singh also points out that the then RJD government held a workshop on Bihari sub-nationalism while presenting the state’s case to the 12th Finance Commission.

Bihari sub-nationalism could be an idea that has been long delayed, says Saibal Gupta, who heads the Asian Development and Research Institute in Patna. “Tagore wrote ‘Jana gana mana’ and also ‘Amar Shonar Bangla’”, he points out. “Similarly, there have been sub-national movements in the south. But in the Hindi heartland, after the Sepoy Mutiny failed, the British unleashed the maximum repression. As a result, resistance to modernisation and westernisation was the strongest here.”

In such a constricted setting, no spacious multi-caste or multi-class social movement could grow. “In Bihar, therefore, there has been the Indian identity and after that only the caste identity,” says Gupta. Today, in the absence of a civil society, the movement towards sub-national cohesion has to, of necessity, be state-centric, he says.

No wonder then that just days ago, in an unusual gesture, the Chief Minister publicly congratulated UTI mutual fund chairman-cum-managing director U K Sinha (of Bihar origin) for taking charge of the Securities and Stock Exchange Board of India.