Commentary/ Dilip D'Souza

Sometimes there is no laughing

Work comes to a standstill in Bihar,' said the headline in the newspaper the day I began this column. Catching sight of it, I came to a standstill too, in surprise. I read the news eagerly, hoping for some indication of just how 'work comes to a standstill' in a state where, as far as I can tell, no work has been done for years. But there was nothing in it that proved enlightening.

Oh yes, Chief Minister Laloo P Yadav is exerting every fibre of his considerable imagination to find ways to stay out of the clutches of the law. That's had the fallout you might expect. His 'loyalists' are closing shops and offices; processions and meetings are being held in support of the CM who won't go; ministers have given up spending time at their desks. That kind of thing, but despite the headline, some things are happening in Bihar. A bureaucrat reports that ''only those files are being disposed of which can provide ministers with some financial gain."

Nothing out of the ordinary, you see, nothing at all. So what is it about work coming to a stop in Bihar that is remarkable enough to make news?

Ah, but that's the mystique, the charm of Bihar. I'm not being entirely facetious, because there is something poetic, or perhaps I mean prophetic, about the depths to which that state has sunk. Dare I admit it? Bihar fascinates me.

In December 1982, Shiva Naipaul wrote in The Spectator about a visit to Bihar. It was 'A Dying State' to him then, and he described its capital like this: '...a junk-heap of peeling, crumbling buildings, of squatter colonies earthed in tracts of mossy mud... Stagnant, black-watered gutters reek. Inches away from these sewers, people squat, arms limply hanging, oblivious of the stench, staring as vacantly as the wandering holy cows... The disorder, the dirt, the ugliness is overwhelming. How do men manage to live in a place like this? How is it that they do not all go mad?'

This was Patna Naipaul wrote of, a city Indians know has a rich, glorious past. As Pataliputra, it was a centre of culture and learning for the world. That was what Sharma, a complacent Bihari official, impressed upon Naipaul: "How long was Rome capital of the world? Only for a few hundred years. But Pataliputra was imperial capital for much, much longer than that... thousands of years. Yet you people in the West call Rome the Eternal City. We Hindus laugh."

I try picturing the scene. Sharma and Naipaul, on the brink of one of those "black-watered gutters", looking over a landscape filled with squatter colonies and general ugliness. Sharma, chewing on some paan maybe, telling Naipaul about the glories that lie hidden somewhere below, somewhere before, the disorder and the dirt. Sharma, unable to see and uninterested in the irony that his words, mingling with the surroundings, raise up around him like a fog. Sharma who laughs, but could he have known that in a very real sense, he personifies the perversity that is Bihar?

When I read that headline in the paper, I thought of Sharma. In my mind, he sits at his government desk somewhere in a government office in Patna, lost in a reverie about Rome and Pataliputra, laughing quietly to himself. Along come Laloo's 'loyalists', closing the office and sending Sharma home. They have seen to it: work has come to a standstill in Bihar. Neither they, nor the press covering the event, nor even Sharma who is now laughing all the way home, stop to think that he had been doing no work anyway.

In a recent issue of Granta, William Dalrymple makes an interesting point about the state. Newspaper articles about Bihar always refer to its 'backward' condition -- its poverty, population, crime, sloth. But in many ways, writes Dalrymple, Bihar is actually well ahead, well forward of the rest of the country. It has even established something of a tradition, a heritage, for itself -- as a trendsetter. What Bihar does today, the rest of us are scrambling to do tomorrow. Like, for example, fake elections. Elections were first rigged in Bihar, in 1962. Today, they are commonly rigged everywhere. In numbers, criminals were first elected to Parliament and the assembly in this state. Today, every state, every party, has important elected leaders with murky crimes in their pasts.

True to that glorious heritage, Bihar now offers us India's first head of government who will not go.

If you think about it, that's a perfectly logical conclusion to the growing domination of politics by criminals that Bihar taught us, the growth we have tolerated for years. These are men who have no use for laws to begin with. They owe their power, their positions, to a seething contempt for justice. So when their crimes come back to haunt them, it's only natural that they pay no attention.

It's only our genteel notions -- of law and order, of justice that the courts are meant to dispense, of the supremacy of the Constitution -- that are offended by Laloo's refusal to quit office. We are astonished by such brazenness, such open defiance of the law. The truth is -- and Bihar showed it to us years ago -- that there's no reason in the world to be surprised. We have allowed a whole generation of men to rule us who disdain genteel notions. Laloo is simply the first of them to say the obvious: those concepts mean nothing to me, so why should I step down?

Saying so, daring the country to remove him, he puts the rest of us squarely in the middle of a painful dilemma. How do you apply laws to a man who has no idea of the meaning of laws? What Constitutional requirement can rein in a man who cares not a fig for the Constitution? There's talk of imposing President's rule in Bihar if Laloo will not give up his position. I really, really want to know how that's going to be done. Just what is going to drag Laloo off that chief ministerial throne?

That question needs answers, because it's only for the present that we have just one chief minister -- Laloo -- who will not quit. What's going to happen when his colleagues in other states adopt the same brazen tactics? Which, as the rest of the country follows Bihar's pioneering footsteps, they surely will?

It was 15 years, half a generation, after Shiva Naipaul that Dalrymple wrote about Laloo's Bihar in Granta. He describes Patna in words that, all those years later, are startlingly reminiscent of Naipaul: '... the treeless pavements (are filled) with sackcloth shacks. The shacks expand into slums. The slums are surrounded by garbage heaps. Goats, pigs, dogs and children compete for scraps of food. Open sewers line the road. Sewer rats the size of cats scamper among the rickshaws.'

Naipaul or Dalrymple, take your pick. This is the empire that a Laloo determined to stay in his chair presides over. This is the hell that he and his equally venal predecessors have built in Bihar. If in 1982, Naipaul saw a dying state in Bihar, it must be in some kind of grave today.

If Bihar sets the trend, what's in store for the rest of us? That thought is what fascinates me. But no, Mr Sharma, there's no laughing.

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