The Rediff Special/B G Verghese

Independent and honest officials have been hounded or sidelined. All favours have a price. Patronage has supplanted merit

The reason for this pathetic state of affairs is not far to seek. With little other enterprise, land ownership in Bihar determines the power structure. The zamindars and the zamindari class by and large ruled the State as legislators, bureaucrats and professionals. They controlled the media and academia. The politics of Bihar until 1967 was little more than the story of intrigues and rivalry among the ruling castes. This continues, though there has been a change of actors. The upper crust among the middle castes has moved centre-stage. They have entrenched themselves in the power structure and have used or, more truly, abused the politics of patronage to appropriate the state and enhance their leverage.

These closed caste and kinship networks have become self-perpetuating bastions of privilege and preference. Supernumerary appointments have brazenly been made for a consideration to non-existent government posts by officials on the eve of retirement. These have sometimes had to be subsequently validated to avoid further hardship to innocent victims.

Merit and service are at a discount and efficiency has suffered. The disempowered poor do not know where to turn. Laws cannot be enforced, and due process requires a reach and staying power that few possess. The rural elites have acquired stakes in the most lucrative avenues of private enterprise, namely, contracting and road transport, further enhancing their dominance.

From the 1920s, when there were moves to introduce free and primary education in Bihar, the upper (read ruling) castes opposed such dangerous tendencies. Illiteracy and serfdom go together. No surprise that even today, Bihar remains a sink of illiteracy. The industrial enterprises of Chota Nagpur and South Bihar -- mining, steel, engineering, cement, sugar -- were for the most part established by outsiders. Long association with Bengal as part of that Presidency had left Bengali salient in many spheres of activity. The state witnessed a process of de-industrialisation and de-urbanisation over the turn of the century. Many rural poor were recruited as indentured labour and sent to the West Indies, Guyana, Surinam, Mauritius and Fiji.

Zamindari compensation was not invested in the indsutrialisation of Bihar. There was no real local entrepreneurial tradition. Absentee landlordism, usury, indebtedness and an impoverished peasantry precluded the growth of a market. North Bihar remained internally unconnected and 'disconnected' from anywhere else except by an inefficient metre gauge system. Even to this day it is not on the Indian Airlines map, while the lateral road system is dissected by distantly bridged tributaries of the Ganga.

Worse, agricultural productivity remains abysmally low with large sections of landlords unwilling to cultivate their fields themselves or to provide security of tenure to their tenants or sharecroppers for fear of losing possession of their lands. They have long sought to live as rentiers and absentee landlords, enjoying the unearned increment from capital appreciation of their properties. They have not risked innovation, land improvement or better farming so as to enhance agricultural stability and productivity.

On the contrary, these rent-seekers have been attitudinally inimical to improvement and change. They entered politics to perpetuate feudal power or joined the services and professions to construct an unholy coalition to ward off the danger of land reform, social development and an end to feudal privilege. Their time and money has been invested in perpetuating caste-dominated landed interests. The social equation in Bihar makes feudalism equal caste plus land.

Indeed, caste and land are so closely interwoven that it is even today not always easy to separate one from the other. The 'agricultural surplus', if that is what the exploitative dividend can be termed, has been further invested in acquiring influence through money and muscle, by buying juicy contracts, political funding, booth-capturing, securing appointments for caste cohorts, and reducing the state to a confederation of private estates. And so to the criminalisation of politics and the politician of crime.

Booth-capturing and electoral malpractice and violence have reached their acme in Bihar. A once-proud administration has been reduced to shambles. The legislative invasion of and judicial intervention in the executive domain has demoralised administrative cadres. Independent and honest officials have been hounded or sidelined. Nothing moves without special pleading. All favours have a price. Patronage has supplanted merit.

The transport, electricity, irrigation and other departments have become by-words of incompetence and corruption. Educational institutions have been degraded and brought to ruin. Scams abound. The current listing includes scandals pertaining to fodder and animal husbandry, bitumen, urban land, forests, Medicare, drugs, audit and police uniforms. Rough accounting places the value of public loss at around Rs 1500-2000 crores. The depredations of the coal mafia are estimated to cost some hundreds of crores of rupees every year. A hapless public, bereft of executive, legislative or judicial redress, was so demoralised and de-humanised as to applaud the Bhagalpur blindings of alleged criminals in around 1981.

None of this is new. An earlier generation heard with amazement of the cooperative scandal in which money was siphoned away by mortgaging Gandhi Maidan in Patna and Platform Number 1, Patna Junction. The sheer audacity of such theft is breathtaking.

Mr Verghese's comments form part of the Kedar Nath Singh Memorial Lecture which he delivered in Chhapra, Bihar, recently.

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