Victor Mallet / FT
For many of Bihar’s 110m inhabitants, the main goal in life is to leave their homeland as soon as possible — to study or find work, however menial.
Biharis toil on construction sites from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu and as far away as the Gulf. “Mostly people from here have to migrate to other states to get jobs,” sighs Parimal Paritosh, 20, who moved to Punjab to study engineering and has come home for the funeral rites of his grandmother on the banks of the River Ganges.
Yet this month politicians from Prime Minister Narendra Modi downwards have been flocking to the landlocked north Indian state — a byword for poverty, despair and overcrowding — to court its people. It is election time in Bihar, and it is a pivotal state. Bihar’s population — if it were a country it would be the world’s 12th-largest, just behind Mexico — makes victory in the state election a crucial prize for Indian parties.
If Mr Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party ousts the current chief minister Nitish Kumar when results are announced on November 8, it would eventually help the BJP wrest control of the national parliament’s upper house from the opposition, which has blocked key economic reforms such as a planned goods and services tax.
The BJP can count on its traditional support from the Hindu upper-caste minority. “I come from a forward caste and the only party that seems to support my ideology is the BJP,” says Mr Paritosh. But Mr Modi hopes his charisma and the promise of jobs and development, which swept him to power in last year’s general election, will lure the middle and lower castes into the BJP fold as well.
In fact, Bihari voters complain, election promises of development and handouts for the poor have been overshadowed by frenzied “vote-bank politics”, with politicians trying to win over different caste groups and pro-BJP activists seeking Hindu votes by demonising Muslims as beef-eating slaughterers of sacred cows.
“Nobody’s talking about education, health, employment or real development,” says RK Sinha, head of the zoology department at Patna University. “Everybody’s talking rubbish — caste and beef.” As for education, he echoes Mr Paritosh. “Almost 90-100 per cent who have the means, who can sell land or jewellery, they send their children out of Bihar.”
Mr Kumar, the Bihar chief minister who has a reputation for having boosted the local economy by tackling gangsters, building roads and promoting girls’ education after he took office a decade ago, seems re-energised by the first two of the five rounds of voting and rumours of a strong performance by his Janata Dal (United) party and its allies.
At a rally in Punpun near Patna this week, he mocked Mr Modi as an outsider unable even to stop recent caste violence in his native Gujarat or the gang-rape of babies and children in Delhi. “All these [BJP] people are flying around Bihar like paratroopers,” he told the crowd. “Bihar would be run by baharis [outsiders], not Biharis.”
Mr Kumar was once an ally of the BJP, and if he had stayed loyal his record and the BJP’s backing would probably have ensured an easy re-election. But he detests what he sees as Mr Modi’s communal, anti-Muslim leanings and has been forced into a new and uneasy alliance with his old enemy Lalu Prasad Yadav, the third force in this election.
Mr Yadav, a joke-cracking populist who this week called Mr Modi and his chief adviser “demons”, was Mr Kumar’s predecessor as chief minister and presided over an administration known as the “jungle raj” that was notorious for tolerating violent crime and bribery.
He cannot even be a candidate in the election because he was convicted of corruption in a cattle-feed scandal dating back to the 1990s, but the ability of his Rashtriya Janata Dal (National People’s party) to secure votes is essential for Mr Kumar’s survival.
Manoj Jha, a university professor and spokesman for Mr Yadav’s party, says the main election issues are caste, high inflation and the perception that the BJP is running “a government of the rich”. Bihar voters, he says, will judge whether Mr Modi has ruled or misruled in his 18 months in power in New Delhi. “This is an election for the assembly of Bihar, but interestingly and not without reason it has become almost a national election,” says Mr Jha.
The electoral arithmetic is too complicated and polls too unreliable to know who will win, but a BJP victory next month would probably give new impetus to Mr Modi’s national government, just as a defeat could sap its confidence and deepen its difficulties with economic reform.
Meanwhile, Biharis themselves, at least those who have not left, wait patiently for salvation from desperate poverty — few villagers even have toilets, let alone refrigerators. “Once they get to power, they forget us,” says Sunita Devi, a lukewarm supporter of Mr Kumar after hearing his speech in Punpun. She says she earns just Rs1,000 ($15) a month as a school cook.
