Once the seat of Ashoka’s vast empire, a land of literature and Buddha, Bihar now lies on the floodplains of the Ganga, and its glories have run dry – grappling with the realities of poverty, crime, and corruption.

The stories from the state are outliers but repetitive and have a bearing on the rest of the country, both economically and politically. It also has its own heroes and Dalit stalwarts, from Jagjivan Ram to Ram Vilas Paswan. But how has this story unfolded?

To understand the making of present-day Bihar, Anand Vardhan speaks to two authors who have written about its contemporary realities, The Hindu’s deputy editor Shobhna K Nair in her book Ram Vilas Paswan: The Weathervane of Indian Politics and activist Mrityunjay Sharma in Broken Promises: Caste, Crime and Politics in Bihar.  

On the politics in the state, Sharma says Lalu Prasad Yadav could have been the hero of a generation, “who could bring up those marginalised” and it looked like he was that person till the 1990s. “He would ride a cycle to the secretariat, he did not even move to the chief minister’s residence, he would just sit under a tree in any place and hold junta darbars.” But Lalu eventually realised that governance is “tough and what happens faster is vote-bank politics”.  

But Nair says that Lalu’s identity politics “at that time was very crucial. First of all, you have to give them the voice. If you don’t give them the voice, forget about anything else. That length had to be run. If Nitish had come to power in the 1990s, what do you think he would have picked between the two streams of politics of enabler and provider?”    

Both agree that Bihar “has never been politically complacent”and even initiated the Zamindari abolition and the question of reservations. Sharma says that hence, it has been a “very fertile ground for politicians…you will not see any other state in the country which has leaders who have come from outside, who the state has co-opted” such as Sharad Yadav and George Fernandes.        

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