At first they didn’t want to leave their homes. Despite the fact that Kosi waters were threatening to maroon entire villages about three months ago, those who had their huts there refused to move out. It was only when Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar went on TV to say that the Kosi waters would return, this time with even greater ferocity, and urged the people to live temporarily in camps however uncomfortable, that several thousand lives were saved in Bihar, otherwise the toll would have been much higher than the official figure of 3,000 plus missing.
But now the boot is on the other foot. Although the waters have begun to recede, and 80 per cent of those living in camps have left for home, the rest who are still in the camps have nowhere to go. For several months, they have been guests of the state government. Now, the state government wants to close down the camps so that it can return to its other activities. It is actively discouraging NGOs from providing food, milk and even blankets to families in camps fearing this could be an incentive to prolong their stay.
Those villages in the thick of the floods continue to be inundated. Although there are not many, families say there’s nothing but water and the cold to go back to. East of Madhepura, Harijantola, another group of villages is under water, but the water is not deep enough to allow motorboats to ply. This is the twilight zone where there are neither people, nor the government. Those from this locality are in camps. The government wants them to leave. Supaul, for instance, has floods every year so people have their own strategies for dealing with them. But this year, floods have engulfed areas that haven’t had any since 1954.
The camps themselves have generated a new kind of politics, of scarce resources and narrow confines. There is a Sanskrit saying: yachako yachakam drishtva shvanvat gurgurayate (a beggar, on coming face to face with another beggar, snarls like a dog). Visualise a big hall. One end of the hall has been ‘colonised/adopted’ by Ramvilas Paswan. It has everything — milk powder, biscuits, colourful caps, used clothes. Paswan’s managers can see political potential here. At the other end of the hall is the camp set up by the state government. You cannot cross from one into another.
From the state government’s point of view, life has to go on. It wants people to return home so that they can help in desilting the land, build homes (for which it is willing to pay and is fighting for funds). Embankments have to be raised and strengthened, culverts have to be built and the river has to be coaxed back to pilot channels — river morphology has changed. The longer this exercise takes, the longer it will take for Bihar to return to normal.
Under these circumstances, what should India make of the anti-Bihari agitation of Maharashtra Navnirman Samiti (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray? The movement has no doubt got the oxygen of popular support for MNS in Maharashtra; but what has it done for Bihar politics?
For one, diverted attention from the pain and loss caused by the floods. It is a moot question whether floods could have been prevented. In no state can the government ever get kudos for rehabilitation: for living in camps away from home can never be comfortable for the inhabitants, no matter how much the administration tries. In Bihar, the stock of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is so low with the people that criticism of the state government’s tackling of the floods has limited traction.
So in a way every political party has seized upon the MNS agitation with a loud sigh of barely suppressed relief: for Lalu Prasad it is a way of reclaiming the kind of politics he is best at — for, it is a bit hard for the people of Bihar to absorb criticism of the way the administration is managing the floods, from Lalu, of all people. For Nitish Kumar, it is an opportunity to get on with rehabilitation work while Lalu Prasad’s eagle eyes alight on some other issue. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Nitish Kumar’s ally in government, it is a way of expanding their base, which is fine with Kumar so long as it is done along secular lines. Former Civil Aviation Minister and former BJP MP from Kishanganj, Shahnawaz Hussain’s flagging political fortunes have got a boost because of the floods — now the enemy is not the JDU’s determinedly secular politics but somebody in distant Maharashtra.
Kumar wrested the initiative from other political parties by getting five Lok Sabha MPs from JDU to resign from their seats in protest against the MNS campaign. This could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory — only Lok Sabha MPs have resigned, not Rajya Sabha (JDU President Sharad Yadav has been elected from the Rajya Sabha) or the Assembly, and this point was seized upon triumphantly by Lalu prasad and his managers. But the people of Bihar are past masters are cutting a swathe through rhetoric.
On November 24, Kumar completed three years in office. Yes, the floods have wiped out a lot of work his government has done. But in these three years there hasn’t been a single communal riot, (the Left privately concede they’ve compounded their mistake by getting into an alliance with Lalu and then sticking to it), and reform, however superstructural, has taken firm root in Bihar. Now, the state could use a break.
