WRITING in an introspective and anti-objectivity mode, my partial and partisan narrative of post-Total Revolution politics in Bihar begins with a disclaimer that it does not intend to be either a celebratory or a condemnatory univocal account of a complex reality derisively called ‘Barbaric Bihar’. Second, this account claims that Bihar travels everywhere, initially as a reminder of suffering, next as an opulent comedy of errors, and ultimately, as a saga of the indomitable spirit of revolt against the dominant moral and political certainties of our times.

Politics is rarely social engineering. It is more often a replay of the painful memories drawing upon both the past and present. Let me begin with remembering my first brush with politics as personal and social history. Like everywhere else, public streets in Patna are often perceived as ‘lewd, dangerous and untrustworthy space’. Yet the same public streets also become sites for contestation, negotiation and compromise with public malaise.

One day, at the height of the historic student movement in 1975, returning from my school in Patna city, I saw a huge gathering at the city chowk. I felt a quiet surge in my veins. By now I had come to know, largely through my father’s unofficial conversations and my mother’s razor-sharp tongue-lashing, that the city was in the grip of a brewing discontent around issues of corruption, price rise and police brutality. I stopped and peered into the motley crowd. I saw a resolute old face speaking softly and forcefully. I could not help listening to him. His voice would rise slowly leaving behind scattered waves of an angry sea. Several new words seared my boyish innocence but the one phrase that almost swept me off my feet was ‘Sampurna Kranti’. Fortunately, for many years, I didn’t not know that it was also called ‘Total Revolution’. This helped make my teenage flirtations with all sorts of kranti (revolution) more tolerable.

As the end of his speech, the crowd erupted in sheer joy and the meeting ended in an orderly manner. Suddenly, I saw my tutor distributing leaflets in the dispersing crowd. Cautioned by his presence, I immediately withdrew from the street and returned home. Perhaps that night began my fascination with the idea of rucksack revolution, failed or otherwise. Next morning, as I got busy chasing squirrels and chameleons in the orchard in my backyard, I did not bother to find out that my tutor was an active worker of the local RSS unit. Nor did I learn for many years that he had mysteriously disappeared one evening, only to be later discovered languishing in jail under the dreaded MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act), that too mistakenly under my father’s instructions! Such were the times during the Emergency of Indira Gandhi and Total Revolution of Jaiprakash Narayan (JP) in Bihar.

 

Like many others of my generation, I too grew up rather hurriedly and awkwardly. In the process, I witnessed ‘total revolution’ being increasingly overwhelmed through default and design by a new Age of Emancipation in which ‘cockneyed’ Mandal revolutionaries, frenzied Hindu nationalists and red-hot Maoists began a vicious no-holds-barred struggle for an imagined ideological and political hegemony. Amidst the rapidly evaporating influence of the Brahmanical gaze in Bihar of the late 1980s, the accompanying hope and despair was something that Bihar had not witnessed in its long chequered history.

Writing in the late eighteenth century, Patna historian Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai (1727-98), in his account The Seir Mutaqherin or View of Modern Times, had spoken poignantly about the ‘tumultuous events of his day’ that led to ‘the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the triumph of the East India Company in North India’. Unlike JP’s fascination with a metanarrative of social revolution, Ghulam Husain likened the inqilab or revolution to ‘a change in rulers, a change of dynasties, a reversal of luck or fate’ resulting in ‘destruction of the old economic order, a distortion of the old social order’.¹

 

Ironically, JP’s tone was prophetic, his message messianic. Yet he failed to see that in the 1970s Bihar had already started showing signs of a reversal of social hierarchies and the emergence of a new social order.² Else, he would not have gone to Musahari in Muzzaffarpur to tame the rising ‘spring thunder’ or tried unsuccessfully to stop the ‘Maharudra ka Mahatandav’ (Dance of Shiva).³ Nor could he foresee that the total revolution would soon be drowned in the raucous voices of the Mandal and Mandir uprisings in the not too distant future. As luck would have it, many of his close disciples and associates later became the vanguard of the Mandal and Mandir uprisings.

Also, tragically, some of the more vociferous inheritors of JP’s legacy took the art of corruption and crime to such new depths of ingenuity and depravity that apharan (kidnapping) soon emerged as the only flourishing industry in Bihar. Significantly, and much to the delight of neo-liberals, the victims of abduction have come to be signified as either ‘damaged’ or ‘intact’ goods. Whether it is a fratricidal struggle between dwija and shudra, a war of supremacy between Naxals and Ranvir Sena, or vicious encounters between trigger-happy cops and protesting citizens, Bihar looks in the grip of a permanent yellow fever called ‘varchasava’.⁴ It is in this sense that Bihar struggles and rebels against its own self-inflicted suffering.

 

Although the liberals and left often acrimoniously disagree on their diagnosis of what ails Bihar, I am inclined to believe that most of the suffering in Bihar has been caused by a gradual unfolding of a strange but intimate ‘Tocquevillean paradox’.⁵ In other words, the continuing social exclusion of dalits and shudras from structures and institutions of economy, polity and culture have resulted in near nihilistic clashes between governance and popular democracy.⁶

Taking a cue from the debilitating effects of democracy on governance, Tocqueville prophetically writes:

‘Democratic nations are at all times fond of equality, but there are certain epochs at which the passion they entertain for it swells to the height of fury. This occurs at the moment when the old social system, long menaced, completes its own destruction after a last internecine struggle, and when the barriers of rank are at length thrown down. At such times men pounce upon equality as their booty, and they cling to it as some precious treasure which they fear to lose.’⁷

 

In other words, as the democratic revolution has become irresistible and irreversible, it has also created certain dangerous instincts, habits and manners that have asphyxiated politics and stymied policy in Bihar. It is widely argued that pre-Mandal Bihar functioned relatively efficiently and effectively only in the absence of a democratic society. But the so-called ‘Congress system’ masked a deeply hierarchical and feudal social order. Once socially excluded castes and classes started entering the portals of political power, especially after the historic 1967 elections, the myth of governmental neutrality and efficiency began suffering a mortal decline. As society became more ‘democratic’, the government got locked in a growing crisis of administrative paralysis, corruption, nepotism and favouritism.

To make matters worse, the Leviathan initially hobbled and tottered, finally surrendered to the combined might of insurgent caste warriors, resurgent class revolutionaries, dreaded private caste senas and diehard criminals by the end of the 1990s. Although one cannot discount the influence of structural factors, the deeper causes of the growing ‘crisis of governability’ emanated from the failure of politics in resolving struggles for social justice.⁸ And though Jaganath Mishra and Lalu Yadav are often held responsible for governmental atrophy, the genesis of this democratic puzzle could as easily be traced to Bihar’s much fabled, though now forgotten, ‘total revolution’ days.

 

Following Gandhi’s legacy of saintly politics, JP abhorred personal power, eulogized partyless democracy and galvanized civil society as an antidote to the increasing authoritarian streaks in post-independence India. However, unlike the Mahatma who uncompromisingly savaged modernity and westernization, JP remained fuzzy, incoherent and utopian in his opposition to capitalism and its disciplinary powers. JP ventured through dark times of Indian democracy and suffered repression during national Emergency in 1975. Facing a democratically elected left-leaning populist leader in Indira Gandhi, he had no choice other than to confront the realm of popular politics.

Supported partly by circumstances and partly by the force of his personality, his fierce opposition to Indira Gandhi’s growing misrule in 1974 resulted in the forging of a rainbow coalition of mostly anti-Indira forces. Wedded neither to ‘left, right or centre’, JP issued a wild card to everyone – liberals, Gandhians, socia-lists, Hindu nationalists and several broad-minded radical humanists – to join in what Gramsci would have called a spurious and unstable ‘historic bloc’. By mobilizing old dominant classes and engineering ‘a partial appropriation of the popular masses’, especially backward castes, the ‘total revolution’ paradoxically succeeded in seeding the political and moral grounds for the arrival of ‘passive revolution’ in Bihar.⁹

JP was so overwhelmed by the immediacy of politics and the urgency to resist Indira Gandhi’s growing indifference to democratic politics that he led himself to believe that a motley crowd of young urban-provincial middle class students would usher in a new era of nirvana.¹⁰ On numerous occasions, he harped on the significance of the historical recovery of the shudras and dalits. Yet dalits, tribals, and shudras were condescendingly offered a dependent and auxiliary status in the new rainbow coalition against forces of authoritarianism. And he falsely persuaded himself that socially conservative political parties, especially the Hindu nationalists and right-wingers, would accept the ‘goal of total revolution’.

 

Ultimately, his failure to renew a charter of commitments around principles of democracy, socialism, secularism and social justice with the participating political parities, groups, and individuals resulted in the ‘total revolution’ going haywire and bankrupt. Barring a few hard core idealists, most activists saw in it potential for social mobility understood as personal power and status. Many prominent student leaders and the so-called ‘free-thinkers’ of the 1975 movement ended up occupying predictable positions of status, influence and privilege through politics, civil services, journalism, and NGOs. In other words, the very success of ‘total revolution’ became its nemesis.¹¹ Hardly surprising that Bihar became addicted to a heady elixir of amoral familialism, crony capitalism, crime and self-aggrandizement in the post total revolution era.

 

The Mandal, Mandir and Naxal uprisings emerging as ‘master narratives’ in the garb of a ‘democratic upsurge’ in the late 1980s, have permanently altered and unsettled the already volatile political and social landscapes in Bihar.¹² The grand old party, Congress, has today become thoroughly discredited; the traditional left parties look askance; and the old sarvodaya outfits clamour only for leftover sarkari crumbs. The glorious peasant movements of the Swami Sahjanand variety have become socially irrelevant. The hegemony of the upper castes in government has become history. If Lalu Yadav’s strategic alliance with Congress and Nitish Kumar’s ‘pseudo-secular’ alliance with BJP is any indicator of changing times, Bihar has failed in vanquishing the ghosts of its ‘total revolution’.

 

Further, the Mandal backwards have predictably become arrogantly ‘forward’ and dalits have come to taste the power of emancipation through both ballot and bullet. Although some Maoist groups still profess and practice annihilatory tactics, most Naxals, especially those led by CPI (ML-Liberation), have been transformed by the logic and dynamics of evolving popular democracy in Bihar.¹³ There is a massive boom in real estate, para-banking, ATMs, mobile phones, swanky cars, shopping malls and up-market eateries despite acute shortage of power, roads, drinking water and more important, law and order. Popular mafia politicians, spineless bureaucrats, and Johnny-come-lately NGOs have wittingly or unwittingly democratized and decentralized corruption and crime. In this so-called ‘utterly corrupt moment’, democracy has ironically emerged as the only beacon of hope and despair in Bihar!

 

The emergence of a politics of social justice, especially since 1990, has baffled and bamboozled the socialists of the total revolution into irrelevance. Caste socialists led by Lalu Yadav, crowned as ‘subaltern Saheb’, have conferred on caste the legitimate status of the foundational emancipatory reality of Bihar.¹⁴ Buoyed by their quick success in capturing political power from the long-entrenched upper castes, the Mandal revolutionaries zealously and aggressively halted the juggernaut of Hindu nationalists. Using a fatally attractive concoction of social justice and secular arrogance, the Mandal warriors offered the backwards and Muslims a palpable sense of empowerment (izzat). However, in the process, they also deliberately allowed state power, already inefficient and ineffective, to be abducted by locally dominant castes, resulting in the continued oppression of dalits and rural labour.¹⁵

Lalu’s supporters, with nose-stud flamboyance, claimed that the days of upper caste dominance were over. They delighted in his simpleton village persona, justified his disdain for urban-bred upper caste bureaucrats, ungrudgingly approved his ruthlessly amoral ways to stay in power, and gloated over his love for extended family, especially in-laws. In other words, Lalu’s emergence has been truly historic, spectacular and tragic. Knowing well the famous Indian proclivity for relishing fantasies, Lalu soon consciously transformed the ‘Age of Emancipation’ into a dream dope. ‘The noblest hearts’ and the most ‘vulgar souls’ needed neither fear nor favour for this fatal attraction.

 

Whether we like it or not, democracy in Bihar has come to resemble a celluloid temptation for the millions living in the crowded slums of rage and anguish. Proving his mentors such as JP and Karpoori Thakur wrong, Lalu Yadav became the most opulent manifestation of the previously repressed and disavowed aspects of democracy in a traditionally hierarchical caste society. So it should not surprise us that he blurred the distinction between what Joyce McDougall calls ‘the impossible and the forbidden’ in the flaming fields of Bihar.¹⁶ In short, Lalu and his ragtag band of caste soldiers dealt a crushing death blow to the modernizing dreams of Nehruvian and Marxist prophecies of ‘abolition of caste’ and elevated secularism to the reality TV status of Indian Idol of electoral democracy in India.

Unlike the Naxal uprising, the Mandal revolt in Bihar has proved beyond doubt that democracy arises in peculiar ways in familiar places; the same caste obligation, which had long sustained and perpetuated discrimination of all sorts, accidentally became the saviour of democracy by fostering sentiments of protest, recognition and self-respect. Paradoxically, like JP’s fascination for lack of ideology, the passion for equality among heroes and heroines of the Mandal revolt became so ‘insatiable’, ‘incessant’, and ‘invincible’ that it gutted, almost irrevocably, the so-called Rawlsian ‘overlapping consensus’ on notions of good governance and constitutional rule in Bihar.

In the ensuing unequal internecine struggles between numerically preponderant insurgent backward caste revolutionaries and minority upper caste groups, Lalu signalled not only the demise of the elitist Nehruvian Vaishnavjan politics, he also consigned JP’s total revolution to the dustbin of history. In other words, he actually invented a new mode of democratic representation in Indian politics in which, as political theorist Sunil Khilnani points out, ‘A political actor claims to act on behalf not simply of his own kind – caste, religion, racial, or linguistic group – but actually, at the limit, to act simply on behalf of his or her own self.’¹⁷

 

Driven by a new politics of egoism, the foster children of the student movement of 1975 increasingly grew bold and outrageous. And by the beginning of the new millennium they had ransacked all so-called normal and traditional sources of morality and politics, giving mafia politicians such as Shahabuddin, Dular Chand Yadav, Munna Shukla, Suraj Bhan among others a free license to trade in the flourishing market of kidnapping and ransom. What had emerged as the greatest transformatory moment since the days of the Buddha, soon came to symbolize a farcical politics of crime, corruption and violence in Bihar.

Amidst increasing incidents of massacres of dalits by marauding gangs of private caste armies and random killing of poor upper caste peasants by over-enthusiastic Maoists in the 1980s and 1990s, the new politics of identity/presence turned out to be Janus faced; it delegtimized a hierarchical society, but also installed self-interest as the only lynch-pin of self-respect. Ironically, as political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta insight-fully suggests, the quest for equal moral standing in caste societies usually takes a debased form. Lalu Yadav’s politics revolved around the twin principles of a desire to dominate and self-debasement.¹⁸ Therefore, forced by the circumstances of caste society and inspired by a therapeutic need for empowerment, the infamous fodder scam and proxy-Rabri raj gave Bihar new myths to celebrate deprivation and opulence.

 

Indeed, after a long time, Bihar came to witness ecstasy, pure and simple! All those who squirmed and whimpered at Lalu’s daughters’ lavish weddings in Patna failed to realize that one of the fundamental instincts of democracy is to provide instant gratification to both elites and masses.¹⁹ If politics in Bihar is today so ubiquitous, infectious and fatally attractive, Lalu Yadav must be given due credit. However, as scholars of comparative politics know all too well, populism eventually fails or if it succeeds it transcends itself. This may explain why Lalu failed miserably as chief minister in Bihar but has succeeded in becoming the most successful CEO of Indian Railways in recent times. In other words, this probably signals Lalu’s dramatic transformation from a politician to a successful entrepreneur. This is the meaning of being and becoming Lalu Yadav!

 

The defeat of Lalu Yadav in the twin-assembly elections and the Jehanabad jail break in the closing hours of 2005, characterized by the ignominious Buta Singh episode and the rise and fall of Ram Vilas Paswan, demonstrate that politics in post-Lalu Bihar will continue to be decided on the shifting sands of Mandal, Mandir and Naxal discourses. Blending dejected Mandal forces especially MBC (most backward caste), dalit Muslims and disgruntled upper castes with militant Hindu nationalists, Nitish Kumar has ended the Lalu era in Bihar. However, the end of Lalu misrule is only metaphorical, for this may well constitute another moment of slippage into new mythologies of emancipation and ‘back-to-back intimacy’ with the democratic puzzle.

Quite predictably, the politics of Hindutva has reverted to ‘total revolution’ days by acknowledging Nitish as Big Brother. Although Nitish’s victory was expected, he could not have secured a resounding success in assembly elections without BJP and RSS support. He seems to have been seduced by the ‘definitionally ethnophobic and frequently ethnocidal’ ‘true secularism’ of the saffron warriors.²⁰ He is also enamoured of the upper caste Oedipal fantasies of a ‘castrated victim’. This became darkly manifest when he disbanded the Amir Das Commission probing the ‘political links’ of Ranvir Sena, a private army of upper caste Bhumihars.

Even as Nitish is busy unleashing a slew of ambitious policy proposals for revamping the decrepit school system, enhancing the affirmative action regime for most backward castes, and attempting land reforms, Bihar has also ironically discovered ‘new passions and pleasures’ in the form of rising waves of lynching of ‘putative criminals’ by bloodthirsty castes, sadomasochistic classes and betrayed masses. In most such cases of ‘instant justice’, dalits have borne the terror of the emerging sushasan (good governance). In other words, the future of an inherently open, critical and syncretic politics of tolerance is suspect in Bihar, at least in the immediate future.

 

 

Not surprisingly, Nitish Kumar’s vision of development (vikas) is informed and guided by an ideology of high modernism and a developmental state. As a qualified engineer, the high modernism is reflected in his belief in the capacity of technicians and engineers to design and implement schemes of social change. Although hailed by culturally uprooted caste Hindu NRIs as the ‘Saviour of Bihar’, Nitish’s politics of ‘social unity’ and ‘coalition of extremes’ lacks a vision of social justice and deliberative democracy; it is often presented and translated in terms of fictional law and order and comical infrastructure. Moreover, his failure to radically reform a highly privatized, inefficient and corrupt Leviathan reveals the continuing crony nature of primitive capitalism in Bihar.²¹ If history is any guide, high-modernist schemes have invariably failed to improve human conditions.

In short, his faith in a developmental state to resolve the ‘democratic puzzle’ is facile and misplaced in the absence of a genuine social revolution revolving around issues of land reforms, rights of dalits and inclusive governance. Nitish Kumar cannot hope for credible success unless he recognizes insurgent Naxals as part of the social justice juggernaut. For this he will have to invite them to the negotiating table and restore what Habermas calls ‘communicative rationality’ in the flaming fields of Bihar.

 

 

To conclude, the post total revolution history in Bihar often comes across as a double articulation: a complex camouflaging of the totalizing dreams of the dominants and the hybrid normalization of the revolt of the subalterns. It is in this strange sense that Bihar possesses none of the attributes of past and present; it is constantly separating itself from the familiar and moving on to the unfamiliar. Little wonder, JP, Lalu and Nitish share the same discursive space that liberates us from the grand and heroic disciplinary gaze of the dominant, but often ends up, in different ways, as a ‘parody of history’. Despite their best intentions and radical interlocutions, they prematurely succumb to the earthly temptations and fantasies of so-called ‘mimic men of the new world’.²²

This has forced Bihar to take an extreme step to what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘purposive self-annihilation – a confrontation between oneself and oneself.’²³ In other words, Bihar’s salvation lies in revealing and resisting the growing incompatibility between the exteriors of revolution and the interiors of bondage.

 

* Ashwani Kumar’s book on Bihar titled Community Warriors in India is forthcoming from Anthem Press (London).He can be reached at ashwanitiss@gmail.com

 

Footnotes:

1. Anand A. Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Bihar, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998, pp. 53-54.

2. See for an illuminating historical account of collapse of dominant social order in Bihar, Francine R. Frankel, ‘Caste, Land, and Dominance in Bihar: Breakdown of the Brahmanical Social Order’, in Francine R. Frankel and M.S.A.Rao (eds), Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, Vol. I, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989.

3. In his book in Hindi titled Maharudra ka Mahatandav, Swami Sahjanand has described rural proletariat as Maharudra (God of destruction) leading to imminent collapse of hierarchical and feudal agrarian order in Bihar. Quoted in Arvind N. Das, Agrarian Unrest and Socio-Economic Change in Bihar: 1900-1980, Manohar, 1983, p. 142.

4. In the Bombay film, Sehar, when asked by her son, the protagonist Arshad Warsi (young idealist police officer fighting an evangelical war against the criminals) Suhasini Mulay says that, ‘Varchasva means absolute power. Something that cannot be distributed or shared but can only be wrenched out.’

5. Sudipto Kaviraj, ‘Democracy and Development’, in A.K. Bagchi (ed.), Democracy and Development, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1995, p. 119. The tensions between governance and democracy can also be seen in the growing ‘deep division of discourse’ between what Kaviraj calls ‘upper and lower orders’ in India. See Sudipto Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society, and Discourse in India’, in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics, Longman, Harlow, 1991, p. 87.

6. Historically speaking, the hierarchical caste society in Bihar is defined by three major social faultlines – Dwijas (Brahmin-Kshatriya-Bhumihar and Kayastha), Shudras (Mandal castes or Backward castes), and Dalits (untouchables or outcastes). Shudras are further divided into Upper Shudras and Lower Shudras. Yadavs, Kurmis and Koeris – the so-called engine of green revolution in North India – form the bulk of Upper Shudras. Lower Shudras comprise smaller castes such as Malhas, Nayis, Kewats, Binds, and Tantis etc. Resisting the hegemony of both Dwijas and Upper Shudras, Lower Shudras, also known as most backward castes (MBC), have emerged politically and socially salient in the aftermath of twin-assembly elections of 2005 in Bihar.

7. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Henry Reeve, Vintage Books, New York, 1954, p. 103.

8. Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 205.

9. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, Zed Books, London, 1986, p. 30.

10. Commenting on the Bihar Chhatra Sanghrash Samiti, the nodal organization leading the movement, Ghanshyam Shah noted that it was ‘dominated by upper castes and middle class including teachers, writers, lawyers, and Sarvodaya workers. Shopkeepers, lawyers and doctors dominated its chapters in towns. In villages, they were controlled by rich peasants who, of course, were from the upper castes.’ See, Ghanshyam Shah, Protest in Two Indian States, Ajanta Press, Delhi, 1977, p. 99.

11. Reflecting on JP as political thinker, Bipan Chandra writes perceptively that Total Revolution suffered from serious limitations of ‘ideology, programme, policy and organization.’ See, Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency, Penguin Books India, Delhi, 2003, p. 150. Many of JP’s friends and contemporaries have raised concerns and doubts on the potential of Total Revolution. It is, thus, no surprise that many popular mafia politicians have emerged from the embers of Total Revolution. Once Lalu Yadav’s bete noire, upper castes’ saviour and now accused of lynching a Dalit IAS officer, Anand Mohan Singh is a classic example of democracy becoming a prisoner of its own rogue desires.

12. Master narratives are generally fluid and contingent on shifting histories of power relations. From this perspective, master narratives are not only ordinary political idioms but represent a deeply contested representation of power struggles between hegemonic knowledge elites and insurgent masses.

13. In Bihar, the Naxal movement has succeeded in emerging as a militant dalit movement against oppression of rural labour by private armies of upper castes and the para-military forces of the state. CPI (ML) or ‘Male’ officially participates in electoral politics and unofficially continues its armed struggles. In October 2004, MCC and PWG merged to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and decided to continue armed struggle, triggering fears of a ‘red corridor’ linking Maoists in Nepal and India.

14. Sankarshan Thakur, Subaltern Saheb: Bihar and the Making of Laloo Yadav, Picador, New Delhi, 2006. (First published as Making of Laloo Yadav: The Unmaking of Bihar, Harper Collins, 2000.)

15. Stuart Corbridge and John Harris, Reinventing India, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 228.

16. Joyce McDougall, Theatres of the Mind, Basic Books, New York, 1986.

17. Sunil Khilnani, ‘The Indian Constitution and Democracy’, in Zoya Hasan, E. Sridharan and R. Sudarshan (eds), India’s Living Constitution, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2002, p. 73.

18. Pratap B. Mehta, The Burden of Democracy, Penguin India, New Delhi, 2003, p. 41.

19. I recall my conversations with fisher-women at Boring Canal Road on the eve of Lalu Yadav’s second daughter’s wedding in Patna in 2003. While chopping raw fish, one of the women indulgently said that it was perhaps the most lavish wedding she had ever heard of in her life. Speaking psychoanalytically, though she was not going to attend the wedding party, the metaphor of ‘lavish wedding’ permitted her to light the ‘unlit stages of desire’ where much of our initial liberation from bondage takes place. In this sense, Lalu’s fascination with opulence reveals what Homi Bhabha calls a ‘hybrid moment of political change’. See, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994.

20. The phrase has been used by Ashis Nandy to describe the pernicious politics of both secular nationalism and Hindu nationalists. See, Ashis Nandy, Exiled at Home, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998, p. 331.

21. The recent High Court judgment on the allotment of lands to film maker Prakash Jha’s projects reveals the continuing crisis of systemic bureaucratic corruption and the lack of an in-built mechanism of social audit in Nitish’s developmental programmes.

22. V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, Picador, London, 2002.

23. Reflecting on 9/11, Gayatri Spivak coined the phrase ‘purposive self-annihilation’ to describe the phenomenon of suicide bombing. Quoted in The New Republic, 29 July 2002, p. 9.