http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050307/asp/opinion/story_4449111.asp By Mahesh Rangarajan
BLOWING IN THE WINDS OF CHANGE The fragmentation of polity evident in Uttar Pradesh seems to be spreading to Bihar, writes Mahesh Rangarajan Is Bihar going the Uttar Pradesh way? This is a question that now merits serious thought. For a time in the early Nineties, it seemed like each state had moved into a new kind of political equilibrium. Under Kalyan Singh, the party of the mandir broke through divisions of caste and secured for itself a clear majority in the Vidhan Sabha in Lucknow. Four years later, Laloo Prasad Yadav became the first man since the late Karpoori Thakur to secure a clear majority in the state assembly in undivided Bihar. Yet, the illusion soon broke in UP. From 1993 onward, the state has seen three large political formations, each with a distinctive base and leadership, jostle for power. In the long term, the Bharatiya Janata Party had slipped to a distant third place. The camps of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayavati now alternate in power, though neither is able to secure a clear mandate from the electorate. A similar scenario is unfolding in Bihar. For the last decade-and-a-half, the long suppressed aspirations of the Mandal classes, minorities and a large chunk of Dalits found a place in the platform of Rabri Devi and Laloo Yadav. The spokes in the umbrella now have come half undone. There is a serious tussle for power for the first time with a challenger from the lower end of the social spectrum. The challenge is not encompassed by any one party or group. The vote share of fringe parties opposed both to Hindutva and Laloo Yadav�s party points to a yearning for change. The Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation have together taken one in ten votes. The latter in particular has been the only effective left wing force on the ground. On the face of it, Nitish Kumar too embodies the Mandal process. But since the Thirties, the Kurmis forged ahead of their backward brethren with the strides they made in education and contracts for brick-laying and road-building. What they lack in numbers they have made up in political sophistication. The fact they went with the Hindutva groups is less due to their affinity for saffron politics and more due to the bid to secure Kshatriya-like status via political power. The Yadavs under Laloo Yadav had a very different approach. He reached out to the culturally �invisible� but numerically crucial extremely backward classes even more than Muslims. These castes were given symbolic sops, as with the abolition of the toddy tax. Men like Captain Jai Narain Nishad, who served in the Indian air force, became an emblem of pride for fishing communities who had little access to education. Over the last decade, what was a relatively unified bloc has been breaking up slowly. The victory in 2004 of the Untied Progressive Alliance in retrospect seems to have been shaped by two factors. One was the deep unpopularity of the ruling Vajpayee government among the vast number of the under-classes and the poor. The other was the sheer accretion of votes and the momentum of the coming together of Sonia Gandhi, Ram Vilas Paswan and Laloo Yadav. The poll results of 2005 have been subject to much analysis in terms of seats. Everyone wants to know who can and will ally with whom. Or who can work against whom. But the figures reveal a society heading for the kind of turmoil UP has been caught up in during the post Mandal-mandir epoch. Neither Mandal nor the mandir issues have gone away. But once they became part of the political idiom, they slowly lost their ability to divide or, alternatively, to unify blocs of citizens. The politics of polarities has run into limits. Or rather, there are new polarities and border-crossings that cannot be easily assimilated into a bi-polar model. Paswan and the Congress together polled 18 per cent of the votes. The amazing thing about the assembly polls in Bihar is not the vote erosion of the Rashtriya Janata Dal-led alliance. It has fallen below, just below, the 30 per cent vote mark for the first time in a decade. What is more striking is the heavy loss of ground in votes for the National Democratic Alliance. From 37 per cent in the general elections only ten months ago, it is now down to just over a quarter of the vote. This shows a clear inability on the part of the NDA to expand its social base. In fact, its base has contracted even though its seat share has expanded. The formation of a new government is of less interest than the direction it will take. In fact, governing Bihar has never been as difficult. Paswan has challenged Laloo Yadav but not humbled him. The NDA has made a big stride but fallen short of even the striking distance of power. The Congress remains a non-starter. The BJP has not made the kind of splash it wanted to. The fragmentation of the polity evident so sharply in UP seems slowly to be spreading to Bihar. The loaves and fishes of office did unify his ranks but the welling up of ambitions with 2,500 applicants for 243 seats did not bode well for him. Nor did the widespread disaffection due to the cornering of tickets by a small coterie of enriched candidates. The absence of a party structure to mediate and iron out conflicts has never been more apparent or more damaging. Yet, Paswan is no Mayavati. He lacks not only the formidable cadre base of the sort the old Bamcef, the union founded by Kanshi Ram, gave her. He also does not have the kind of educated layer of Dalits that she has been able to mobilize and rely on in UP. The Dalits are not only smaller as a community; there is no history of entrepreneurship comparable to that of the leather-working castes of the north. Bihar is at a crossroads once again. There are stirrings of change. But they are not strong enough to create a new order in politics or society. There will be twists and turns yet in the story in the days and years ahead. It is still possible for a Laloo Yadav to stitch together a government. But that regime will barely be a functional one. As a senior Marxist Leninist leader told this writer, Laloo sarkar (government) may go on but Laloo raj (absolute rule) is at its logical end. What will replace it is still unclear. The author is an independent researcher and political analyst ------------------------ Yahoo! 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