Terms of Trade| Bihar: Where fossil of a deadly beast is being sold as exotic

Bihar’s meme-worthy politics hides deep scars of caste, crime, and migration — reminders of a state still healing from decades of violence

The Oxford dictionary added the word meme in 2016. It is defined as “an image, a video, a piece of text, etc. that is passed very quickly from one internet user to another, often with slight changes that make it humorous”. Almost a decade later, newsrooms across the world are doing everything they can to get one right on a daily basis. That’s the tyranny of the digital age for the news-business.

If your meme algorithm even has a whiff that you are watching something on Bihar, chances are Anant Singh would have been dominating it.

As we cover the Bihar polls, the state is turning out to be a meme factory. Never mind if it is still struggling to get real factories. Sometimes it is the man/woman on the street. The only wealth most Biharis have is with words. Sometimes it is a senior leader of a political party. But the most viral ones are those which come from meme-hunting journalists talking to the proverbial Bahubali (a polite euphemism for hardened criminals) turned politicians. Mokama assembly constituency in these elections is to the Bahubali arena in Bihar what Wall Street is to global capitalism. And for good reason. It is an Anant Singh versus Surajbhan Singh contest, both of whom are upper caste (Bhumihar) crime-business mascots par excellence in the state’s political economy landscape. Their party identities are secondary to the candidates’ persona but the fact that they (or their wives) are contesting from the two parties which claim the legacy of Karpoori Thakur in Bihar only makes the irony stronger. If your meme algorithm even has a whiff that you are watching something on Bihar, chances are Anant Singh would have been dominating it. A terse one-liner there, an obnoxious, even if honest claim here. He’s been dominating the metaverse for many years now.

The so far, so good saga (hopefully) came to an end on Thursday evening as reports came in that a person who happened to be the uncle of Jan Suraaj Party’s candidate from Mokama had died after a clash with Anant Singh’s supporters. There is a firearm injury which has probably led to the death. In the best traditions of natural justice, Anant Singh, whose supporters have been accused of the killing, has claimed innocence. To be sure, the deceased Dularchand Yadav, was not exactly a saint and was considered a Bahubali in his own right. He perhaps joined the cause with his nephew’s candidature only because his old party, the RJD, had decided to make a ‘pragmatic pivot’ to a Bhumihar candidate this time instead of an Yadav. For what it is worth, the RJD fought the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from this part of the state with the wife of another OBC Bahubali on the ticket. She is now an MLA candidate from a constituency not very far from Mokama. In the 2019 and 2020 elections, the RJD fielded Anant Singh or his wife on its ticket. The larger point being that none of these parties has any principled opposition to such elements and they are known to, even celebrated for, displaying such pragmatic promiscuity when it comes to elections.

There are far too many Dularchand Yadavs who have succumbed to political violence in Bihar. My earliest memory of a political killing – I was a five-year-old – is my local MP Ishwar Chaudhury from Gaya being killed by Maoists in the 1989 elections while he was on campaign. On Wednesday, another incumbent MLA and a candidate in these elections was almost killed in my home district. His constituency Tekari used to be a hotbed of Maoist violence not so long ago. It has seen massacres and even police stations being looted. Dusk meant the beginning of a de facto curfew for decades.

Politics and violence are not something unique to Bihar or even India. But what is often forgotten is that political violence is often organic in nature to societies such as Bihar. It is a political economy at its macabre best. In Mokama, you need a gun along with a plough or tractor to till your fields. The entire region is a lowland in the floodplains of the Ganga and a lot of the ground is underwater most of the times of the year. The floods keep shifting. This also means that administrative demarcation of the land does not really matter and it is always up for grabs. You need an Anant Singh to protect your property rights and livelihoods, not because he lends himself to viral memes. The quid pro quo is acknowledging his Robin Hood status. In some places, the river is not geographical but sociological: decades of power equations being challenged by the hitherto oppressed. In a feudal setup where caste is the only bonding factor and also the defining feature of material fortunes, it was natural that most of these solidarities, even if perverse and deadly, were formed on caste lines.

One of the reasons a lot of these conflicts are now things of the past is that the battlefield has seen a bipartisan abdication. Both the erstwhile privileged and the deprived, the oppressor and the oppressed, are now headed out of the state in search of better livelihood options. Bihari is perhaps the biggest sub-nationality in this country which has contributed equally to the ranks of the construction worker as well as the investment banker in the last thirty years. The state is now a place where all these characters come back to their social cocoons but have very little material stakes there. It is migration, and not some structural break in the state’s ability to maintain ‘law and order’ which largely explains the relative tranquility compared to how things were three decades ago. The Anant Singhs and Dularchand Yadavs of the world are mostly relics of the past rather than a way of life.

While hardly active partakers in conflict, most of us Biharis have not forgotten what it was to live like back then. The wounds of the past are too close to allow such amnesia. Our neighbours in the locality in which I grew up in Gaya in Bihar -- my parents still live there -- are people whose village is Senari. It saw a massacre of 34 Bhumihars by Maoists in 1999 – it was in the middle of my tenth board exams – and I remember being woken up by hysterical crying from the house as news came in early morning. The house behind ours had a person, once again upper caste, killed by Maoists in his village. I have seen the fatherless child grow up in front of my own eyes. There are entire colonies which came up in cities like Gaya and Jahanabad where upper castes migrated from villages to cities to seek sheer physical safety. Gory and painful and traumatic as all this is, it is just a half truth. My own social roots and the relative privilege it brought kept me insulated and oblivious to what the so-called lower castes must have faced in the name of feudal exploitation. There have been many more massacres which saw Dalits and backward castes being killed in the state. The state was a battleground for private upper caste militias and Maoists in the 1990s. This orgy of violence followed a prolonged period of one-sided feudal exploitation by mostly upper caste feudal order.

Elections became the proverbial nor’wester when these tensions would create a local storm and consume a life or two here and there. My father, as a university professor, did election duty for almost four decades. As someone from the Magadh region of the state, a hotbed of land struggles and subsequent Maoist activity, we used to fear for his safety until he came back home. The wait was extraordinarily painful in the pre-mobile phone days.

Every isolated incident of political violence during elections triggers the, now thankfully dormant, PTSD syndrome of what political violence did to the average Bihari. Most of us, like normal human beings, are not made of the DNA which makes the likes of Anant Singh or his mirror images on the other side of the caste divide. It is for this reason that we detest the vulgar meme hunters who find the fossils of our entrenched socio-political violence exotic.

“No one who has been asked by an intelligent American student whether the phrase ‘Second World War’ meant that there had been a ‘First World War’ is unaware that the knowledge of even the basic facts of history can be taken for granted”, Eric Hobsbawm wrote in the opening paragraph of The Age of Extremes, the last of his four-part cult classic . The vulgar exoticization of the dark history of Bihar’s political violence and its perpetrators without remembering the atrocities and crimes committed and the lives which have been consumed, by the zombies of the meme factory, whether or not inadvertently, displays similar ignorance of not just the history of my state but even a basic empathy for its people who are still healing the wounds and trying hard to keep the genie in the bottle.

(Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa)