THE WORST OF INDIA

Buddha's enlightenment was probably the last bit of good news to

come out of Bihar, reports William Dalrymple Patna, Bihar NO ONE has ever called Patna, the capital of the violent and corrupt Indian state of Bihar, a beautiful city. As you drive in through the outskirts, the treeless pave- ments begin to fill with sackcloth shacks. The shacks expand into slums. The slums are surrounded by garbage heaps. Around the garbage heaps goats, pigs, dogs and children compete for scraps of food. The further you go the worse it becomes. Open sewers line the road. In or beside them lie emaciated migrants from famine-hit vil- lages. Sewer rats the size of cats scamper among the rickshaws.

Bihar is one of the last places in the sub- continent which readily conforms to the image of India promoted by well-meaning Oxfam adverts, all beggars, cripples and disease: 'Send $10 and help Sita regain her sight . ..' For, the reality is that India is now the seventh largest industrial power on earth; and out of a population of 800 mil- lion it has a middle class of 175 million whose incomes and way of life compare very favourably with that of the average European. Satellite dishes now compete with temple spires in any Indian city. Today, many economists believe that the country will follow Taiwan and South Korea as the next venue for the Pacific Economic Miracle. Western bankers have begun flocking to Bombay; even Sotheby's has moved East, Yet while Bombay and its hinterland stride forwards towards prosperity, health and literacy, Bihar has begun to act as a kind of counterweight, visibly dragging the country back towards the Middle Ages. Despite rich mineral deposits and fertile soils, the state remains by far the poorest in south Asia. It has the lowest literacy, the worst roads, the highest crime. It even has a famine. Whatever index of prosperity and development you choose, Bihar comes tri- umphantly at the bottom.

Two thousand years ago, it was under a bo tree near Patna that the Buddha received his enlightenment; but that was probably the last bit of good news that ever came out of Bihar. Metropolitan Indians today tend to think of Bihar rather as metropolitan Englishmen think of Liver- pool — only much more so. Bihar is a social and political basket-case. The under- world, the police and the politicians of the state are virtually interchangable: Dular Chand Yadav, who has 100 cases of rob- bery and 50 murder cases pending against him, can also be addressed as Honourable Member for Barh. At least 33 of Bihar's State Assembly MPs have criminal records. Great swathes of countryside are con- trolled by the private armies of landlords and their rival Maoist militias. The state has withered; Bihar is now nearing a condi- tion of pure anarchy.

The state firmly established itself as the horror capital of India in 1980. In Bha- galpur, a provincial town 200 miles down- stream from Patna, the police, frustrated by the corruption of the local judiciary, decided to take things into their own hands. They rounded up 26 suspected crim- inals and made them lie down in the back of a lorry. Then, one by one, they pierced the men's eyes with a bicycle-spoke. After that, a .man in a white shirt, referred to by Is this one for Martyn Lewis or not? the police as 'Doctor Sahib', injected acid into the eyes. One of the blinded men, Saligram Singh, recalls that he was then asked if he could see anything. When he replied 'a little', Dr Sahib obligingly inject- ed his eyes again.

When Delhi newspapers publish articles on Bihar's disorders and atrocities, they tend to emphasise the state's 'backward- ness'. What is needed in Bihar, they say, is development: more roads, more schools, more family-planning centres. But, as polit- ical violence spreads from Patna out into the rest of the country, it seems equally likely that Bihar could be not so much backwards as forwards: a trendsetter for the rest of India.

The first ballot-rigging recorded in India took place in central Bihar in the 1962 gen- eral election. Thirty years later it is now the norm. So serious and infectious is the Bihar disease that it is now throwing into doubt the whole notion of an Indian eco- nomic miracle. The vital question for India's future is whether the economic prosperity of the West of the country can outweigh the moral slump and economic depression which are spreading out from Bihar and the East. Few doubt that if the `Bihar effect' — mass corruption, total law- lessness, the breakdown of the institutions of government — does prevail and over- come the positive forces at work in India today, then, as one Bihari journalist put it last week, 'India will make what's going on in Yugoslavia look like a picnic.'

The day I flew into Patna, there were four stories vying for attention on the front page of the Bihar edition of the Hindustan Times; each in its own way seemed to con- firm the collapse of government in the state.

The paper led with a report about a group of tribals who were demanding an independent state in the hills of southern Bihar. The tribals, it seemed, had just car- ried out a raid on a state-owned mine and successfully got away with 'almost 600 kilo- grammes of gelignite, over 1,000 detona- tors and 1,500 metres of igniting tape'.

Below this the paper reported a shoot- out in which the Patna police killed 'a notorious criminal wanted in several cases of dacoity including the kidnapping of the Gupta Biscuit Company's proprietor'. A political piece carried a statement from the Congress opposition accusing the Bihar government of 'ignoring the famine-like sit- uation prevailing in the state', while anoth- er report, headlined 'Crime on the Rise 1rl Muzaffarpur', detailed the arrest over the previous three months of '1,437 criminals' taken into custody during the 116 riots that the town had apparently suffered since the new year. Yet the most astonishing story concerned the goings-on at Patna University. There the previous day angry examinees had `torched a police jeep and damaged the car of the Vice-Chancellor'. What had caused all this? A cut in student grants? Nothing of the sort. 'According to reports, the Vice-Chancellor, in a surprise visit to his university's examination centre, found all the examinees adopting unfair means. He ordered a body search and seized two gunny bags full of notes, chits and books from the examinees ... In a brazen move the examinees then walked out of the examination hall and resorted to wanton vandalism.'

Later, I called on the vice-chancellor to see if the reports were exaggerated. Pro- fessor Mohinuddin was a small, wiry man with heavy black glasses. He maintained that, on the contrary, the press had played down the violence. On being caught red- handed the students had attacked him, hurling desks and chairs, and forcing him to take shelter in a sandbagged police post. There, despite a valiant defence by the six policemen on duty, the mob had succeed- ed in driving the vice-chancellor from his refuge with the help of a couple of crude fire-bombs. Later, for good measure, the students had issued a death threat against him. 'It is lucky I am a widower,' said the professor. 'I only have my own safety to worry about.'

Not far from Professor Mohinuddin's house was the home of Uttam Sengupta, the editor of the Patna edition of the Times of India. Like his academic neigh- bour, Mr Sengupta had had an upsetting week. Two days previously, an assassin had taken a pot-shot at him with a sawn-off shotgun. The pellets had lodged them- selves in the back door of his old Fiat. Sengupta had escaped unscathed but shak- en.

According to Sengupta, what was hap- pening in Bihar was nothing less than the death of the state. Much of the problem, he said, derived from the fact that the Bihar government was broke and unable to provide the most basic amenities. Patna went unlit at night as there were no light bulbs for the street lamps. In the hospital there were no bed sheets, no drugs, and no bandages. The only X-ray machine in Patna had been out of order for a year; the hospital could not afford to buy the spare parts.

What was bad in Patna was much, much worse in rural areas. Outside the capital, electricity had virtually ceased to be sup- plied — this despite the fact that Bihari mines produced almost all India's coal. Without power, industry had been brought to a grinding halt. No roads were being built. There was no functioning system of public transport. In the villages education had virtually packed up and adult literacy was actually declining: since 1981 the number of adult illiterates had risen from 13 to 15 million.

Sengupta maintained that there were two principal effects of this breakdown. Firstly, those who could — the honest, the rich and the able — had migrated elsewhere. Sec- ondly, those who had stayed had made do. This had involved a sort of unofficial wave of privatisation. As the government no longer provided electricity, health care or education, those who could had had to pro- vide it for themselves. Residents in blocks of flats had begun to club together to buy generators.

This privatisation had not been limited to 'towns. In rural areas, some of the bigger villages had begun to build their own roads to link them to the markets. In the absence of state buses there had even been a revival of the use of palanquins. On one road I met four brothers who were returning from carrying a woman to her relatives in a near- by village. They had made their palanquin themselves, they said, and were now bring- ing in more money from their palanquin business than they were from their fields.

All this was very admirable, but the situ- ation became more sinister when people took into their own hands the maintenance of law and order. It was the landlords who were the first to recruit armed gangs, ini- tially to deal with discontented labourers. In response, the poor had fought back, organising themselves into amateur guerril- la groups and arming themselves with guns made by local blacksmiths. Over the years the violence had spiralled: there were now ten major private armies at work in different parts of the state and in many areas the violence was uncontrol- lable.

One of the worst-affected areas was the district to the south of Patna. There, two rival militias were at work: the Savarna Liberation Front (or SLF) representing the interests of the high-caste landowning Bhumihars, and the Maoist Communist Centre (or MCC) representing the untouchables who farmed the Bhumihars' fields. Week after week, the Bhumihars would massacre uppity peasants; then, in retaliation, one peasant would behead an oppressive landlord or two; the police did little to protect either group.

If I wanted to see one possible vision of the future of India, said Uttam, I should visit Barra, the scene of a recent massacre. I took his advice and set off the following morning at dawn. The road, one of the principal highways in Bihar, was the worst I have travelled on in four years of living in India: pot-holes the size of bomb craters puckered its surface. On either side, the rusting skeletons of dead trucks lined the route.

As we drove on the 20th century slipped away. The electricity pylons came to a halt; in the villages, wells replaced such modern luxuries as hand-pumps. Cars and trucks disappeared from the road, and eventually even the rusting skeletons vanished. We passed the odd pony-trap and the four men with their palanquin. The men flagged us down and warned us about highwaymen. They told us to be off the roads by dark.

Eventually, turning right along a dirt track, we came to Barra, a small but ancient village raised above the surround- ing fields by an old tell. I was taken around by Ashlok Singh, one of the two male sur- vivors from the massacre. As we walked he explained, quite matter-of-factly, what had happened. On the night of 13 February 1992, 200 armed untouchables had sur- rounded the village. By the light of burning splints, the raiders had marched all the men into the fields and tied them up. Then, one after another, they slit their throats with rusty harvesting sickles.

Ashlok walked me from the village to an embankment where a small white monu- ment had been erected to the memory of the 38 dead villagers. A hot wind blew in from the fields; dust devils swirled in the dried-out paddy. I asked, 'How did you escape?'

`I didn't,' he said. And pulling off a scarf, he revealed the lurid gash left by the sickle, which had sliced off the back of his neck. 'They cut me, then left me for dead.'

Then Ashlok showed me the houses he and the widows of the village had erected with the compensation money. They were miniature castles: tall and square, with no windows except for thin arrow slits on the third storey. Unwittingly, they were almost exact miniature copies of the peel towers erected in the Scottish Borders in the later Middle Ages, when central authority had completely broken down. There could be no better illustration of Bihar's regression to the Dark Ages.

`The government can no longer protect us,' said Ashlok Singh as we walked back to the car. 'We are left at the mercy of God.' He rubbed the scar on his neck and said, `Every night after sunset we are fright- ened.'

The driver was itching to be off. It was late afternoon, he said, and he wanted to be back in Patna before sunset. It was mad- ness to be on the roads after dark.