Batras [बतरस]
Bihar’s ‘tryst with destiny’: panchayat sarkar!
By Ratnakar Tripathy
Let me start by explaining why I have used a highly loaded phrase ‘tryst with destiny’ here, used by Nehru on the night of the Indian independence decades ago, lest you begin to wonder if I am in the habit of demeaning haloed phrases ‘just like that’, as we Indians like to say.
Just the other day on the 2nd October, when the world was busy paying its earnest, not so earnest or hypocritical homage to Gandhi, Gandhi was happening all over Bihar, technically in all the gramsabhas and panchayats, according to a government requirement, but effectively in many if not most of them. As we say in angrezified Hindi, in the worst possible cases, at least the ‘phoramlty [formality]’ of organizing gramsabhas was followed as a mandatory PR event or a ritual all over the state. The purpose was to discuss public works needed in the specific panchayat and to gear MNREGA schemes accordingly. The idea was in the name of MNREGA, enough ponds have been dug up in water-logged villages, and enough levees built to prevent imaginary flooding in chronically parched countryside, and there is a need to do what really needs to be done. So villagers were meant to gather and decide what public works they wanted in their villages, instead of following a dictate from Delhi.
We heard tales of corrupt mukhiyas shying away from meetings, of village men and women who gathered for the occasion with no idea of what it was all about. But remember, it was the first state wide gathering of its kind – a new beginning of what seems like a direct road to self-government.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar attended a gram Sabha too as an observer, and invoked the ancient republican past of Vaishali at Bishenpur Basant village in Vaishali district. As I turn the pages of historian K P Jaiswal’s ‘Hindu Polity’, it is indeed amazing how enduring Vaishali and other republics of the past were, and perhaps as important, how numerous these republics were in times now conveniently forgotten. Isn’t it strange how we Biharis tend to boast of our Mauryan Empire and suppress perhaps the nobler memory of our ancient republics, where people gathered in the manner of gramsabhas and argued and bargained endlessly?
Just as so many of us seem to forget our past and present and begin to admire Narendra Modi and Nitish simultaneously with no inclination or ability to distinguish between the two – the iron-fisted authoritarian impulse of Gujarat’s Modi [not our own Sushil Modi, who is also fast acquiring a national stature] and an essentially democratic agenda of Nitish, bent on taking political power to every doorstep, even if he can’t deliver electrical power to the villages on immediate basis.
I know what the mischievous and cynical interpretations to the above lines may be – that I am using my editorial prerogative to support Nitish’s prime ministerial candidacy. I am not. Quite simply, because I feel that the democratic experiment being carried out in Bihar is epoch making and more momentous than the presidentship of US, PM-ship of India or the presidentship of the World Bank. Just as epoch making as Vaishali or ancient Greece were/are and not Alexander the great, Changez Khan, Napoleon or Hitler! Bihar is turning in an accelerating manner from a global example of total human despair to an example of hope and improvement for humanity. If I was the CM of a place like Bihar in 2011 and was offered compulsory and unavoidable promotion, I would opt for the tourism ministry in Bihar [urban development is also quite fine with me] and start a trek across the unseen and unexposed parts of Bihar instead of salivating over Delhi. At any rate, I don’t understand the phrase ‘prime minister material’ that’s worrying Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi and LK Advani, and all other candidates on steroids who flex their muscles in front of their early morning mirrors every day. These days even Subramanyam Swami, sitting on top of a mound of secret files thinks he is PM material, as if the science and art of politics had turned into a Material Science B.E. curriculum!
Jokes and historical profundities apart, even if our panchayat experiment and experience is symbolized today by showy Scorpios of mukhiyas, non-existent hand pumps and stolen solar lights, let us look at what not too distant tomorrow will bring us. In effect, we are a step ahead of what Anna Hazare is preaching – choose the right candidate he says, while we are on our way to doing better and choosing our own schemes!
So the question is are we keeping track of changes around us to see with a full sense of responsibility that we are fast turning into the example to follow, instead of blindly chasing the latest flavour, the ‘item’ whether Munni or Sheela or the example of the day?