Nitish Kumar’s Triumph

An improved administration with a selective use of identity helps the ruling coalition triumph in Bihar.

In what must be described as an expected result, the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United)-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition has come up trumps in the Bihar state assembly elections. The coalition has not just won. By achieving a three-fourths majority in the assembly, it has nearly annihilated the opposition comprising the Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Ram Vilas Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) alliance and the Congress Party. The outcome repeats the Lok Sabha election results in 2009. The reasons for the strong victory in the assembly elections are the same as in the Lok Sabha polls – a very positive perception about the JD(U)-BJP government’s public works programme and the quality of state administration as also the ruling coalition’s very deft use of identity to shore up its base.

Fore more, read the rest of the editorial here.

The die is caste

“Social engineering” remains the main theme in Bihar's polity as the 15^th Lok Sabha elections in the state beckon.

Bihar's elected representatives have had an important part to play in the national legislature for long. True to its recent legacy of “Mandal politics”, the state promises to deliver yet another verdict that is reliant on the correlation of various caste and community based alliances. The main political parties in the state hope to construct a winning alliance of the right combination of caste and community alliances – in other words, “social engineering”.

The performance of the major parties have depended upon their ability to maintain their respective social bases among various castes. Thus, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) led by Lalu Prasad is seen as a Yadav and other backward classes dominated party deriving support also from Muslims. The Loktantrik Janata Party (LJP) led by Ram Vilas Paswan has a primary social base that comprises of dalit communities such as the Paswans and the Dhobis. The Janata Dal (United)'s support base is rooted in the Kurmi and Koeri community, and the Bharatiya Janata Party is seen as the party of the upper castes. There has not been much of a shift in the respective social bases of these parties in the state since the last held assembly elections in 2005. The rise of the aforementioned parties in the state has coincided with the historical decline of the catch-all Congress party, which has been reduced to a near irrelevant force now.

To the further detriment of the Congress party, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in Bihar unravelled as the RJD and LJP decided to keep the bulk of Lok Sabha constituencies for themselves resulting in the Congress deciding to go it alone. The ruling National Democratic Alliance of the JD(U) and BJP have also finalised a seat sharing arrangement making the elections in the state a battle between between these two alliances even as the parliamentary left parties in the state have come together to form a cohesive United Left Bloc (ULB).

Considering that the LJP fought separately against both the JD(U) and the RJD in the 2005 elections, the coming together of the LJP and the RJD promises to shore up support for the alliance. If the combined vote share (38.9%) of these parties in 2005 is an indicator, the LJP-RJD alliance seems to be on a better footing compared to the ruling NDA (36.9%).

While the JD(U) has harped upon governance and performance of its chief minister, Nitish Kumar as talking points in the elections, the party realises the primal importance of social engineering and has embarked upon it with gusto. The party in government has addressed concerns of some communities such as backward Muslims to garner their support. At the same time, other communities, such as the Koeris and the Brahmins have had causes of resentment with the way Nitish Kumar has ruled – he is seen to be authoritarian and being too reliant on the bureaucracy. The BJP's support base among the upper castes is quite substantial and it has also managed to garner support in the relatively urban pockets of the state. “Social engineering” thus remains the operational strategy for the NDA alliance as it has fielded candidates based on caste equations, even resulting in the dropping of several sitting members of parliament .

The Muslim-Yadav base of the RJD and the dalit base of the LJP is indeed formidable and this factor is seen to favour the RJD-LJP alliance. Lalu Prasad's party might have lost the assembly elections in 2005 after 15 years of rule, but his support base had endured and so is the case before these elections. The alliance was weakened by the exit of the Congress from the seat sharing strategy, but in any case the traditional support base of the Congress, particularly the Muslims (ever since the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992) have gravitated toward the RJD. After the break up of the Congress' alliance with the RJD – the RJD has put up candidates in the seats that it had offered to Congress, ensuring the further marginalisation of the latter. The RJD and the LJP however assure that they are firmly with the UPA and along with the Samajwadi Party have formed a bloc of parties in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

The fledgling alliance between the parliamentary left parties strives to provide a promising alternative to the identity-based mobilisations of the other main parties in the state. The Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the strongest left outfit in the state -the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)- Liberation have finally found common ground and have formed an United Left Bloc, which fancies its chances in some traditional left strongholds in the state.

Unlike other parties, the left Bloc has tried to mobilise people on the basis of issues such as relief to people affected by the Kosi floods, problems faced by public sector employees and other livelihood related issues in the lowly developed state. While the parties in the Bloc play down expectations for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, they are confident of building an issues-based alternative to the mainstream political parties in the state and are keen on positioning themselves well for the next assembly elections. The performance of this left Bloc would ultimately determine the shift from the primordial identity based politics that has dominated the state.

Draft of editorial written in the Economic & Political Weekly . The final version can be read here. 

Bihar Floods Special Issue on EPW

Floods are a perennial problem in Bihar. The very same water source that acts as the life-blood for the agriculture-dependent population in the state, turns into an avalanche of death and misery every year. And every year, as this natural disaster strikes, it evokes temporary attention to the plight of the victims and soon to be forgotten government commissions and helicopter visits by the bourgeois polity. But once the shock value of the images fades away, all is forgotten even if misery is compounded and the people are made to brace up for the next year's natural fury. Such is the case of floods in Bihar. The Kosi river- a dynamic, sediment carrying water body is particularly driven to course-changes and therefore to put paid any plans to tame the river (through the embankment strategy that has been adopted for years). That the fact that this river originates across national borders in Nepal makes the problem even more complicated. Four experts - whose intros are provided in the post- with substantial understanding of the problem through different forms of expertise weigh on the Kosi tragedy and the perennial woes of river management and floods. They even venture to offer solutions. Following are the links to these articles published in the Economic and Political Weekly.

BIHAR FLOODS

Floods, Himalayan Rivers, Nepal: Some Heresies
Ramaswamy R Iyer

The strategy of building embankments to constrain river flow and to prevent floods in north Bihar has proven to be questionable and flawed. Reliance on a dam-and-reservoir system for that purpose only offers limited protection and even greater risks of flooding in case of damage. Learning to cope with floods and managing a transition to a system that does not rely upon the embankments any more seems to be the rational course of action.

Ramaswamy R Iyer (ramaswamy.iyer@gmail. com) is with the Centre for Policy Research and has written extensively on issues related to water.

Management of Floods in Bihar
C P Sinha

A combination of short- and long-term measures that gives importance to both structural (traditional) means and non-structural techniques is required to solve the perennial flood problem in north Bihar.

C P Sinha (c_p_sinha@rediffmail.com) headed the Second Bihar State Irrigation Commission and was also associated with Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.

Kosi: Rising Waters, Dynamic Channels and Human Disasters
Rajiv Sinha

The recent Kosi floods have proved once again that inadequate control measures have been responsible for the recurring disasters. Typically flood control and riverine studies focus on hydrological information, whereas a much more integrated approach that pays attention to specific morphological factors is required. Since Kosi is a dynamic river with a unique morphology and because it is a river which has always carried high sediment loads, flood management strategies must be attuned to such specific parameters of the river, besides being much more than mere “river control” through embankments.

Rajiv Sinha (rsinha@iitk.ac.in) is with the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

The Kosi and the Embankment Story
Dinesh Kumar Mishra

The Kosi afflux bundh breached in Kusaha in Nepal on 18 August 2008. This was the eighth incident of its kind and the first time did a breach occur upstream of the Kosi Barrage. The ones in 1968 and 1984 were no less disastrous but this year’s breach has generated the most concern and its international dimension has added an edge. In an effective life of 45 years, the embankments have remained intact for 37 years. What happens to the people who have suffered the wrath of the river nearly five times more than those in the areas protected by the embankments?

Dinesh Kumar Mishra (dkmishra108@gmail.com) has been working on water-related issues in Bihar for many years and is the convenor of the Barh Mukti Abhiyan, a civil society organisation working with the people living in flood-prone areas in the region.

Perennial Misery

How can Bihar end the flood disaster that visits its people year after year?

Submerged railway tracks near Madhepura, 250 km from Patna. (Photo courtesy PTI)

The breaching of embankments in the upstream areas of the Kosi river, in Kusaha village in Nepal, has resulted in yet another round of floods in north Bihar, in the districts of Supaul, Saharsa, Araria, Madhepura, Katihar and Purnia.

The disaster this time is much larger than usual. More than three million people have been affected and a million have been forced to seek higher ground.

The tragedy of floods ravaging this populous area is that the phenomenon is a regular occurrence. This time though, there is now enough information that the Kosi floods could have been avoided if there was coordinated action to prevent the breaching of the embankments. Yet this was not to be.

The Kosi is known to be a dynamic river that carries heavy sediment loads along with its flow. The river has therefore undergone several course changes in its history. The upstream management of embankments in the Kusaha area of Nepal was India’s responsibility (that of the government of Bihar to be specific). If the heavy silt load in the river and its meandering flow gnawing at the embankments had been monitored and acted upon, it would have been possible to prevent the breach that finally took place. Once the embankments were breached, then the Nepal police, fearing a greater inundation of living areas, cut a chasm in the path of the river to redirect the surging waters away from villages in the area. The result was that the Kosi began to flow through older stream-ways that it used to take in the past and this ended up in a flooding of vast tracts in and around north Bihar.

Negligence, lack of coordination between the government of India and Nepal, and sheer laxity of the state government in handling a perennial problem were the proximate causes of the Kosi catastrophe, which has been exacerbated by heavy rain in the region. Hundreds of thousands remain marooned in the area. The loss of property in the 16 affected districts includes destruction of 3,00,000 homes and of a swathe of crop area. Flooding by the Kosi is, at the time of writing (September 5), still under way and there is a danger of an epidemic of water-borne diseases. Quick evacuation, deployment of a larger number of boats for movement to higher ground, provision of relief (including medical supplies and food) and construction of facilities such as temporary homes are priority concerns for a state government that is struggling to cope with the enormity of the disaster. The National Disaster Management Authority should help to expedite relief efforts and coordinate work of the relief agencies along with the army. Yet, considering that the flood situation has been described as a national calamity by prime minister Manmohan Singh, relief efforts by the central and state agencies remain woefully inadequate.

Relief and rehabilitation after a disaster of this magnitude do pose a major challenge to state and society, but what of the future for the Kosi basin and other flood-prone areas of Bihar? The recurrence of the problem suggests that the strategy of controlling the flow of water through artificially constructed embankments and bunds is problematic, simply because their maintenance is too difficult a job to carry out with certainty. Frequent breaches have only made flooding even more disastrous than what the natural process of flooding would have entailed.

Much of the misery that visits the people of north Bihar every year could be mitigated if the strategy of dealing with floods was not merely reliant upon the “hold or break” approach of managing rivers. One school of thought feels it is necessary for the water resources ministry and the disaster management authorities in both the central and state governments to study the issue from a newer perspective that places much more emphasis on strategies such as proper flood plain zoning, retaining the natural drains of the river in its course-ways, constructing flood-proof facilities in the very vulnerable areas and disseminating information about flood management, sanitation, and water usage. In a nutshell, the prescription is for reducing the dependence upon culverts, embankments and other artificial structures to regulate the flow of the rivers through the region and to manage the natural outflows of the water, including by temporary cultivation on the flood plains.

Another school of thought suggests that flood avoidance is incumbent upon building high dams in Nepal to check the flow of the rivers in Bihar. But this remains a difficult task to undertake, for it would mean that Nepal would have to manage large volumes of water in reservoirs which would also be subjected to rapid silting. However, Nepal would be able to receive considerable income if the water in the reservoirs could be used to generate hydropower. The presence of a newly elected democratic government in Nepal should make it much easier for the governments of the two countries to negotiate a solution to the flooding problem.

In the end, disasters such as the floods in Bihar should not be considered as one-off incidents that are forgotten after the floods subside. A comprehensive change in perspective in viewing flood management is necessary to prevent recurrence of this tragedy that the people of Bihar have been experiencing for decades.

Editorial written for the Economic and Political Weekly