(In this issue, we carry a curtain-raiser for the key issues in the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections, and a response to the recent much-hyped visit by Rahul Gandhi to Bihar. In the coming November issue we will carry the CPI(ML) manifesto, constituencies and candidates, as well as reports from the election campaign. – Ed/-)

Beginning from October 21, Bihar will go to polls to elect its next Assembly and government. Just before the announcement of the election schedule, the state witnessed a dramatic hostage-crisis lasting one full week, when the Maoists took four policemen hostage and killed a BMP constable – Lucas Tete, a tribal from Jharkhand – before eventually releasing the other three. This gave the Election Commission ample pretext not only to stretch the Bihar elections to as many as six phases but also to reduce the polling time for several constituencies in each phase to eight hours in place of the normal duration of ten hours.

There are four major political camps in these elections in Bihar – the JD(U)-BJP combine, the RJD-LJP combine, the Congress and the CPI(ML)/Left. The mainstream media would however like to reduce the entire election to a two-horse race between Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad, and between them these two leaders are trying their level best to make the contest as personalized as they can, diverting the people’s attention from all the key issues on which they have little to offer to the disillusioned Bihar electorate. Apart from invoking the fear of the Lalu era, Nitish Kumar has ironically also discovered a good shadow-boxing opponent in Narendra Modi.

Indeed, Nitish Kumar’s shadow-boxing with Narendra Modi is a typical example of the former’s pretentious politics. When the BJP was lying badly isolated in the wake of the dastardly demolition of the Babri Masjid, Nitish Kumar was among the first leaders in the Hindi belt to join hands with the BJP. When Modi’s Gujarat reeled under the state-sponsored genocidal assault in 2002, Nitish Kumar was a minister in Vajpayee’s cabinet and uttered not a single word of protest. Nitish has had no problem having the BJP as his partner-in-power in Bihar. Yet he believes he can project himself as the tallest secular leader by returning Rs. 5 crore of flood relief money to Gujarat and pretending to prevent Narendra Modi from campaigning in Bihar!

When it comes to matching Nitish Kumar’s political opportunism, the new-found Lalu-Paswan bonhomie is no pass-over. Five years ago, Ram Vilas Paswan was all against Lalu Prasad and was a strong votary for a Muslim chief minister in Bihar. Today, Paswan is a staunch ally of Lalu Prasad and both have coolly forgotten the issue of a Muslim chief minister. Instead the combine projects Lalu Prasad as its chief ministerial candidate with Ram Vilas Paswan’s brother as his deputy. In Bihar, Lalu Prasad waxes eloquent against price-rise, in Delhi he refuses to vote for the cut motion against the UPA’s inflationary budget and bargains with the government only for a hefty hike in the salary and allowances of members of parliament!

Lalu Prasad has promised a ‘new-look RJD’ and for this he has found a great leader in the former JD(U) MP Prabhunath Singh. It should be noted that Prabhunath Singh, a notorious north Bihar politician with any number of criminal cases has all along been strongly opposed to the RJD and during the last Lok Sabha elections, when the RJD’s tally came down to a meagre four, one of those four victorious candidates – Umashankar Singh – won by defeating none other than Prabhunath Singh. Today if Lalu Prasad finds a valuable leader in Prabhunath Singh, the reason is not difficult to understand. In the reigning debate over land reforms, Prabhunath Singh has emerged as a key feudal face ‘predicting’ rivers of blood if Bihar were to implement land and tenancy reforms. Clearly, reassuring the feudal forces against the ‘fear’ of land reforms is the key to Lalu Prasad’s ‘new look’ RJD.

However much Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad may like to keep the people engrossed in a personalized slanging match, and the Congress crown prince may try and play his cameo using the central power to buy more clout for the Congress in Bihar, it is impossible to suppress the ground reality in a state that is 90% rural and 80% poor (going by the latest UNDP report). For the third successive year Bihar is experiencing large-scale crop failure due to drought conditions. North Bihar is again witnessing floods – every year sees breaches in embankments: if it was Kosi two years ago, it is Gandak this year. As Bihar goes to polls, large parts of the Bihar countryside are in the grip of near-famine conditions.

The Supreme Court monitoring team has acknowledged more than 100 starvation deaths in the state and the Wadhva Committee describes the public distribution system in Bihar as the most corrupt in the country. The treasury fraud unearthed by the CAG has only corroborated the people’s own experience of rampant loot and corruption in every development scheme and administrative department. And then there is this question of absolute lack of productive, especially industrial investment in the state and the resultant crisis of employment and the government’s refusal to honour the recommendations of commissions set up by itself – whether on common school system, land reforms or uplift of mahadalits.

The Congress ruled Bihar for 40 long years, it also took the people 15 years to get rid of the RJD – now these elections will tell us how sufficiently Nitish Kumar has already been unmasked in the course of his tenure of five years.