Review: Broken Promises by Mrityunjay Sharma

When I was in school in Patna, a classmate was kidnapped. Two years earlier, our theatre teacher had been shot dead. Growing up in Bihar, we regularly heard of and read about kidnappings and murders, among a host of other crimes. But in my childhood bubble, I had not imagined they would hit so close to home.

The abduction drew a huge outcry, student protests, and media attention, prompting even the Prime Minister to ask about the child’s whereabouts during an election rally. Thankfully, the police rescued him. Many others were not as lucky.

The kidnapping is one of several anecdotes in Mrityunjay Sharma’s book, Broken Promises: Caste, Crime and Politics in Bihar, illustrating the lawlessness, misgovernance, and economic implosion in the state from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. By 2005, Bihar ranked lowest among Indian states on most economic and social indicators. Despite the progress it has made since then, it continues to be a byword for everything bad and backward.

However, this is by no means a recent phenomenon. An advertisement purportedly published in 1912 and recently shared by the Facebook page Lost Muslim Heritage of Bihar demands, “Who says Behar is Backward? (sic)”. It then counters allegations of backwardness by showcasing the perfumes made in Bihar — “Coronation Eleven” and “Lily Showy White” — and claims they were “highly spoken of by the Press and Beharees”.

While Broken Promises explores some of the historical reasons for why Bihar lagged behind the rest of India, it focuses primarily on how the rule of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi affected the state. It also traces Yadav’s ascendancy against the major political events of the 1990s, such as the Mandal Commission’s recommendations for caste-based affirmative action and LK Advani’s procession to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya.

With Yadav’s victory in the state election in 1990, the stranglehold of dominant castes on Bihar’s polity received a blow. He rose to power with the promise of heralding social justice and breaking deeply entrenched casteist and feudal mores. Some of his early policies, such as abolishing the auction and control of fishing ponds by dominant castes and granting their ownership to the fisher caste, were steps in this direction. In subsequent years, however, the social revolution did not materialise — crime and corruption did.

The author profiles the various criminals who wielded immense political clout after the “institutionalisation” of crime. Such was their impunity that they even murdered high-ranking government officials, like the District Magistrate of Gopalganj in 1994.

Sharma writes that Yadav only gave lip service to social equity instead of implementing laws such as land and tenancy reforms, which could have benefitted the most marginalised castes. The period also saw the rise of “armies” led by landed castes that perpetrated horrific massacres. In turn, communist guerilla groups took revenge, leading to “a never-ending series of bloody reprisals”. Meanwhile, health, education, and infrastructure deteriorated, and Bihar’s residents emigrated for a better quality of life and the opportunities their homeland could not provide.

Instead of following a chronological trajectory, the author sequentially explores different facets of the period. This format makes for an engaging read. It also provides deeper insights, such as why the central region of undivided Bihar, more prosperous than the northern and southern parts, saw the worst violence.

While Sharma’s work is competent and coherent, it lacks novelty. Those who stayed abreast with the news during the time he chronicles will not find it particularly illuminating. Besides, various memoirs and non-fiction accounts, most notably by Sankarshan Thakur, Santosh Singh, and Vijay Nambisan, have already covered the topics that Sharma explores. Even the book’s title is the same as that of a 1992 work on Bihar by Vinita Damodaran, although the latter focuses on a different era.

Bihar’s maladies have been fodder for endless books, movies and TV shows. While many depict the what and the how, there is little focus on the why. They treat its backwardness as an a priori fact requiring only the most superficial explanations. Besides, most of them adopt the same lens and techniques to depict the state, with bizarre anecdotes, spicy gossip, or expositions of violence to hook their audience.

Thankfully, some recent works have eschewed this template. Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories is not about Bihar per se, but it brilliantly traces how the early annexation of the state by the British and colonial policies, especially the imposition on farmers to grow opium, have shaped its trajectory. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the drug trafficking that immensely enriched London and Boston did so by impoverishing Bihar’s farmers. MR Sharan’s 2021 publication, Last Among Equals: Politics in Bihar’s Villages, charts a different path with its focus on the grassroots.

Regardless, one could argue that there is some merit in restating widely known facts and using hindsight to clarify the past, especially for a newer generation of readers. Besides, by incorporating the turnaround since Chief Minister Nitish Kumar came to power and contrasting it with the earlier period when Yadav held sway, Broken Promises presents a more comprehensive overview of contemporary Bihar than works published earlier.

However, a disappointing aspect of the book is the author’s subterfuge. His biographical note on the jacket dwells on a host of accomplishments, but leaves out a key detail, which is peppered on his social media — that he is a member of the BJP, a party antagonistic to Yadav. Given that the book is an extensive critique of his party’s opponent, fair disclosure would require him to state his affiliations.

Of course, the author’s political preferences do not make his arguments any less credible or invalidate his critique. Sharma is dispassionate throughout the book and steers clear of ideological slants or partisanship. He uses information in the public domain to build his critique and backs many of his assertions with references, as an academic would.

However, in academia, scholars have to mandatorily declare conflicts of interest. Researchers often take funding from the organisation whose work or products they are evaluating. But that does not automatically mean their data or conclusions are suspect. As long as they state any conflict of interest, their work is judged on its merit. I wish Sharma had done the same.

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.