On reality of caste, Bihar holds a mirror

There is something about Bihar.

It may be the state where the Buddha attained his enlightenment (Bodh Gaya, c. 450 BCE), where the world’s first residential university flourished (5th to 13th century CE), where Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, was born (Patna, 1666), Gandhi started his first satyagraha (Champaran, 1917), the state from which India’s first President Rajendra Prasad hailed (serving from January 26, 1950), where Jayaprakash Narayan commenced his transformative movement against corruption and misrule (1974). But it remains the state that is the subject of the intensest political speculation, and critical comment.

It gets judged adversely and is derided. Its being the third most populous state in India (after Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra) with the highest population density in the country (1,102 per sq km), the lowest literacy rate (61.8%), the worst sex ratio (895 females to 1000 males) are held up against it, quoted in season and out of season. Twenty-five years is a long time. In the political life of a country, that span is longer than its chronological span. If asked what happened in September/October — around this time — 25 years ago, in 1998, in and around the subject of Bihar one would have to think very hard.

Yet that was a time when Bihar was the centre of political activity. And not an ordinary one at that, for it involved the then President of India, KR Narayanan and the then government of India, led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The government of Bihar was being described as dysfunctional, and“non-existent”. Bihar being on the defensive in numerous court cases was going against it.

The spirited, now-jocund, now-sombre, never-say-die Lalu Prasad had lost his office as chief minister (CM) of Bihar in 1997 amid allegations of corruption. In July of that year, he had stunned the political world of India by seeing to it that if he were to leave, his wife Rabri Devi would succeed him. This was considered a joke, a poor one at that. That she was duly elected leader by the party that held a majority of the Legislative Assembly and was legally and constitutionally entitled to that seat, that office, that position of power, was not taken seriously. That a wife, merely because she was the former CM’s wife, and not a formally educated woman at that, had become CM “through the back door”, was what was being said. And by this time in 1998, Rabri Devi’s government was in deep trouble.

The precariousness of her numbers in the House apart, her government was being criticised for its standards of governance. No one spoke up for its palpable under-performance, no one wanted to be seen as a defender of her patently unedifying rule. In September 1998, the Union cabinet recommended to President Narayanan that the government of Rabri Devi be dismissed and the President’s Rule imposed under Article 356 of the Constitution of India. Crucial to the recommendation was the report of newly-appointed BJP-affiliated Governor Sunder Singh Bhandari citing financial mismanagement and poor law and order. Governor Bhandari claimed to have sent a “fool-proof” case for the government’s dismissal.

The Governor’s assessment may have been “fool-proof”, but it was not Narayanan-proof. The President read the cabinet’s recommendation line by line, word by word. Those of us on his staff who had gone over the text and made our own comments on it did what we were meant to do, like fact-checkers in any newspaper office. But the President’s appraisal of the recommendation was his own. He studied it and reflected on it, in silence, without anyone butting into the process. He had done the same about a year earlier when former Prime Minister (PM) IK Gujral’s government had recommended the dismissal of the BJP government led by Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh. And just as he did then, so he did now. He returned the recommendation to the government for reconsideration. There was no politics to his decision. There was only fairness, Constitutional fairness.

Law and order failures, financial mismanagement, and misgovernance are bad. But they do not amount to a constitutional breakdown, the sine qua non for President’s Rule. This was his clear, simple reading. There can be political democratic responses to those situations, but Rabri Devi did not call for unseating on the grounds of a failure of the constitutional structure. This was a protection he was giving not to a chief minister but to a constitutional principle, a protection he was duty-bound as President of India to give. And while initially, the Vajpayee cabinet was rattled by his decision, just as PM Gujral’s had been, it decided in its maturity to accept the point. It did not press for the dismissal. It did not repeat the recommendation which the President under the Constitution would then have had to accept. The Hindu carried an editorial on September 27, 1998, titled “Well done, Mr Narayanan”, while Hindustan Times titled its editorial “Not a snub, a favour”. How a favour? The editorial said that an eminently dismissable government would have donned the mantle of martyrdom had it been dismissed. In the event, it stayed on until the logic of democracy brought about a change. So the President had done the Union government a favour.

It was not to do a favour to anyone that President Narayanan did what he did. It was to do the right and proper thing without fear or favour. He was undisturbed by the criticism that had briefly come his way from the BJP. He was unelated by the encomiums that came to him from the supporters of Lalu Prasad and Rabri Devi. There is something, as I said, about Bihar. It gave the country a chance to see the Constitution’s morality being upheld.

Today, when the state is in the news because of its caste survey, Bihar is giving the nation a chance to see its population’s reality being upheld. Everyone came out well in 1998 — President Narayanan for returning the recommendation, and PM Vajpayee for accepting the President’s action. Today, a consensus on the reality of caste being recognised, without fear or favour, would be a favour done to our nationhood.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former administrator, is a student of modern Indian history. The views expressed are personal