On The spot
Tavleen Singh
For me the saddest sight I saw in Bihar last week was the magnificent building of the 19th century Khuda Baksh library rising like some unbowed sentinel out of the unspeakable squalor of a Patna Street. A later addition to it was the Curzon Reading Room and on its high, yellow washed façade was imprinted 1905 in black as if to remind passersby that Patna was once not just a city of books and refinement but in even older times the cradle of Indian civilization. Travelers from other lands who saw Pataliputra at its zenith marveled at its architecture and the sophistication of its people. Megashtanes who visited in the late 3rd century BC describes this city built on the Ganga this way. ‘It is the shape of a parallelogram, and is girded with a wooden wall, pierced with loopholes for the discharge of arrows. It has a ditch in front for defense and for receiving the sewage of the city.’ The Chinese monk, Fa Hein, was so dazzled by the palaces and temples of ancient Pataliputra that he wrote that they could not have been built by human beings. It is hard not to remember these descriptions and weep when you visit Patna today. In a country replete with unsanitary, ugly cities Patna would still win first prize.
As I was returning after an absence of more than fifteen years I rang my old colleague, Shankarshan Thakur, to ask his advice on what to look out for. Shankarshan has just written a book on Bihar’s chief minister called ‘Single Man: the life and times of Nitish Kumar of Bihar’. It is a sympathetic biography of the man who has at least succeeded in bringing Bihar back from the edge of the abyss upon which it stood by the time Mr. and Mrs. Laloo Yadav finished their long, lawless reign. Nitish Kumar has restored law and order in the state and this is no small thing if you remember that under Laloo and Rabri Yadav people were afraid to step out of their homes for fear of being kidnapped or killed by the gangs of thugs who were the real rulers of Bihar. So let me begin by praising Nitish Kumar for bringing back the rule of law in a state which not just investors but even ordinary travelers were afraid to go near.
Sadly, he has done little else in the eight years he has been chief minister. And, you can see this without leaving the city limits of Patna. On my first afternoon I visited places where new residential apartment buildings have been built and where land prices have gone through the ceiling. Shankarshan had given me a list and I faithfully followed it only to find that the apartment buildings have come up in a disorderly, shoddy way without any effort having been made to provide the parks and aesthetic public spaces so necessary for modern living. But, at least the newer parts of Patna are relatively clean.
It is when you drive into the older parts of the city where there is the Patna Sahib gurudwara and other historical buildings that the true horror of the city’s decay hits you. The deeper I went into the old city the more it felt as if I were driving through a city of garbage dumps and open drains. Under Nitish’s Government flyovers have been built over the older parts of the city but they conceal neither the squalor nor the crumbling buildings but seem almost to acquire that same depressing decay that you see everywhere in Patna except where the high officials live.
The next day I drove out of Patna towards Bodhgaya. Other Indian states have a vast treasure of old temples, forts and palaces to tempt foreign travelers but Bihar has only Bodhgaya where Shakyamuni, Gautam Buddha, achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. I expected that at least on this route I would see a fancy new highway and the restaurants and hotels without which foreign travelers rarely come. But, whatever Nitish Kumar’s other qualities he seems not to have understood how tourism can become an important pillar of economic growth. How it can bring the infrastructure, services and employment opportunities that transform economies. So the road to Bodhgaya was a broken strip of tarmac that at some places disappeared altogether. A bridge over a wide, dry river looked as if it could collapse at any moment. If Bodhgaya itself has become a town of beautiful Buddhist temples and relatively modern hotels it is because of investment that has come from Buddhist countries like Japan and Thailand. The Bihar government’s contribution is a very basic airport in Gaya that at least spares foreign pilgrims the drive I took from Patna.
When I got back to the city I spent an hour or so wandering about that part of the city where the political leaders and high officials live and it was salubrious and clean and in this season there were pavements carpeted with the velvety fallen flowers of Red Silk cotton trees. It felt as if I had accidentally left Patna and wandered into another city altogether. As I drove around the wide, tree-lined streets of this part of Patna I found myself growing more and more despondent because I realized that the state of Bihar’s capital city and its other towns is not because people do not wish to live better but because those who have governed Bihar realize that there is no point in bothering about such things as civic services, cleanliness or anything else for that matter as long as they can remain cocooned in their sanitized enclaves and hide behind the high walls of their vast houses.
Everywhere in India we see that colonial attitudes to governance are the main reason for why people are so angry with their elected representatives but nowhere do you feel this more than in Patna. The divide between the enclaves where the people live and where they rulers live is stark and scary. Yes Mr and Mrs. Laloo Yadav are to blame for the mess they left behind but neither Nitish Kumar nor his coalition partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party, can be absolved. The overwhelming impression I left Patna with was that Bihar has fallen fifty years behind the rest of India. If today Narendra Modi is viewed as some rock star magician in Bihar, at least by Hindu voters across caste lines, it is because people want desperately to see their lives improve.
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