KIRAN PANDAY

The meeting last month between prominent Nepali politicos and some of their previous or future Indian handlers in the capital city of Bihar seems to have gone rather well. Not a day passes without a laudatory mention of the achievements of the Bihari state in the Nepali press. From noted UML propagandist Pradip Nepal to Nepali Times columnist Prashant Jha, every participant appears to have returned with a positive take on the transformation taking place in what was once known as the badlands of the Indian republic.

The credit for assembling political heavyweights in Patna in the middle of multiple crises back home must go to the Indian Embassy here. In fact, Pradip Nepal admitted publicly that he agreed to attend purely because the plenipotentiary of the host country made it an issue during his tête-à-tête with Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal. Several others who have been less forthcoming about their reasons for attending may have also found it difficult to refuse.

The meeting was probably a publicity stunt, something that media theorists call a pseudo-event, where nothing need happen to make the news. The importance of such hyperreality has to be understood from the kind of media coverage it generates. Clearly, the main purpose of the Patna get-together was to expose Nepali participants to the developmental politics of Nitish Kumar.

In the current chief minister of Bihar, the mercantilist-military alliance of metropolitan India has found a willing accomplice, a poster child for the Indian model of capitalist development. But Kumar has a political interest in hiding the failures of his government behind the glamour of the flyovers being built in his capital city.

The numbers that Bihar has produced of its achievements await independent corroboration. The Directorate of Economics and Statistics in Patna boasted that the gross domestic product (GDP) of the state grew by 11.44 per cent during 2008-09, a figure that the Central Statistical Organisation reproduced on its website without verification.

But Manas Chakravarty of Indian Wall Street Journal questions the authenticity of the claim that Bihar has begun to industrialise. When neither bank deposits nor lending rise, it's difficult to be too sure about economic vibrancy. And a high growth rate from a very small economic base isn't the kind of miracle it's often made out to be.

The claim of the Kumar administration that law and order in the state has improved also needs to be taken with a drop of holy Gangajal. It's true that reports of high-profile abductions have decreased. Freed of political interference, the police now enforce property rights with more vehemence. But the terror of the uniform in any democracy can't guarantee a sustainable peace, and in fact the backlash from repressed violence can be cataclysmic.

Kumar is an engineer and predisposed towards increasing investment in infrastructure, and the middle class salivates at the prospect of better facilities that attract organised businesses and multinationals with higher compensation packages. But the poor don't always benefit from the decimation of the informal sector of the economy. It's a bit early to draw any conclusions from the road-building spree in Bihar.

What Nepal really needs to learn from Kumar's various experiments in Bihar is that the state must spend more on education and health to earn credibility and be accepted by wider society. Massive investment in the creation of modern infrastructure becomes meaningful only when the masses benefit and have a vested interest in their uninterrupted operation. When all the people want is to obstruct traffic to gain small favours from government, it doesn't matter whether the road is a single-lane track or a six-lane highway.

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