The Oxford Dictionary added the word meme in 2016. It is defined as “an image, a video, a piece of text, etc. that is passed very quickly from one Internet user to another, often with slight changes that make it humorous”. Nearly a decade later, newsrooms around the world are doing everything possible to get one right on a daily basis. This is the tyranny of the digital age for the news business.
As we cover Bihar elections, the state is becoming a meme factory. It doesn’t matter that it’s still struggling to get to the actual factory. Sometimes it’s the man/woman on the street. Most Biharis have only words as wealth. Sometimes it is a senior leader of a political party. But the most viral are the memes that come from journalists talking to Baahubali (a polite euphemism for hardened criminals) turned politicians. In these elections, Mokama assembly constituency is for Bahubali Akhara in Bihar what Wall Street is for global capitalism. And for good reason. It is a contest of Anant Singh versus Surajbhan Singh, both of whom are mascots of upper caste (Bhumihar) crime-business in the political economy scenario of the state. The party identity of the candidates is secondary to their personalities, but the fact that they (or their wives) are contesting from two parties that claim the legacy of Karpoori Thakur in Bihar makes the irony stronger. If your meme algorithm had even the slightest inkling that you were looking at something on Bihar, chances are Anant Singh would have dominated it. There’s a brief one-liner, an unpleasant, if honest, claim here. He has been dominating the metaverse for many years.
The so far, so good saga (hopefully) came to an end on Thursday evening when news broke that a man who was the uncle of the Jan Suraj Party candidate from Mokama had died after a clash with supporters of Ananth Singh. There is a firearm injury that probably caused death. In the best traditions of natural justice, Anant Singh, whose supporters have been accused of murder, has claimed innocence. Of course, deceased Dularchand Yadav was not exactly a saint and was considered a Baahubali in his own right. He probably got involved with his nephew’s candidature only because his old party, the RJD, had decided to make the Bhumihar candidate the ‘practical pivot’ this time instead of Yadav. It is noteworthy that RJD had contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from this part of the state on a ticket with the wife of another OBC strongman. He is now an MLA candidate from a constituency not far from Mokama. In the 2019 and 2020 elections, RJD fielded Anant Singh’s wife on its ticket. The great thing is that none of these parties have any principled opposition to such elements and they are known, even celebrated, for displaying such practical narrow-mindedness when it comes to elections.
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There are many Dularchand Yadavs who have been victims of political violence in Bihar. My earliest memory of a political murder – I was five years old – was that Ishwar Chaudhary, my local MP from Gaya, was murdered by Maoists in the 1989 elections while he was on the campaign trail. On Wednesday, another outgoing MLA in my home district and a candidate in these elections was almost murdered. His constituency Tekari used to be the center of Maoist violence until recently. It has seen massacres and even looting of police stations. The fall of evening meant the beginning of the de facto curfew that had been in place for decades.
Politics and violence are not unique to Bihar or India. But what is often forgotten is that in a society like Bihar, political violence is often of a natural nature. This is political economy at its best. In Mokama you need a plow or tractor as well as a gun to plow your fields. The entire area is a lowland area in the floodplain of the Ganga and much of the land remains submerged in water for most of the year. Floods keep changing. It also means that the administrative demarcation of land does not really matter and it is always up for grabs. You need an Anant Singh to protect your property rights and livelihood, not because he lends himself to viral memes. In return his Robin Hood status is being accepted. In some places, the river is not geographical but sociological: power equations of decades past are being challenged by hitherto oppressed people. In a feudal system where caste was the only binding factor and also the determining feature of material destiny, it was natural that most of these solidarities, even if distorted and fatal, were formed on the basis of caste.
Many of these conflicts are now a thing of the past, in part because the battlefield has seen bipartisan abdication. Both the erstwhile privileged and the underprivileged, the oppressor and the oppressed, are now moving out of the state in search of better livelihood options. Bihari is perhaps the largest sub-nationality of this country which has contributed equally in the category of construction worker as well as investment banker in the last thirty years. The state is now a place where all these characters come back to their social circles but have little material interest there. It is migration, not any structural disruption in the state’s ability to maintain ‘law and order’, that largely explains the relative peace compared with the situation three decades ago. The Anant Singhs and Dularchand Yadavs of the world are mostly relics of the past rather than lifestyles.
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Though hardly active participants in the struggle, most of us Biharis have not forgotten what it was like to live at that time. The wounds of the past are too close to allow such amnesia. In the area where I grew up in Gaya, Bihar, our neighbors – my parents still live there – are people whose village is Senari. It witnessed the massacre of 34 Bhumihars by the Maoists in 1999 – this was in the middle of my tenth board exams – and I remember being woken up by the sound of crying coming from home early in the morning when the news broke. Behind our house a man, again from an upper caste, was killed by Maoists in his village. I have seen a child growing up without a father before my eyes. Many such colonies sprang up in cities like Gaya and Jehanabad, where upper castes migrated from villages to cities in search of physical security. As terrible, painful and sad as all this may sound, it is only half the truth. My own social roots and the relative privilege derived from them kept me insulated and oblivious to what the so-called lower castes might have had to endure in the name of feudal exploitation. There have been many other massacres in the state in which Dalits and backward castes were killed. In the 1990s the state was a battleground for private upper caste militias and Maoists. This orgy of violence followed a long period of one-sided feudal exploitation by the mostly upper caste feudal system.
When these tensions create local storms and kill a person or two here and there, elections become proverbial. My father, as a university professor, performed election duties for almost four decades. As a person hailing from the Magadh region of the state, which was the epicenter of the land conflict and subsequent Maoist activity, we were worried about his safety until he returned home. The wait was exceptionally painful in the days before mobile phones.
Every isolated incident of political violence during elections, thankfully, gives rise to the PTSD syndrome that political violence did to average Biharis. Most of us, like ordinary humans, are not made of the same DNA that makes Anant Singh or his mirror images stand on the other side of the caste divide. That’s why we hate those vulgar meme hunters who find the fossils of our entrenched socio-political violence alien.
Eric Hobsbawm writes in the opening paragraph of his four-part cult classic The Age of Extremes, “No intelligent American student who has asked whether the phrase ‘World War II’ meant ‘World War I’ is unaware that even the knowledge of the basic facts of history can be taken for granted.” Vulgarizing the dark history of Bihar’s political violence and its perpetrators, without remembering the atrocities and crimes committed and lives taken by the zombies of the meme factory, inadvertently or not, displays not only an ignorance of my state’s history, but also a basic empathy for the people here, who are still healing the wounds and working hard to keep the genie bottled up.
