Covid-19: A warning bell for Bihar
Both data and reports suggest a worrying scenario. The state needs to do more
Bihar is India’s third-largest state in terms of population. It also has the largest share of rural population in any state in the country. It has a large migrant workforce that after a long struggle made its way back home during the lockdown. Its socioeconomic indicators remain weak. And its health infrastructure is limited, with only 0.11 beds and 0.39 doctors available per 1,000 people.
When the pandemic spreads to Bihar, it is time to worry. Over the past month, anecdotal evidence and a series of reports have suggested that those with symptoms are unable to get tested; those who have tested positive have struggled to find hospital beds; those who have developed severe symptoms are unable to access medical care, get ventilator support on time, and receive plasma donations; citizens have been lax in following social distancing protocols; health care personnel themselves are wary of providing care for the fear of being infected themselves; and that the contact tracing process is severely limited. A report in this newspaper on Monday showed that data corroborates these reports. While it has improved somewhat in recent days, Bihar has the lowest testing rate anywhere in the country — 7,917 tests per million people, when the national average is 18,086. Like other states, it is banking disproportionately on rapid antigen tests, rather than RT-PCR tests, which is a far more accurate barometer of judging infections. It has the third-worst doubling rate at 14.7 days, when the national average is 23.6 days.
While the government has made recent bureaucratic changes and accorded higher priority to Covid-19 management, the reports and data ring a warning bell. Bihar must follow the only successful model available to tackle the pandemic. Increase testing; rigorously trace the infected and their contacts; isolate those infected and treat them; ramp up health infrastructure; and enforce social distancing.
In 1994, Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto cut off all meaningful interaction with India. The freeze continued till Nawaz Sharif won the February 1997 election and immediately signalled a desire to resume diplomatic and political contact. Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda and external affairs minister IK Gujral decided to reciprocate positively, but, before doing so, Gujral held quiet and separate conversations with leaders of the ruling alliance but, significantly, also with the main Opposition parties.
Gujral went personally to some of them, taking his officials along so that if matters of detail arose during these discussions, they were on hand to answer them. I recall that I accompanied Gujral to a meeting with the then Congress president Sitaram Kesri who, like all political leaders, endorsed the view that India-pakistan dialogue should resume.
The purpose of my recounting the political spadework undertaken by Gujral is only to emphasise that despite the political contestation, there has been a tradition of trying to forge a consensus or, at a minimum, bridge differences on crucial foreign policy and security issues. This was accomplished through out-of-the-public-eye contacts and briefings, either directly between political leaders or through contacts of officials and professionals whom the Opposition leaders trusted. It would seem that this tradition continued, at least, for some part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government on matters relating to Pakistan and the India-united States (US) nuclear deal.
In keeping with the same spirit, Opposition political leaders sometimes reined in their colleagues from probing too deeply on sensitive information on national security and foreign policy matters. Again, an incident related to Gujral comes to mind. He was then no longer PM, but a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs. The then foreign secretary was before the committee on the Afghanistan situation. Committee members began to raise questions about the nature and extent of our assistance to the antitaliban forces. This was sensitive information and it would have been detrimental to India’s interests if it became public. Gujral intervened. He said that he knew what India was doing and it should not be openly discussed. The subject was immediately dropped.
It was good that PM Narendra Modi convened an all-party meeting after China’s dastardly action of June 15 in the Galwan Valley. Obviously, he did so, among other reasons, to show the nation’s resolve to resolutely respond to the Chinese strategic challenge, especially its designs on Indian territory. Notwithstanding the controversy that emerged from some of Modi’s remarks, the essential message that emerged from the meeting was one of the nation’s firmness to confront
actions. Such signals are important but cannot be a substitute for the development of a consensus on broad and enduring strategy. That can only come through quiet and confidential dialogue within all sections of the country’s political and strategic classes.
Naturally, this does not mean that the government of the day does not have the right and the responsibility to design and execute foreign and security policies. To think otherwise would be to question its popular mandate and its constitutional functions. But there are some issues of such surpassing significance to the national interest that every endeavour has to be made by the political class to forge understandings through quiet and purposeful conversations, which would lead to a toning down of the sharp, often vitriolic rhetoric — the staple fare of spokespersons of all political parties in the electronic media. The process naturally would have to be government-led but the main Opposition parties would bear an equal responsibility in making it a success.
After the trauma of Partition, there has not been as difficult a time for the country as now. The Covid-19 health crisis, by itself, is daunting for India’s society and polity. The migrant labour movement brought about great distress and its impact continues in some spheres. The economy, which was already in a slowdown, is now contracting. It will take time to be restored to the path of sustained growth. It is at this stage that India has been confronted by Chinese aggression along the Line of Actual Control, necessitating a complete re-look at India’s China policy since 1988.
The question that the political class has to ask itself whether the nation can afford normal ebb and flow of politics at this stage or if it is a time to reach out to each other. Is this a time for the political parties, whether in the ruling alliance or the Opposition camp, to score points on national security and foreign policy concerns, even if, unlike the past three and a half decades, there is one single party under a leader with a decisive electoral mandate? The answer cannot but be to seek a build a unified national policy approach to begin with on China. And, give politics and the ideological divides a rest.
The New Education Policy (NEP) presented by the government recently is being described as a progressive and forward-looking document. There is little to quibble with the broad recommendations in the document. The deeper question to pose is whose interests the reform is going to hurt, and whether this class has enough power to circumvent the reform measures.
Outside the educational hubs of Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, it is not professional educationists, but politicians and their supporters who own and run a large segment of private schools and colleges. Thus, NEP is likely to hurt political class the most. What will happen to various recommendations of NEP when it meets political obstacles in these carefully-built fiefdoms? Will NEP become like many other documents that had the potential to revolutionise things in theory, but failed to accomplish its intended outcomes in practice?
The rapid expansion in the number of colleges and universities in India in the past two decades, as scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur note, was not because of some huge middle-class pressure or demand, but was driven by the entrepreneurial zeal of politicians. On an average, six new colleges were opened every day including weekends between 2000 and 2015. To put this in a comparative perspective, with way greater resources, the United States (US) was opening only one new college a week at this time. And this has happened when India has one of the most regulated higher education systems. This means that many of these colleges were opened only after the exchange of kickbacks and bribes.
For example, politicians in Uttar Pradesh (UP) have invested heavily in the education sector over the past few years. More than 30% of elected politicians in the state either own a school or a college or both. I collected this data during the fieldwork for my PHD dissertation that examines the power base of political families. The analysis suggests that a politician with 20 years in active political life is three times more likely to own a college. Many of them mention owning colleges in their official biodatas. For example, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Lok Sabha member proudly claims on his official website that he runs more than 45 colleges in his district. But this is not unique to either the BJP or UP. What is happening in UP and other north Indian states now has already happened in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, where politicians in the late 1990s and early 2000s invested heavily in setting up engineering and medical colleges.
Why have politicians invested so much in the education sector? First, some politicians genuinely feel the obligation to help their constituency, especially when the State has failed to deliver. Second, opening schools and colleges increases their social and political prestige. Many of the college buildings I observed during my fieldwork are on illegally occupied prime land that either belongs to the government, the gram sabha or is the disputed property of private individuals. Opening a school or college mitigates some of the bad reputation that comes with illegal occupation of the land. Third, schools and colleges function as sources of patronage for politicians. This patronage can vary from the allocation of admissions to teaching jobs to janitorial positions.
Fourth, educational institutions in smaller towns continuously supply politicians two important instruments to maintain power — money and muscle. Colleges typically function under trusts and are, therefore, not required to follow the same transparency rules as companies. Politicians often give large amounts of money and provide resources to the trusts of their loyalists. Anyone who has read Shrilal Shukla’s classic Raag Darbari will attest to this. As researcher and scholar Philip Altbach notes that politicians use educational institutions as a base for their operations. In smaller towns and poorer parts of the country, a college is likely to be the most important institution in the area. All those who receive such favours then oblige politicians by helping their campaigns by mobilising resources and manpower.
Fifth, and more importantly, these private school and college premises not only serve as examination centres for students studying there, but also as centres for various competitive examinations conducted by the state. And this is where the deep nexus of politics-crime-bureaucracy operates. Many of us are familiar with the “nakal mafia” (a nexus that thrives on providing cheating materials for a fee). Two years ago, a mass cheating incident was recorded on the cellphones in Bihar in which parents and friends of students were photographed climbing school walls to pass on answer sheets. The images captured a cruder form of the organised business of cheating in examinations, where the whole centre is designed to facilitate this illegal operation. This well-oiled business operates not only with the collusion of the local police, as was attested to by the video from Bihar, but also with the collusion of political officials, whose patronage is essential in everything from allocating the examination centre to protecting the mafia by holding off the police.
And that is why one is sceptical of this much-touted policy document, not because one doubts the intent of those who have laboured hard to design it, but because New Delhi continues to be in denial of ground realities in the education sector in large parts of the country.