The Fascism of the Dispossessed

In the autobiography of electoral democracies, everyone is a citizen, because everyone has a vote. However, as fifty years of the critique of modernity has taught us, citizenship is a state of being, a specific identity, within which, are immanent the various regimes of power that make up the modern nation-state. The citizen internalizes the legal framework of the rule of property and lives it as ‘civic’ sense. S/he stands in a queue, drives in a lane, pays her taxes, has a ‘work-ethic’, throws garbage in bins, and participates as an isolated individual in the social life of the homogenized community of the nation. Peoples that fail to live up to these standards are, therefore, ‘incomplete’ citizens. They are in a process of perpetual ‘transition’ from a pre-modern state to the fullness of nationhood. 

However, even these ‘transitional’ nations reproduce these founding myths in their own political histories. In India, till the 1990s, the self-image of the secular state obliterated its ambiguous and chaotic beginnings. Nehruvian-socialism – a mythic bogeyman created by its post-liberalisation critics – took some time to emerge, and it had less to do with our first Prime Minister than the overall political projects unleashed in newly decolonized states across the world – overtly or covertly backed by the Soviet Union. The Nehruvian elite – if one could use that term – was a product of that global political atmosphere. It had a clear modernizing impulse derived from enlightenment discourse, but overdetermined by the experiments with egalitarianism and planning in the USSR.

As is well known, this ‘modernising’ process was not an uncontested outcome of the national movement and therefore was driven ‘top-down’ by the state. Even if it was well-intentioned, its class-character meant, it was always going to be half-hearted. Planning was aimed at creating the conditions for the expansion of the national-bourgeoisie and to supplement it with state-run industries, where the incubation period for future profits was going to be long. The more radical part of this project – land reforms – was never implemented and whatever gains were made by peasants were hard-fought victories through ‘left’ democratic movements.

What is relevant for us, is the kind of identities it produced. The ‘model’ citizen in the ‘Nehruvian’ project – taken further and crystallised by his daughter – was the secular/rationalist/nationalist individual who was opposed to ‘superstition’ (read religious rituals), believed in science, was committed to ‘humanism’ and was keen to develop a purely Indian high culture (classical music, aestheticized handicrafts, art-house cinema, modern art, etc.). This project was executed through the building of new state institutions – each with its own regime of power – through which, the modern ‘normal’ was created.

In hindsight, it is remarkable, how small this Nehruvian elite turned out to be, even though it held complete sway in the discursive imaginary of the nation-state. It was mostly populated by those who had access to the machinery of state-power – bureaucrats, urban politicians, lawyers, university teachers, doctors, engineers, and other allied groups who were directly involved in constructing the edifice of the Nehruvian state. They populated India’s new ‘civil’ society.

Those at the margin were themselves heterogenous in class and caste terms. Some were wealthy, such as the trading classes and castes, and rich farmers and rural landowners from dominant castes. Their access to the state was routed through the local and regional politician (this formed the backbone of the Jan Sangh and the later ‘Janata’ socialists). They retained traditional cultural practices and everyday rituals, which had to be hidden away in the confines of the home and the family, because the Nehruvian state looked down upon them. While ‘national’ culture got increasingly prototyped, the disapproval of the state caused the culture of the trader and the landlord to become increasingly fragmented and disaggregated. This was to later have significant repercussions in the cultural life of the nation as ‘Nehruvian-socialism’ was systematically dismantled in the 1990s.

There were also the poor and the dispossessed – poor peasants, agricultural labourers, urban factory workers, adivasis, etc. Their access to the state was again mediated by the local politician – often someone with a criminal record – who led agitations that yielded specific and contingent concessions from the state. They formed various fragmented agglomerations of what Partha Chatterjee has termed ‘political society’. The Nehruvian state set up an entire bureaucratic machinery – modeled in form on the skeleton left behind by the British – to ‘modernise’ the poor. This involved their enumeration through censuses, creating a corpus of knowledge about them, building roads, setting up schools, clinics, banks, and other disciplinary institutions, overseen by the BDO and other babus.

This project to build state-capitalism could have continued, but for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a unipolar world. By the mid-80s two things had happened – the Reagan-Thatcher era had got entrenched and Gorbachov had brought about glasnost and perestroika. Indira Gandhi – who had already started privatizing and creating the grounds for a consumer revolution – was assassinated and her son decided to take India to the 21^st century. Rajiv Gandhi was the first to start talking about targeting subsidies and reducing the fiscal deficit and the Rao-Manmohan reforms were a continuation of what he had actively set in motion.

The ‘Nehruvian’ elite fully backed this process, as it saw the world change around it. The dominance of leftists in the academic world waned as the collapse of the socialist world, in the early 90s, undermined the global prestige of Marxism as a theoretical system. The media – especially the business media – became vocal votaries of market reforms and public culture valorized the act of making money.

The first gainers of this process were the trading classes – people who were already imbricated in the marketplace. Liberalisation was, essentially, the privatization of natural resources, finance and economic rights. Access to government and politics enhanced access to these resources and rights. No wonder, then, that liberalization caused a massive growth in corruption and black money. It showed up in the rise in consumption of fine articles and luxuries and in a real estate boom.

Traders, land-owners, corrupt politicians and babus, suddenly became rich and the cultural space turned upside-down. Till the mid-80s, the culture of the trading classes and landowners was pushed out of public spaces and hidden inside homes. Since, it did not get any institutional space, it could not get homogenized or ‘normalised’. From the mid-80s, as money-making became socially acceptable and prestigious, these hitherto marginalized affluent groups began to assert their culture in the public space. The problem, however, was that they did not have any prototype for propagating it.

The culture of the rich (wrongly called the nouveau-riche since they were always wealthy) developed a peculiar speculary relationship with popular art – especially Bollywood cinema and the newly emerging world of Hindi soap operas. There were a few broad common contours of the culture of the trading classes – (a) everyday religious rituals (involving worship, fasting, attire, marking the body, etc.), (b) hierarchically arranged joint family, (c) inequality and rigidity in gender roles (d) belief in social (caste and class) hierarchy and (e) respect for authority.

All of these, were in direct contradistinction to the structural elements of the secular-rationalist national culture of the Nehruvian elite, which had developed into a homogenized ideology, which made it identifiably ‘modern’. In contrast, the culture of the trading classes could not be institutionalized or normalized, and therefore it could only position itself as ‘tradition’.

It should come as no surprise that the one of the earliest homogenized form of this culture is the Ram mandir movement, that took its contemporary form in the late 1980s. It found its iconography in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan, so much so that the serials stars became part of the movement, participated in rallies and were later elected to Parliament. The Ram movement, was much an assertion of ‘tradition’ as its invention. It made large sections of those marginalized by the discursive practices of the Nehruvian state, find a manufactured common cause with each other. It became a proxy for the grievances and the newfound confidence of these groups.

Even the more secular aspects of everyday culture – clothing, speech, body-language – built upon, and, in turn, influenced, the prototypes provided by Bollywood in the 1990s. Significant amongst these are films like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (made tax-free by the Rao government as it propagated good ‘family’ values), Maine Pyar Kiya (the foreign returned hero falls in love with the demure girl) and later the K-serials, such as Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki and Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, both of which valorized the businessman’s joint family setup. The angry young man, who fought the rich bania, the criminal smuggler and the corrupt official, gave way to the suave young man who was going to inherit the family business.

The modern cultural institutions of the rich of the 1990s and the 2000s, were based on re-invented traditions – karwa chauth, navratra, eggless Tuesdays. These went hand-in-hand, with young wives from joint families appearing in malls, in the incongruous combination of mehendi and minidress. Designer clothes, expensive cars, Italian taps in designer bathrooms, vegetarian sushi are all elements of this new modernity. It is modern because it is homogenous and normalized and propagated through institutions and state apparatuses. It is this modern ideology that we know as Hindutva today. It is represented as much by the saffron clad political sadhu who wants to build the Ram mandir as the vrat-keeping, miniskirt clad young bride in a shopping mall.

Yet, this is a modernity that poses itself as tradition. And, not just any tradition, but a tradition that has been suppressed and subjugated. This modernity has its own narrative of victimhood, that stretches right back to the coming of the Muslim ‘invaders’. The narrative acquires its own history, but it has one problem – it lacks the resources of institutional scholarship that have created the narrative of the nation state across the world. No wonder, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, we have witnessed the war over history writing in India.

This war over History would, most probably, have been lost by the new moneyed elite, had it not been for the emergence of smart phones and social media. WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter have done more in just a few years to manufacture history than what history textbooks could do over the past few decades. It has entirely disrupted the process of political mobilization, rendering old forms of political practice entirely redundant.

However, till now, we have only looked at the affluent groups who were culturally marginalized by the Nehruvian state, and who re-invented and re-packaged the ‘tradition’ of Hindutva to assert their cultural hegemony, as the post-liberalisation world gave them increased social and political authority. Vajpayee and later, Modi were clearly their ideal choices for leading the nation. But, it would be wrong to believe that Modi’s rise and dominance is simply a product of the hegemony of the modern ideology of Hindutva.

To understand this, we need to talk about the invisibles – people who are not captured in any official statistic, nor in any analysis. These are the victims of liberalization – the hundreds of millions of people who have been pauperized by the expansion of the market in the past 25 years. These are the destitute and the indebted, people who have not had any regular employment for years on end. These are the people who turn up for MNREGA jobs or are willing to do a full day’s work for 20 rupees. These are the people who live off the entrails collected from the village butcher. These are the people who turn up in the stories done by well-meaning reporters about the lives of drought affected farmers, expect that this is how the farmers live, all through the year, drought or no drought.

These people – mostly coming from poorer Dalits and the most backward castes – are outside the pale of the official economy. Demonetisation did not affect them, because they have never seen a 500 or 1000 rupee note. They are not part of those who the middle-class considers to be poor – drivers, maids, hawkers, labourers, plumbers. They are people who don’t have land or work and only become visible when they appear on city streets as beggars and vagrants.

This is the second wave of people, who are against both the old Nehruvian elite and the new moneyed elite. For them, Narendra Modi is a saviour of the poor – a gareebon ka maseeha. He is not only pro-rich, but by playing the gamble of demonetization, he has positioned himself as being anti-rich. The Modi BJP’s victory in state after state, post-demonetisation has less to do with Hindutva and much more to do with this anti-rich image. That is the reason why journalists, pollsters and analysts underestimated the scale of Modi’s victory in UP. They encountered a huge number of ‘silent’ voters, who have been traditionally slotted as BSP voters – they are the poorest of the poor, who are wary of speaking their mind lest they be persecuted later. For the first time in its history, exit polls underestimated the BJP’s performance, because the poor, underprivileged ‘silent’ voter backed Narendra Modi.

It is not clear that Modi himself understands this fully. The selection of Adityanath as chief minister, suggests the BJP has erroneously attributed the UP victory to Hindutva and polarization. Yet, Narendra Modi instinctively knows that his best bet is to play the anti-rich card. It is going to increasingly inform his governmental and political strategies. In the absence of any concrete economic programme, an anti-rich rightwing populism is likely to find more concrete articulation. It will seek an enemy and the modern ideology of Hindutva already provides an enemy character – the Muslim, the secular and the liberal. But, the new moneyed elite will not escape the wrath of this lower-class populism, because its defining characteristic will be its anti-rich platform. We will, therefore, see the dismantling of the entrenched structure of the BJP as a party, because it is populated by the new elite. We should not be surprised if IT officials go after the new rich, even if they owe allegiance to the sangh parivar (we have already seen that happen in Delhi, where the state RSS chief’s home and offices have been raided).

In short, this is the second wave, of Hindutva. It is an anti-rich populist Hindutva, which will disenfranchise its original practitioners. The only form it can take is of fascism, of the kind the world saw on the streets of Germany and Italy, some eighty years ago. 

In Defence of Black Money

The magic is in Rajesh’s mixing – the tossing of the puffed rice, the timing of each wet and dry ingredient and the exact amount of mustard oil that he puts in the jhal muri. You just need to be a little patient as he moves across his push-cart. Rajesh had polio as a child.

Every day, two beat cops come and stand with the small crowd of his dedicated clientele. There’s an unconscious acceptance amongst everyone, that the cops will get priority. Almost everyone who stands there is rich or powerful enough to make the cops wait, but they all know it will get Rajesh into trouble.

I had once asked him how much hafta the cops take from him, for allowing him to stand with his cart at the street corner. He smiled and said that they give him a discount.

“Langda hoon saheb,” he explained. It’s a sympathy rebate that the other thelawalas and hawkers, on the road outside our office, do not get. “Bakiyon ka fix rate hai – koi 500 deta hai, koi do hazaar. Jitni zyaada sale hai, utna zyaada dena padta hai.”

“Aap log complain kyon nahin karte?” I had asked, somewhat indignantly.

Rajesh smiled and said “policewaale, MCD waale, yeh log hafta nahin lenge to phir humko yahaan kaun khada hone dega?”

Things suddenly fell into place. I remembered how, about a year ago, an honest officer had taken over the local thana. The hawkers on the street were raided, their thelas confiscated. They disappeared for almost a month, till the SHO was transferred.

Rajesh is wary of honest officers, who implement the law zealously. He was once evicted from his home by an honest officer. It was in a large cluster of jhuggis that had sprung up on municipality land. Hawkers, daily wagers, maids, rickshaw pullers and an entire range of self-employed entrepreneurs who make up the bulk of India’s service sector, lived in the encroachment.

Like his neighbours, Rajesh paid high rates for an illegal power line to his jhuggi. Like others he paid extortionist prices for water from the private tanker that came every two days. Every month, the local dada – Babubhai – came and collected his share of the money that had to be paid to the cops and the municipality officers.

Rajesh was Babubhai’s favourite. He sometimes came for a packet of bhujiya and for a head massage. Rajesh had strong fingers in strong hands, which had once been broken by a local cop. Babubhai had taken a group of locals and surrounded the thana. The cop had to be transferred.

Babubhai was elected to the local ward, but even he could not stop Inspector Karamvir Singh from getting the jhuggi demolished. Inspector Singh was incorruptible and didn’t fear politicians. He had joined the force to implement the law, and evicting the encroachers was part of that. Later, the Inspector had personally come and given Rajesh 500 rupees, but told him that he must go and live in an authorized colony.

Predictably, Inspector Karamvir was quickly posted to somewhere in the hinterland of Haryana. The encroachers returned, but Babubhai charged an extra fee to make up for lost revenues. Here too, Rajesh got a sympathy discount. His polio made life cheaper for him.

People like Rajesh help generate black-money every day. Bribing allows them to live in the interstices of urban India. They know that the law protects the right to property more than any other right. They survive by breaking these property rights – standing with a thela at the crossing, setting up house on municipality land, stealing electricity from the closest pole.

The bribes go up an interconnected chain, right to the top – to top cops, politicians, ministers, babus and judges. They flow and coalesce as bundles of black money - sometimes as hoards, sometimes as real estate and at other times as gold or even P-notes. It creates a network of power that runs parallel to the network of law and liberty. It weaves together a political society right next to the civil society of middle-class propertied citizens.

Rajesh is the biggest victim of black-money and corruption. But, without it Rajesh would never be able to survive, because, people like Rajesh have no place in the nation of citizens. They will forever remain fragments invisible to the law. 

What Was He Thinking?!!!

When you think of the BJP, you think of Brahmins and Baniyas. Add to that, some Adivasi groups who have been Sanskritised by Sangh missionaries and you broadly have the social base of the party. In other words the BJP has largely been a coalition of upper castes and traders, with some adivasis and communally polarised groups thrown in.

In 2014, Narendra Modi rode on this core base, which makes up about 20% of India’s voters, and added to it all the discontents of the UPA’s disastrous second avatar – the urban poor crushed under runaway inflation, the unemployed youth, the farmer facing higher input costs, the agricultural labourer denied the promise of MNREGA and the businessman affected by an overall slowdown in the economy.

But, it is easier to promise acche din when you are fighting an unpopular incumbent, than when you have to deliver on those promises as PM. Two and a half years into his rule, Modi has realised that the economy is in a worse shape than what the Manmohan-Chidambaram duo left it in: farmers are in deep distress, there are no new jobs and businesses have no reason to invest. Narendra Modi has realised that he needs a radical new plan if he is to expand the BJP’s core base beyond the stable 20%.

Demonetisation is that radical plan, the mega gamble. If it fails, Modi loses nothing, because he would have lost the next elections any way. If it works, he reinvents Indian politics by creating a new coalition of the poor and big business that the Congress depended on for the first 30 years after independence.

Whether Modi anticipated the immediate impact of demonetisation or not, he has committed himself to a series of other actions to make political capital out of it. There is little doubt that this one act has helped him reinvent his image as a pro-poor PM, something last done by Indira Gandhi in the early 70s. There is an element of schadenfreude in the way the poor have reacted to demonetisation. Even when they curse the cash-crunch and the loss of wages, they praise the PM’s intentions. They believe that even if they are suffering, the corrupt rich are suffering more.

Of course, Modi knows that this emotion will not last forever. Even the greatest supporter of demonetisation knows that, in the short run, it will hit the poor the most. Even after the economy is remonetised, the action against black money will also hit the poor.

Here are a few facts to back that:

        

• About half of the Indian economy is in the cash-dominated informal sector and it employs 80% of the workforce.
• 45% of India’s GDP comes from small and medium enterprises who employ 46 crore people. They will take a huge hit if they have to pay regular taxes.
• There are 10 crore small traders and retailers and only 1% of them have credit or debit card machines. Reducing cash transactions will push consumers to organised players.
• All of village India operates on cash, because 93% of villages do not have an actual bank branch.
• The black-money driven real estate sector, which is one of India’s biggest employers of daily wage-workers, will slow down.
• Another black-money driven sector, gems and jewellery, which employs about 1.5-2 crore daily wage workers, will also be hit.
• The informal-dominated textiles and garments industry, which employs 3 crore people has already stopped paying 50 lakh daily wage workers.
• Rabi crop sowing, which grew by 16% in the week leading to demonetisation, dropped marginally in the following week and grew by less than 5% two weeks later. Coarse cereals grown by poor farmers has dropped by 19%. And this is in a year when reservoirs have 25% more water than last year.

So, why did Narendra Modi demonetise when even a little analysis must have told him it will hurt the poor? The answer will, most probably, be known on the 1^st of February when next year’s Union Budget is announced.

Modi’s aim is clearly to create a large fiscal space for himself ahead of the busy election years of 2017 and 2018. This can be achieved through the following moves:

• Get the RBI to hand over the entire ‘profits’ from 1000 and 500 rupee notes that are not returned or exchanged, to the government. Current estimates suggest it could be anywhere between 2 to 3 lakh crore rupees. The special dividend payout might be legally suspect, but no one is betting on Urjit Patel standing in the way.
• Levy punitive taxes on unaccounted for cash deposits – don’t forget it is the I.T. department which will decide whether your cash is black – and collect an additional one lakh crore rupees in the next assessment year.
• High level of bank deposits will push up the demand for government bonds and bring down yields. It will also reduce the government’s interest payments, which is its single biggest expense. A one per cent drop in interest rates could shave off 40-50,000 crore rupees.
• The budget will project higher level of direct and indirect tax receipts by claiming that the action against black money will force many more people to pay taxes. If the government estimates net tax receipts to go up by 15% in nominal terms that will work out to an additional 1.5 lakh crore rupees.
•  Finally, Modi might even say that the economy needs a fiscal stimulus and therefore the Budget will not stick to the 3% fiscal deficit target for 2017-18.

In effect, the Modi government could give itself an additional fiscal space of 5-6 lakh crore rupees, over and above the five lakh crore rupee fiscal deficit it would have otherwise worked with in this budget. In terms of actual expenditure, the government could end up with a chance to spend 24-25 lakh crore rupees, instead of the 19 lakh crore rupees it is budgeted to spend this year.  There is a lot that can be done with so much extra money.

• Take food for all. The UPA had estimated in 2013 that it will cost one lakh crore rupees extra to cover everyone under a liberal PDS scheme. In current prices that would be about 1.2 lakh crore rupees.  
• Another two lakh crores could be transferred directly through DBT to 10 crore poor households. That’s a neat 20,000 rupees additional income per year for each family.
• The remaining 2-3 lakh crore rupees can be spread across various things like additional stimulus to infrastructure, tax holidays and incentives to high-employment sectors like textiles, real estate.
• He could also spend more on defence, especially increasing the size of the army. This would provide a stable and respectable source of income for the rural poor.

In other words, Modi can combine populism with Keynesian economics. This will create additional jobs, boost lower-end consumption of staples, boost demand for two-wheelers, feature phones, telecom services, cement, capital goods, steel, power and fuel. And then, instead of a slowing down, the economy would pick up pace and ultimately, even private investment cycle could revive. By 2019, India Inc could also start seeing their earnings grow.

In the process, Narendra Modi would have changed the political character of the BJP. His core voters would have shifted from the upper caste/trader combine to a much wider lower-class/lower-caste support base.

Of course, all this is easier said than done. The social composition of the BJP’s cadre is upper-caste. There is a deep distrust towards Dalits and backwards within the party. Its moneybags are mostly from the trading classes and Modi himself has got a lot of money and backing from India Inc. Anything that works against these groups is going to disrupt the entire political-mobilization and fund-raising structure of the BJP.

Can the Modi-Shah combine pull it off? They have done it in Gujarat in the past, by winning elections even when sections of the RSS and VHP have worked against them. They did in Uttar Pradesh in 2014, when the entrenched backbone of the party organisation in the state refused to work under Amit Shah.

Feature phones, WhatsApp, Twitter are the key weapons in the Modi-Shah armoury. In their hands, Digital India is a political weapon – a means to bypassing the physical networks of political organisation.

Modi is trying to turn India into a cyber-nation, where the citizen’s identity is driven by a WhatsApp nationalism. Much of political rhetoric today is constructed through videos, images, jokes, trends and viral memes, all of which have successfully created a new language of extreme nationalism – a binary of deshbhakti and deshdroh.

Modi had already won this semiotic battle. He is now trying to create the economic conditions to turn it into an unbeatable political strategy.  

The Jan Don’t Have Any Dhan

“Whatever you might say, this move has started flushing out black money and bringing it into the banking system,” I said, turning my morning daily’s banner headline towards the wife, who was sitting across the dining table.

“More than 60,000 crore rupees has been deposited into Jan Dhan accounts across India. Surely this is not money belonging to the great unwashed in India’s villages, who you care so much about?” I said with a smirk.

“How many Jan dhan accounts do you think there are?” the wife asked smiling condescendingly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Must be a few million, but I don’t see how that matters. Surely the poor don’t have 60,000 crore rupees!”

“The number is approximately 26 crore,” the wife said. “60,000 crore rupees in 26 crore accounts. How much does that work out to, Mr Einstein?”

“I can’t calculate that fast, but it is clearly a big number”, I said defensively as I buttered my toast.

“It is a princely sum of 2,300 rupees per account.” The wife smiled derisively. “2,300 rupees of black money from each account holder.”

“Oh! Come on!” I said. “That is the average. Surely many of the accounts would have got many times that amount.”

“You are absolutely right,” the wife said. “They must have. That’s because even in September this year, 25% of all Jan Dhan accounts were completely inactive and another 30-35% had less than 10 rupees in them. In many cases, banks themselves have been depositing small amounts of cash into these defunct accounts to meet their targets.”

“I have to check all this data,” I said. “How do I know you are not making them up to prove me wrong?”

“If only you even read the morning papers properly, you would have known all this,” the wife snapped. She hates it when she is accused of fudging data. “If you read a little bit, you would have known that in many cases, people are being forced to deposit 50 rupees in their accounts to just operate them, even though the government had promised to make these zero balance.”

“So what? At least it’s an attempt to bring banking to everyone,” I said. “This is what financial inclusion is all about.”

“No,” the wife said vehemently. “It is a massive wastage. On an average a Jan Dhan account gets no more than 300-400 rupees a year in deposits, and a bank earns just 9-12 rupees from that. It costs many times that amount to just maintain these accounts. Public sector banks are forced to operate these loss-making accounts and then told they are inefficient because they don’t make enough profits.”

“You MNC bankers have no problem with that, because you continue to service the rich and wealthy,” the wife said glaring at me, as if I represented all that was evil about the world of finance.

“Poor people are being forced to open accounts, which are serviced by roving banking correspondents,” she continued. “The banking correspondents park themselves in small towns and poor villagers have to waste a day and spend money on bus tickets to go and get their dues from them.”

“Right now, thanks to demonetization, the banking correspondents and local branch officials have become all-powerful petty-potentates.” The wife had started using big words again and I had started losing track of her argument.

“Bank officials of all sorts have full access to the accounts held by the rural poor, along with all their KYC documents. It is very easy for them to fudge deposits and turn black money held by grain traders, money-lenders and big farmers into white, by putting them into Jan dhan accounts.”

“That’s just a conspiracy theory,” I said weakly.

The wife ignored by intervention. “The deposits will be small enough to be below the radar and will be spread across thousands of accounts. After a while, the money will be withdrawn in crisp new notes and handed back to the original black money holders for a sizeable cut.”

She drained her coffee cup and put it down with a flourish. Clearly, we were nearing the end of the speech.

“So, this is what your great financial inclusion is about. Millions of poor people will unwittingly turn other people’s black money to white, without ever knowing what went on in their accounts.”

“And at the end of it all, the jan will continue to be without any dhan.”

Sharmaji Wants to Donate

Sharma: Namaste Panditji, Kaise hain? Aapka to phone hee nahin lag raha hai do din se. (Greetings Panditji, How are you? You haven’t been taking calls in the past two days.)

Panditji: Ha ha ha! Kya bataun Sharmaji. Abhi sab ko bhagwaan yaad aa rahe hain. Bataiye aap ki kya seva kar sakte hain? (Ha, ha ha! What should I say, Sharmaji. Suddenly every body is remembering God. Tell me what can I do for you?”

Sharma: Wahee seva jo aap har saal karte hain, ha ha ha ha! Kuchh daan dena hai, samajh gaye na? (The same thing that you do every year. Ha ha ha! I want to donate some money. You have understood, right?)

Panditji: Bahut le nahin paoonga, Sharmaji. Naye note abhi tak hamaare paas aye nahin hain. Waapas karne mein bhi samay lagega. Aapko ussey koi kasht to nahin hogee? (I won’t be able to take too much, Sharmaji. We haven’t got new notes yet, so it will take time to return the money. I hope you won’t have any problem with that?)

Sharma: Pareshani kya? Aap kabhi bhi de dijiyega. Lekin daan mujhe 30 December tak dena hee hoga. (What problem? You return it whenever you want. But, I have to donate by the 30^th of December.)

Panditji: Nahin, nahin Sharmaji. Humein bhi to hundi ka paisa 30 taarikh tak jama karna padega. 15 december ke baad purane note hum nahin le payenge. (No, no Sharmaji. We also have to deposit the Hundi money by the 30^th of December. We will not be able to accept any old notes after 15^th December.)

Sharma: Samajh gaya, panditji. Main to 30 november se pahle pahle saara kuchh daan paatra mein daal doonga. (I have understood, Panditji. I will donate the money before 30^th November.)

Panditji: Bahut achcha. Lekin Sharmaji, isbaar 10% se nahin chalega. Hamaara bhi kaam bahut barh gaya hai. Is baar hum 25% lenge. C-block mein Shani mandir waale to 30% le rahe hain. Aap swayam pata kar lijiye. (That is great. But, Sharmaji, this time the 10% rate won’t work. Our workload has increased. This time we will charge 25%. The Shani temple in C-block is charging 305. You can check it out yourself.)

Sharma: Arey panditji, aap kaisee baat kar rahe hain? Aap ki kathan hamaare liye aadesh jaise hai. (What are you saying, Panditji? Your wish is our command.)

Panditji: Bahut achha. To 25% tay rahe. Aap sheeghra hee daan le aayega. Lekin naye note hum agle saal hee de payenge. Ram Ram. (Okay. Then it’s agreed that it will be 25%. You should get the donations as fast as you can, but, we will only be able to give you new notes next year. Bye-Bye.)

Sharma: Ram Ram. (Bye-bye).

The Wife Speaks on Black Money

“Why are you such an idiot, so utterly simple-minded?”

Strong words even by the wife’s standards. Clearly she was frustrated that the PM had proved everyone wrong and taken such a bold step.

“I don’t understand why supporting a surgical strike against black money is idiotic or simple-minded,” I replied.

The wife looked at me with her habitual mix of desperation and disdain. “Because, it is not a surgical strike against black money. It is a silly branding exercise that shows that this government doesn’t give a fig about what happens to people.”

“Oh! Really? Can you please explain your brilliant theories, which clearly run counter to what all well-known economists are saying?” I asked, trying to bring as much sarcasm as I could to my voice.

“Well-known stooges you mean,” she snarled. “Let’s start with a simple fact, black money emerges out of white money. It comes from the banking system, which is the original source of all cash.”

“Every business needs to generate cash to pay bribes for getting tenders, winning contracts, getting clearances, paying hafta to local policemen and political goons, chanda to religious institutions.”

“How do they do it?”, the wife asked, looking at me. Clearly this was just a rhetorical question, because she continued without stopping.

“They over-report costs and under-report revenues. If something cost 80 rupees, they say it cost 100 rupees and if something was sold for 120 rupees, they say they got 110 rupees. So, a 40 rupee profit is reported as 10 rupees. Even the most honest businessman needs to do this, because the bribes they have to pay cannot be offset as expenses.”

The wife paused to take a dose of nourishment from her cup of coffee. “But, bribes are not the only reason businesses have to generate cash. Almost every business, however big, has to deal with the informal cash economy. Carpenters, plumbers, contractors, construction workers, casual labourers, truckers, raw material suppliers take cash. They are in the informal sector and the fact that they do not pay taxes is key to keeping their businesses competitive.”

“So, if you have been able to follow what I have said till now – and I know it is difficult for someone who has not had any real higher education,” the wife said, taking a dig at my MBA from Cornell, “then you will understand that cash has to be generated not only to fund corruption, but also to deal with the informal economy, which employs many more people than the formal organized sector.”

I was about to say something, but didn’t get a chance. “Now, let’s come to migrant labourers who work at construction sites, spend their nights there under makeshift shelters and then go back to their villages in time for sowing or harvesting season. Do they have bank accounts? Do they have credit cards? Do they use e-wallets?” Rhetorical question, don’t answer, I told myself.

“Such people can only be paid in cash. The payments are likely to be registered as wages, but again over-reported, so that the construction company or builder can generate cash. And that brings us to real estate, by necessity, the biggest generator of cash.” The words were becoming bigger, which means the wife was getting more passionate as she spoke.

“A real estate project starts with getting a plot of land, but even before you buy the plot, you have to pay a bribe to get information on where to buy it. Will there be a road coming near it soon? Is a metro station likely to come up there? Once you have paid cash for the information, you start paying cash to get clearances. You then pay cash to buy bricks and sand – both in the informal sector. You pay partly in cash to get cement and steel transported. You pay cash for municipal clearances and connection to utilities. And, you pay cash to the labourers who erect the buildings. So, even before you have sold a single house, you have to generate cash.”

Caffeine pause and then the onslaught continued.

“No wonder, real estate players take cash when they sell homes. No wonder that in the process of generating cash and paying bribes they become politically connected, and then those political connections help them get land, clearances and generate even more cash.”

The wife suddenly turned to me and asked, “are you telling me that from tomorrow, none of this will be required anymore? Are you telling me that from tomorrow every babu, every policewalla will suddenly become honest?”

I didn’t think she wanted an answer, but she was glaring at me, so I blurted out, “I-I don’t know.”

“Of course they won’t, you idiot,” she shouted. “Things will pause for a few days, maybe weeks, and then the button will be reset. Things will go right back to where they were.”

 “Now, let’s come to the stock of black money. Only people who need to transact in cash on a regular basis, keep large amounts of currency notes in stock. So, all small businesses, real estate agents, builders, traders, stockists, small shop owners, will always have a significant amount of cash, much of which would be unaccounted for.”

“Those who have black money as wealth, turn it into white very quickly,” the wife continued. “And, there are many methods of doing it. The easiest is to buy gold or jewellery and store it in your locker. Another method is to go to your friendly neighbourhood pandit, deposit all the cash into the temple hundi and then get it back after some time in white. There are also thousands of small companies, which give backdated certificates that you made equity investments in the past, the valuation increased and now you have sold your stake for a profit. For a small cost, the black money turns into white.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked smirking. There’s no harm in introducing a bit of levity. The wife glared at me, and continued her speech.

“People who have big black money, also convert it into foreign exchange and take it out of the country through hawala. There is also another method, where companies which have ‘cash in hand’ in their books but no real cash, take black money.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. Surely, the wife didn’t think she was not going to teach me about balance sheets.

“It’s simple. As I told you earlier, every business has to generate cash to pay bribes or deal with the informal sector. But, sometimes it is difficult for them to account for the cash payments and it turns up as ‘cash in hand’ on the books, even when there is actually no cash in their hands. This was not taught at Cornell, because real business isn’t taught there” Unkindest cut, I say.

 “So, it is easy for such businesses to deposit real cash into the banks, because they can account for it in their books. They take black money, deposit it into banks and turn it into white. Sometime later, a fake loan contract is worked out between the black money holder and the company. Over time, the loan is repaid, as white money, to the original holder of black money.”

“Then there are penny stocks, which are artificially boosted and over just a few days, their price goes up multiple times. This is then sold and shown as capital gains. A small short-term capital gains tax is paid on it and black is turned into white.”

“But, surely, all this can be caught if the trail is scrutinized closely?” I asked.

 “Of course, they can,” the wife said. “In fact, that is the only way to stop tax chori, by painstakingly scrutinizing tax returns and money trails. It can’t be done by suddenly banning currency notes and throwing things into chaos.”

“But, for that, you need to employ more people in the Income tax department. But, that is not going to happen, because, when it comes to generating employment, your beloved PM is a complete failure.”  

Mr Powerful Returns, Says NDA has the Edge in Bihar

“Stop moping about the house and get dressed,” the wife told me, with a distinct edge in her voice. “The markets aren’t going to bounce back just to cure your depression. Just get on with it now.”

I looked at her with hurt in my eyes, but one glance at her face made me realise that I had played this depression card for too long. The wife was correct. I had lost a pile in the latest vicious correction, and what was worse, I had recommended the same dud shares to my boss.

Anyway, it was time to drown my sorrows in someone else’s whisky. So, I donned by best evening suit and drove off, with spouse in tow, to Rajesh Damani’s party.

As soon as I entered, I spied old Mr Powerful, sitting in a corner, accompanied by a glass of the choicest scotch. It had been more than a year since I had last seen him. Rumour had it that the old codger had been down with cancer. The doctors gave him six months. He took just four. The Emperor of Maladies beat a hasty retreat but not without leaving Mr Powerful bed-ridden for two quarters.

“Ah! Mr Banker,” he called out to me in a commanding voice, “how have the markets been treating you, young man?”

“I expected the correction,” I lied. “India has been expensive for some time now, so this was bound to come.”

“Why?” he asked with his typical derisive nasal twang. “Acche Din didn’t come for the markets and MBAwallahs?”

“It has only been 15 months,” I said. “The PM needs more time.”

“Hmph! If he loses Bihar, he will have no more time. It will be game over,” said Mr Powerful.

“Well, it is an unfair and unholy alliance that will beat him,” I said, finally finding my voice. “It is a fight between those who want Bihar to remain stuck in mandal politics and those who want to take it forward.”

“Really?” asked Mr Powerful. It was obviously not a question, but a polite way to say that he considered me a fool. “In any case, there is no reason for you bhakts to worry. The NDA has a clear edge in Bihar, and not because of its promise of achhe din, but precisely because it has managed to work out a great caste alliance.”

“Really?” I too made an attempt to sound sarcastic. “How is that going to happen?”

“You see, the backward castes are not one monolithic group. They are made up of several caste groups. The top three are the Yadavs, followed by Koeris and then Kurmis. Together they make up about 25 per cent of the population. That means, one in every four voters is an upper OBC.”

“I can do the maths, sir,” I said sarcastically.

Mr Powerful brushed aside my interruption and continued. “Yadavs or Ahirs are mostly small and middle farmers, but they have also traditionally been cattle-herders and milk-sellers. Yadavs are a martial caste, quick to become violent, which is why they supplied the foot-soldiers for the private armies of Zamindars in the days of the Raj.”

He stopped a passing bearer, and picked up another glass of whisky, took a glug and went on with his lecture: “It will interest you to know that the Yadavs have often been at war with the lower OBCs and Dalits, who are the landless labourers who work the fields and supply the bodies for hard labour in the villages. In fact, the Yadavs formed one of the earliest caste armies in Bihar called the Lorik Sena. And they specialised in killing, beating and intimidating these low-caste tenant-farmers and farm labourers.”

“I knew that,” I lied. Mr Powerful glared at me.

“If you talk about Kurmis and Koeris, they too are mostly small and middle peasants. Kurmis have traditionally been grain-farmers, while Koeris have diversified into vegetables, fruits, tobacco and what MBAwallahs use regulary – opium.” He chuckled in a self-satisfied manner at the last dig at me. I have no idea why the guy hates us MBAs so much.

“Even though Kurmis are smaller in number they are more influential locally, as they are mostly concentrated in the Magadh region in central Bihar. Koeris, on the other hand, are evenly distributed across Bihar. In most areas they have just 2000 to 4000 votes. There are only about 25 odd assembly seats where Koeris make up more than 8,000-10,000 votes.”

“There is one other distinctive feature of Koeris. They are considered the cleanest of the lower castes. Old anthropologists have recorded cases from some regions of Bihar, where Brahmins have accepted food cooked by Koeris. That is why, Koeris are amongst the most sanskritised of OBCs in Bihar, and the most likely to find common ground with upper castes and Hindutva forces.”

“Sir, you seem to treat the two as interchangeable categories,” I interrupted. “Upper castes are not necessarily backers of Hindutva, and those who support Modi for his development agenda don’t necessarily believe we need a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya."

“Don’t they?” again the same sarcastic question. “In any case,” said Mr Powerful, “it does not matter. Upper castes in Bihar support the BJP because they want to gain back their lost glory. They have been out of power for 25 years – although Nitish did bring them in through the backdoor in the past few years. Hindutva is the glue for the upper castes that gives an ideological sheen to their fear of lower caste hegemony.”

“So, are you saying that development does not matter?” I asked.

“No. I am not saying that. Development matters to everyone. Nitish Kumar has been trying to market himself as the poster-boy of development for Bihar. But Nitish’s development rhetoric is sitting on top of the politics of caste. The Modi-Shah development brand rides on Hindutva.”

Mr Powerful took another long, deep sip from his whisky glass, caught his breath and continued with his monologue. “The real battle-ground is neither Hindutva nor development. It is the category of most backward caste and the mahadalit.”

“As I was saying, before you interrupted me, the Yadavs, Kurmis and Koeris, haven’t ever been great friends with the lower backward castes and Dalits. If the Yadavs had their Lorik Sena to subjugate the rural poor, the Kurmis had Bhoomi Sena and the Koeris their Azad Sena. Throughout the Naxalite period, these senas have fought armed squads of the Maoists and attacked lower OBC and dalit hamlets.”

“But, despite their differences on the ground, the backward castes united under Lalu in the early 90s, mostly as a reaction to the anti-Mandal agitation by upper castes. You must have been part of that, Mr Banker?” he asked me.

“No, sir. I wasn’t in India at that time. I was studying in the US.” I said gruffly. I was hoping my tone conveyed my irritation with his humiliating manner.

“Are you getting offended by an old cancer survivors jokes, my boy?” he asked, playing the sympathy card.

“No, no, sir! Of course not. Please carry on.”

“Where was I? Ah yes, I was talking about Lalu. The guy is a genius at carving together caste alliances, a true marketing and sales guru.” (Another dig. Sigh!)

“Lalu managed to whip up an anti-upper caste frenzy. He made dignity the key battle cry, and created an emotive atmosphere that helped unite the different lower and backward caste groups.”

“BhuraBaal Saaf karo,” I said. “I remember that.”

“Exactly! I am very impressed,” said Mr Powerful, genuinely smiling at me for the first time. “Bhumihar, Rajput, Baman Lala – BhuRaBaL. Genius slogan for its times, much like Acche Din aane waale hai was last year.”

“Lalu could have been unbeatable, if he had sincerely done land-reforms in Bihar. You know, the state’s image is one of unbridled landlordism, but did you know that it has the most radical and progressive land reform laws in the India?”

“No,” I said, “I had no idea.”

“Yes, if Bihar’s land-reforms laws are actually implemented, then a tenant who has cultivated someone else’s land for 12 years, will automatically become its owner. It is so radical, that D Bandopadhaya, the legendary architect of West Bengal’s land reforms said they needed to be diluted for them to be implemented by any political party.”

“When Lalu came to power in 1990, Jyoti Babu told him, in front of me, that proper land reforms will keep him in power for at least 20 years. But, you know what Lalu said? He told one of his favourite journalists, that poora balancewa hi bigad jayega – the entire balance will be disrupted by land reforms. What he did not say, is that he will lose the support of Yadavs and upper OBCs if he suddenly handed over land to the poor tenants and agricultural labourers.”

“Everyone knows that Lalu’s 15 years made the Yadavs even more powerful. They occupied government jobs, took over panchayats, and an entire industry of criminality flourished under them. That also meant that the upper OBCs also got divided. Yadavs were now at loggerheads with the Kurmis and Koeris too.”

“Is that why Nitish broke with Lalu?” I asked.

“Exactly. You are one smart banker, I must say,” Mr Powerful said genially, as he stopped a bearer for another refill.

“Nitish Kumar’s break with Lalu had as much to do with Lalu’s growing unpopularity due to his corrupt image as it did with the conflicts on the ground between Yadavs and Kurmi-Koeris. That is why Lalu’s lieutenant, the Koeri leader Upendra Kushwaha also broke away and joined Nitish.”

By now, a small crowd had gathered around us. Mr Powerful, used to be virtually mobbed at parties even two years ago. He was known to have great contacts within the UPA and had a direct line to Mrs.G. His magnetism had waned with the arrival of Good Days, but he was such a good story teller that even today, people had slowly given up their fear of being seen with a certified Congressi and a mini durbar had magically appeared around him, once again.

 “But Powerfulji, these OBCs are bound to unite again, if they feel we are coming together to end their jungle-raaj”, a booming voice proclaimed. I turned around to locate the owner of the voice and recognised our old friend Colonel Clipped Moustache. Colonel Moustache had retired from active service almost a decade ago, and had invested a not-so-inconsiderable inheritance to set up a security guard supplying company. His success in business had convinced him of his own genius and made him inordinately liberal with sharing his illiberal opinions.

“I wish they would,” Mr Powerful said, “so that Bihar does not return to the days of the Atyaachar Raaj of the upper castes. But, unfortunately for human beings and fortunately for you, this is unlikely to happen.”

The fungus on Col Moustache’s face bristled, his upper lip quivered as he searched for a suitable riposte. But, at that moment, words failed the valiant soldier, and he turned his grimace into a smile.

Mr Powerful gave him a dismissive look and continued “The biggest problem that Nitish Kumar faces today, is that he built his brand around the rubbish of development politics and good governance. His Sushasan gambit is just a watered down version of the development rhetoric of Modi. Nitish is trying to fight on a platform where Modi is the clear leader.”

“You mean development is rubbish?!” I asked. “Some of my colleagues who grew up in Patna will vouch for the change Nitish brought about. His sisters had never left their home after six in the evening. When Nitish became CM they could go for movies, malls opened in Patna, people started going out to restaurants. I have seen stories on TV of young girls going to school in villages on their cycles, something they would never have dared to do in Lalu’s time.”

“Ha! This is the problem with you people. Why do you believe what you see on TV? Do you know that registered crime went up by 25% between 2006 and 2010?”

“That is probably because crimes were being registered by the police when Nitish became CM,” I countered. “Before that, it’s quite possible that people didn’t even dare to complain to the police.”

“No, Sir! That is not true,” said Mr Powerful. “In fact, the National Women’s Commission had complained in 2010, that rape cases were not getting registered in Bihar.”

“The real difference is that man there,” Mr Powerful said, pointing to a well-known former bureaucrat-turned-politician-cum-lobbyist. The stocky gentleman with salt and pepper hair was known to be close to India’s biggest corporate house and he had worked his way into Nitish’s inner coterie.

“That man built Brand Nitish, using his friends and beneficiaries in the national media. The local media was bought over by showering bounties of government advertisements, housing for journalists, and even Rajya Sabha seats.”

“The stories you watched on TV, the reports you read in newspapers, were all part of a carefully calibrated strategy of brand-building. I see you are smiling sceptically, young man,” Mr Powerful said.

“I must admit, your stories do sound like mega conspiracy theories,” I said trying to stop myself from smirking. “You seem to think that we are all fools, easily manipulated by a few smart people.”

“No, I am not saying that,” Mr Powerful said. “It is just that we are all likely to believe what we want to believe. Smart people utilise these moments and exploit them for their own benefit. But, you are right. They cannot fool people if the tide is going against them.”

“In Nitish’s case,” he continued, “India’s elite – people like you and me – wanted to believe that by defeating Lalu, he had brought an end to caste politics in Bihar. But, as I told you just now, Nitish’s victory was as much a result of a contingent alliance between upper castes allied with the BJP, the upper OBCs like Kurmis and Koeris who were unhappy with the dominance of the Yadavs and the lower OBCs and Dalits who continued to be as poor as they were under the Congress.”

“The common anger against Yadavs was the glue that joined these disparate caste groups together, and development became the paint that covered these joints. The media helped Nitish actively, in creating the Sushasan image.”

“It wasn’t as if crime was not reported: After all, it is the staple of the local tabloid press in any state. What changed was how it was reported. In Lalu’s time, rape, murder and kidnapping was presented in the media as a government enterprise. During the Nitish era, the same crimes began to be reported as sporadic and random incidents, which the state was trying to fight.”

“But, what about my own friends and colleagues who said things have changed on the ground?” I asked.

“I am not denying that things did change in Patna and other parts of Bihar,” Mr Powerful said. “Nitish did act against top mafia lords and gangs, but he also created his own. What also happened was that unfounded fears turned into an unfounded sense of security.”   

“Nitish came to power with the help of the BJP and, in his initial days, he wanted to create a new caste alliance. He was serious about land-reforms and brought land-reforms guru D Bandopadhyaya in to frame a new policy. Bandopadhyaya recommended two basic things. One was giving permanent tenancy rights to anyone who had farmed a tract of land for more than 12 years. The other was a plan to redistribute ceiling-surplus land amongs the poorest sections and landless labourers. This would have immediately helped the lower OBCs and Dalits.”

“So what happened? That would have been radical,” said a young lady in a cotton sari. I vaguely recognised her from television debates where she represented the left-liberal-secular voice.

“Nothing” said Mr Powerful with a wave of his hand. “Nothing happened. Nitish buried Bandopadhyaya’s report and it was only after prolonged protests from some left MLAs that the government issued a CD copy with the English version of the report. The Hindi version was never released.”

“How awful!” said Cotton sari.

“Don’t know whether one can call it awful, but it could have freed him of the upper castes and Hindutva forces,” Mr Powerful replied. "Nitish realised that implementing land-reforms would have angered his own core support base, the Kurmis and Koeris. So, he chose market-friendly reforms and infrastructure development to create a social consensus.”

“Well, Bihar did become one of the highest growing states in India,” I said. I had written a private client report on this myself, so I knew the details. “If I remember correctly, it grew at an average of 11 per cent per year between 2005 and 2009.”

“You know state GDP numbers are supplied by states themselves,” Mr Powerful countered. “Nevertheless, even if these numbers are true, it is also true that even in 2010, 74% of Bihar’s population was living off agriculture, which provided just 22% of its GDP. 3.5% of farmers owned 33% of the land. UN data suggests 81% of Bihar’s population was poor in 2011. Nitish’s own estimate in 2010 was that 70% of people are poor. Clearly, the majority of the people had not benefited from this miraculous growth phase. You see son, I can rattle off numbers too”

“I never doubted that,” I said smiling graciously to retain my dignity. The old goat had clearly beaten me in this round, as well.

“One more curious thing happened during Nitish’s raj. The RSS, Banjrang dal and other Hindutva forces entered through the backdoor. Upper castes felt more secure to go back to their villages and began to revive some of their old power.”

“Are you sure you should have another one?” I asked, as Mr Powerful stopped a bearer to take his fourth large glass of scotch.

He ignored me and took a big sip. “You know Chris Hitchens – I knew the old chap quite well – used to say alcohol helps him organise his thoughts. It does the same for me. Anyway, what was I saying?”

“You were telling us something fascinating about how the BJP made inroads into Bihar,” Cotton Sari cooed.

 “No, I was saying that Nitish has dug his own grave in two ways. One, that he opened the gates for the BJP and the upper-castes to install themselves in the power structure in rural Bihar. The second is that his focus on jobless growth has led to large scale displacement of the poor, indebtedness continues to grow, malnutrition is as bad as it used to be. In the process, he has lost support from a large section of the rural poor. The mahadalit alliance that he wanted to build has actually ended up moving towards the BJP.”

“Well if Nitish Kumar thinks he is going to win on development, he doesn’t stand a chance against Modji,” Col Moustache piped up. “Look, even now Gujarat is the best place to do business in India. That is why Bihar also wants Modiji.”

“Is that the reason why your Modiji and Amit Shah have mapped each assembly seat by caste?” shouted Mr Powerful. He looked like he was about to burst a nerve. “They did exactly that in the Lok Sabha elections as well. Amit Shah set up a fantastic contact programme on the ground where BJP workers from each of the smaller castes from amongst the lower OBCs were contacted individually. This is going to happen on an even bigger scale this time. They have the manpower and money power to do this.”

Mr Powerful paused, looked around his audience and asked “does anyone amongst you follow the election analysis done by the chappies at CSDS? You should look it up. Their surveys show that the BJP managed to get more than half the lower OBC votes in the Lok Sabha. Kushwaha managed to swing the Koeri vote towards the NDA and Paswan brought in more than two-thirds of the Paswan and Dusadh vote, which is almost 10% of Bihar’s population. Now they also have Majhi in the mix. He will definitely swing a part of the Musahar vote towards the BJP.”

“I had read somewhere that if you add up Nitish, Lalu and the Congress's votes of 2014, the Nitish camp has about 46% and the NDA has about 39%,” I said, trying to impress Mr Powerful with my knowledge. “Doesn’t that amount to a complete sweep for Nitish and Lalu?”

“No, it does not. You see, this vote share hides huge regional differences,” Mr Powerful responded. “The NDA is ahead in two regions, Tirhut and Bhojpur, while the Nitish-Lalu alliance is ahead in the East, Mithila and Magadh.”

“The real fight will be right here, in the Magadh region, which is supposed to be Nitish’s base,” he added, almost conspiratorially. “Will Nitish lose more ground here? Will Lalu make up for it? Or will the BJP-Paswan-Kushwaha-Manjhi combine gain here?”

“But, what about the Muslims?” I asked. “Won’t they play the most crucial role?”

“Yes and no,” Mr Powerful replied. “Yes because they are a big block. One in every six voters in Bihar is a muslim. But, No, because they have already voted as a bloc in 2014. Nearly two-thirds of them voted for the Lalu-Congress combine.”

“In fact, this time Owaisi might cut into that vote,” Col Moustache said gleefully.

“Yes, that might happen,” Mr Powerful conceded. “What is more likely is that Owaisi might play spoiler in tight contests. In any case, each of these separate elements will give Modi the edge in Bihar this time.”

“So, you admit that caste will be defeated by development?” I asked.

“No, not at all. Caste will be defeated by caste.”