Synopsis : With the Assembly elections underway in Bihar, the state appears curiously detached from its own electoral theatre. For a generation of young Biharis, neither the rhetoric of the fear of Jungle Raj nor the unbelievable fantasy of universal state employment carries conviction.

Probably the most evocative way to describe contemporary Bihar would be that it is a state caught in motion without movement. A state where the processes of politics hum with frenetic energy, yet the substantive and imaginative purpose that should animate it remains conspicuously absent.

All grander visions of economic transformation and programmatic policy changes seem to get tunnelled in the dark alleys of a state, an exception which political economists have come to mark as an anomaly to the larger st

See Full Page