Like remoras to a whale, narratives cling to every state. They persist long after they stop being true. Punjab is the state of cancer, drug...
Like remoras to a whale, narratives cling to every state. They persist long after they stop being true. Punjab is the state of cancer, drugs and the Green Revolution. Tamil Nadu has excellent public delivery of healthcare and education. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar is Sushasan, Good Governance, Babu even though the State remains absent.
This void does not stay empty for long. Society steps in, creating imperfect replacements to the State.
In Bihar, one of them was local strongmen. In When Crime Pays, the political scientist Milan Vaishnav writes about Anant Kumar Singh, the leader from the bhumihar caste in Mokama near Patna and bahubali, local strongman. Despite the many criminal cases against him, people voted for Singh as he got their work done in a town where the government functioning was weak.
Then, there were market actors, like the Career Plan Coaching Centre. Located in Geetwas, a small village near Araria in northeastern Bihar, it was not much to look at – a tiny room, perhaps four by three metres, tightly packed with benches and desks, housed in an unplastered brick structure whose other half was a garage. It offered tuitions for students between classes eight and twelve.
But, as Gautam Kumar, a mathematics graduate in his mid-twenties...
