What Nitish Kumar did for Bihar, India’s poorest state

THE VIEW from an aeroplane circling Patna at night could be that of any work-in-progress second-tier city in India. A carpet of dense concrete patterned with illuminated streets; glass shopping centres; a half-finished elevated metro line. At ground level, though, it becomes apparent that this is Bihar, India’s poorest state and home to some 130m people. It is the preponderance of bicycles that does it. They long ago receded from much of urban India as the working class came to afford scooters and motorcycles.

The roads, the illumination, the shopping centres—even the confidence to venture out after dark—are the doing of Nitish Kumar, who has run the state as chief minister for all but nine months of the past 20 years. In November his coalition was elected for a record fifth time, winning a stonking four-fifths of the seats. This month Mr Kumar announced he would step down and move to the upper house of India’s parliament. The Bihar of today is a showcase of his achievements—and of his shortcomings.

Born to an ayurvedic doctor, Mr Kumar exhibited a desire for order from an early age. He insisted that household helps should bathe each day, and splashed antiseptic on those who didn’t, wrote Sankarshan Thakur, a journalist, in “Single Man”, his biography of Mr Kumar. At university he maintained a tidy room and handed bars of soap to the cooks. As he wandered the political wilderness, staying over at associates’, he carried a fresh sheet to sleep on.

So the descent of Bihar, never orderly, into utter chaos must have hurt all the more. For 15 years Mr Kumar watched as the boisterous and boorish Laloo Prasad Yadav, a predecessor as chief minister, ransacked the state. Kidnappings, extortion and murder were the norm. When Mr Yadav was charged with corruption, he installed his illiterate wife as chief minister and ruled from prison, still winning elections with canny caste calculus. The economy flatlined. Average annual growth in Mr Yadav’s last term was 3.2%, half the national rate. Incomes were 60% of those in the next poorest state and a mere fifth of those in India’s richest big one.

Mr Kumar, mild-mannered but an astute politician, made a pact with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which commanded an upper-caste vote base. He eventually won power in 2005 and set to work tackling crime, which dropped by 68% in his first term. He built roads and bridges. He launched a bevy of welfare schemes directed at minorities, oppressed castes, and women and girls. School enrolment soared. Health clinics received supplies. Grain yields doubled. The economy grew by more than 10% a year on average throughout his first term, a fifth faster than India as a whole.

Known as Sushashan Babu, “Mr Good Governance”, Mr Kumar was in many ways a mirror image of the BJP’s Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat. By 2010 Mr Modi, too, was feted as an exceptional administrator. Both men came from humble backgrounds, both micromanaged their states and both turned elections into referendums on themselves. The difference was that Gujarat was already prosperous. Mr Kumar had to pull Bihar out of its depths.

Another big difference was Mr Kumar’s avowed secularism. Mr Modi is an unapologetic Hindu-nationalist. Mr Kumar broke with the BJP in 2013, halfway through his second term, for that very reason. By then the sheen had started to come off Sushashan Babu’s government, with rising crime and rising expectations. Yet Bihar’s political realism forced Mr Kumar back into the arms of Mr Yadav, the man who had destroyed Bihar. Mr Kumar has spent the past decade switching between parties to retain power, his attention distracted from governance. He is now back in bed with the BJP in Bihar, and helps hold up Mr Modi’s government in Delhi.

By the time of the state election last year, Mr Kumar had come across a foe that not even he could defeat. Now 75, he is in undeniable, Bidenesque decline. As he moves to India’s upper house, he leaves behind a state that remains India’s poorest. GDP per person, at under $800, is still no more than a fifth of the richest big state’s and on par with that of Congo. Millions of Biharis migrate to other states for work. Corruption remains endemic. Yet he leaves behind, too, a state that has learnt to expect more from its leaders. Bihar’s people are no longer embarrassed to say where they are from. “The real change”, as Thakur put it in his book, is “within the minds and psychologies of Biharis”. ■