With the bugle for the Bihar polls sounded, the courting of one of the most intensely politicised, and intensely political electorates, is officially on. In Bihar, far too much still depends upon the state and almost every question becomes one that is posed to the government. At the same time, it is also a place where a now-dwindling army of “JP-wallahs” and their legatees is still active on the ground, armed with nothing more than a healthy scepticism of the state’s intent, whichever the government, and a jhola-full of resolve to forge wider civil society solidarities to wage a daily fight for justice.AdvertisementWhen an election comes to Bihar, you are likely to come across voters who say that, for them, unlike for most others, winnability may not be the overriding criterion — that they will vote not for the government, as is conventionally done, but for the Opposition, because a democracy needs a strong opposition. Or that they will calibrate their Lok Sabha-assembly choices to ensure that power is not concentrated in the hands of one individual or party, because that is not good for democracy.For years now, though, Bihar, the state of the discerning voter, has been trapped in a prolonged political plateau. The excitements of the Mandal mobilisations of the 1990s led to the radical upending of the caste equations by Lalu Prasad. The Lalu era came to an end, because he did not have the vision or imagination to take his own magnificent achievements to the next step, link them to an agenda of governance. And because he was complicit, therefore, in the shrinking of his formidable 1995 coalition of the backward and the poor into spectres of deinstitutionalisation, “Yadav raj” and “jungle raj” that still haunt the RJD now led by his son.The Lalu era paved the way for the quieter reconfigurations wrought by Nitish Kumar, who put together a social coalition of extremes, and carved out valuable political space in the middle — for restoring the authority of the state and underlining the importance of “vikas” alongside “samajik nyay” or social justice.AdvertisementBut the Nitish transformations have also long hit a dead end. Stories of change were scattered across the state in the 2010 election that brought him his largest mandate — from the dramatic gains on the law and order front to the building of bridges long unbuilt and half-built, from the cycles for girls that enabled them to cover the distance to the school instead of being forced to drop out, to new stirrings among EBCs. For many years now, however, Nitish has been in power as a waning and symbolic presence, switching sides, running out of ideas, resorting to the strong-armed prohibition policy or an array of cash transfers in a desperate bid to paper over the cracks in his support base.Now, the entry of a third player, Prashant Kishor’s “Jan Suraaj” in the broadly bipolar contest in Bihar — the NDA vs the Mahagathbandhan — brings with it a promise. It may or may not shape a new outcome in Bihar, but it could put the older players on notice. It is an opportunity, also, to remake “the people”.For far too long, “the people” of Bihar have been defined in fixed and unmoving ways, all the better to fit the formulas and strategies of established players, and the gap between their political framing and the churn on the ground has been growing. A new player, asking questions, hurling challenges, could bring a welcome disruption in older ways of seeing.It is true, for instance, that caste identities are salient in Bihar, and even etched into its land, spatially dividing the village into caste clusters, apart from providing bounded categories of political and electoral mobilisation. But it is also true that “the people” are more varied and fluid. Just as caste chips away at Hindutva’s imagined monolith, people across castes can also be defined and addressed along other intersecting axes — as the migrants and the unemployed, and as parents of children who go to schools that offer them only a substandard education.To travel in Bihar in the last few years has been to encounter a growing clamour by parents at the lower ends of the caste and class ladder who say that they want a better quality of learning from the sarkari school their child goes to — that it must be a place where teachers teach, instead of primarily dispensing free khichdi or the midday meal. In Bihar, and in other states, a politically convenient stereotype is waiting to be punctured — that the citizen, especially the woman voter, can be reduced fully and unresistingly into the labharthi or passive beneficiary of the designed-by-government welfare schemes.most readThe welfare architecture put in place in 20 years of Nitish Kumar in the state and 11 years of Narendra Modi at the Centre — from free foodgrain to the latest cash transfer scheme of Rs 10,000 to women under the Mahila Rojgar Yojana — is ambitious in its sprawl undoubtedly. But the people of Bihar, including and especially its women, may be far more ambitious and aspirational than the state pegs them to be.After all, both Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, where post-poll analysis found it all too convenient to credit the BJP’s election victories almost entirely to its governments’ cash transfer schemes for women, were also states where this reporter, among others, found many women voters on the ground who said that the scheme is not enough. They asked for more — jobs, lower prices of essential commodities, a better quality of life, for themselves and their children.In the best version of the contest that lies ahead, regardless of who loses and who wins, the new player in Bihar could help enlarge the possibilities and readings of “badlav” or change in a state that has lived too long with the dispiriting sense of its limits.Till next week,Vandita