Recent Rendevous with Village Elders in Bhitbherwan: My Village

Recently visited Bhitbherwan, my village.  The name must be sounding a little tounge twisting. Well, that's what English has for you. In Saral Hindi, it means "Mitti Ka Ghar". Idea was to celebrate Deepawali with all my uncles & cousins whom I hadn't met in the last 12 years. That was just a reason to meet all. and during one of these meetings started a discussion. So here I was, sorrounded by atleast five of them. All in their late 40's, some even late 60's. What else could be the topic of discussion when elections are on their way? Dad asked his elder bhaiyya, "kekra ke vote bhail ha aa kahan ke sama bandhail ba". well, in simple English it means, whom had he voted & who was going to win? His elder brother or my badka (Sr) Chacha ji started. Although Nitish has been voted but more or less we are not in his favor. why? was my immediate next question! He started off by mentioning about some of Nitish's policies where chakbandi has been proposed & that he was off to take some decisions that were not in favour of the land owners. My village is a Kshatriya polulated village with almost 100 households & rest all are from various other castes & religions including Muslims. Lalu was getting favoured by some of the sections including the Yadavs as they had started seeing their messiah in him after 5 years of rule by Nitish. Their extra grown tooth in Lalu days had been cut short by Nitish which was dis-liked by many in Yadav community but not necessarilly by the Muslims as such. Muslims may have got a special treatment by Lalu but internally I must say he hasn't done anything so good to them which others can't take the pie of doing to them as well during their rule.

My question to him was more to do with what the fuss around chakbandi? We have owned land for so long & there are poor who don't have any bit of that although they are the ones who work there. Moment I asked the question, Chachaji wasn't too surprised rather he answered very confidently & politely. Probably he knew my urban socialist thoughts & respected them instead of shouting at me. The babudom that we have today is what Zamindars were in earlier days. His rational was that the way the babu's make you run for your money today is the same way how Zamindars used to be in those days. Just that the nomenclature has changed. Both do the looting so why such a biased approach against the Zamindars specially when they do give the fair share to the workers who plough & crop their land. His rational was fix the Babu dom & things will fall in shape even without Chakbandi.

For once, I thought, he was mixing up the issue but later on I realized he wasn't saying too much wrong either. The issues that we have in the system are not really caused by the landowners but because a lot of the schemes that have been created for the poor are not reaching them. Good or bad, It's the government that is responsible for not being able to knuckle down the corrupt. Aangan wadi's are created yet the food is not reaching the poor school children, MNREGA was established yet the babu's are pocketing the money & it is not reaching the poor village youth then why target the landowners. Moreover why would one want to give off his land if he has it since ages? Equally for these landowners too their is no other source of income than this land. I felt, for once, their story is just like that of the Mumbai bar dancers who didn't do anything wrong but still were shut down from operating in bars because government felt they are causing much of the bad in the society. Infact when the Government stopped it, is when these bar dancers started doing illegal things. I thought it would be the same thing if the landonwers are forced to part from their land. For once, Government will have to explain it if it doesn't want any untoward incidence in the future by forcibly taking their land instead of checking corruption. This is not mere politics but playing with the livelihood of people & if the state is Bihar, one must be careful.

Overall, people are happy compared to the rule of yesteryears but the corruption has got so much in the system now that one can't breath. So Nitish may win this time on the development wave but I can tell that if he doesn't address this issue, he won't be there for long unless people feel that giving Rs 100 once as bribe is worth until you earn Rs 1000 / month. That was an eyeopener for me. By this time, people  had started retiring for lunch & the discussion was left as it is, may be to start when we all would meet again (which typically happened quite often during those 3-4 days of my stay)

By the way, above all, everyone wanted me to come back & build a house in village than making it in some other city like many of village youth. For them, it is the village where you should be respected than buying a piece of land or house elsewhere. Have been pondering over that since then!!