As much as in the fields, shops and factories in Punjab, a cart-puller on a Delhi road, or a security guard in a Mumbai apartment, or a worker in a Faridabad mill must be trying to absorb verbal banalities.
The order of abuse is known, even formulaic. An invective is preceded or followed by the reminder of where he comes from: ********d Bihari, or Bihari ********d. It’s been this way for decades now. Somewhat invisible due to being too mainstream, and the targets being too much from the Hindi heartland, mainly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh – it does not make for a bleeding heart story.
Politics, however, was never the issue, despite what the reactions triggered by the Punjab chief minister’s remarks during a Rupnagar roadshow might suggest. At the heart of it, politics takes care of itself. In self-corrective ways, the demands of context, electoral politics and scrutiny would ensure that a chief minister of Punjab would clarify his remarks about showing the door to “bhaiyas”. For that matter, the Delhi chief minister would keep an eye on the sizeable Poorvanchali vote in the city while denying his alleged mockery of their popular songs and, by extension, one of their principal languages.
That leaves a vast non-political sphere of the mundane, more a part of the everyday negotiations that the migrant workforce faces in the social space.
Such encounters, ranging from banter to vicious verbal attacks, are not limited to the blue-collar workforce from Bihar in farms, factories or shops. It extends to the white-collar workforce from the state working in plush offices in urban centres across the country. That also includes, quite significantly, millions of students from the state found in university campuses in metro cities or institutional townships across India.
Almost three decades ago, scholar Arvind N Das had hinted at this in his work The Republic of Bihar (Penguin, 1992). He wrote, “The out-migration of Bihari students, like those of labourers, to places of learning in other parts of India integrates Bihar further into the national labour market even as it produces a quasi-racial backlash in places such as Delhi which have started fearing incursions of Harrys (Biharis) from the east much in the same way as Britain did in the international realm.”
Thirty years ago, Das seemed as aware of the quasi-racial backlash against the Bihari workforce and student community as the anxieties in metro cities about “incursions from the east”. Such anxieties were found less in farmlands of states like Punjab and Haryana, which became increasingly dependent on the sweat of Bihar and UP farmworkers to reap the benefits of the Green Revolution and the steady flow of huge MSP earnings. The lack of economic fears, however, did not stop the verbal attacks and the stereotyping of the bhaiya workers in social conversations and even in representations in popular culture.
In cities, however, the “incursion from the east” did not engage enough talk about the lopsidedness of regional development. For instance, policies like freight equalisation (1952-93), which denied eastern states like undivided Bihar (thereby including Jharkhand till 2000) and Odisha chances of industrial investment, growth and urbanisation in these formative decades. These issues intersected with the nerve centres of resource allocation, the development model, and federalism. Even if the subsidised transport of enormous mineral resources from these states powered growth and urbanisation in other parts of the country, it denied these states from the “east” an early competitive advantage.
In effect, it amounted to the denial of the locational edge in diversifying the economy, and highly populous regions became largely dependent on agriculture. That was too much pressure on the land for even one of the most fertile regions, like the Indo-Gangetic plains in Bihar. Moreover, the cumulative lack of urbanisation was a major push factor behind the mass migration of the workforce.
In the metropolitan centres, the native anxieties against migrants have been present in varying degrees. Sometimes, they are politically stoked. In Mumbai, for instance, before bhaiyas and bhayanis – as Suketu Mehta recalls in his work Maximum City – transitioned from affectionate to pejorative address, the south Indian workforce became the target. In course of time, however, the political process found a way around it.
In the national capital, however, the growing presence of this “incursion from the east” narrative and the casual nature of invectives against the Bihari workforce, student community and even settled families have largely gone unaddressed. This is despite the fact that the last three decades have seen significant growth in the number of young men joining government, academic, corporate and media organisations in the city. To add to that, the Poorvanchali vote bank factor has seen the political careers of many from eastern UP and Bihar entering the power corridors of city politics.
As mentioned earlier, the curse of being too mainstream and mainland an issue in these times of competitive victimhood has gone against its visibility. That, however, is one of the many factors behind the invisibility. One reason is rooted in how most migrants themselves looked away, preferring a shallow form of co-option over identity assertion. This is particularly true for the white-collar section of the migrant workforce.
The nature of their response in the national capital is a case in point. Irrespective of what they became – high-ranking civil servants, corporate leaders, media professionals – they were eager to distance themselves from the idea of the swarming hives of paan-chewing men and sari-clad women; the fellowship of simpletons that occupied perceptions about Biharis in popular culture. There was, for instance, a proliferation of Bihari journalists who showed alacrity in being co-opted into a metropolitan consensus about “good taste” – in ideology, cinema, literature, and narratives in general. Despite an increasingly high number of journalists from the state working in the national media (a euphemism for Delhi-based media), the response to invectives against the state’s people on Delhi’s streets have seldom gone beyond rhetorical murmurs.
It’s the time of year when the pop music scene in eastern UP and Bihar will be flooded with songs that have waiting wives asking their migrant husbands to return home for Holi. For many women, those songs might not make much sense; they live with their husbands in faraway towns, cities and even farmlands. The blue-collar migrant working men from Poorvanchal are becoming migrant families. That, however, hasn’t changed the abusive blows that await them on the street, as a matter of navigating their living. That has nothing to do with what a chief minister says or clarifies. That’s even too mainland to outrage.
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