The triumph of the incumbent BJP/ JDU coalition in the recently concluded legislative assembly election of Bihar (pop.130 million) where this alliance bagged 202 of the 243 seats in the assembly, has attracted reams of media comment. In particular, the return of JDU leader Nitish Kumar as chief minister of India’s poorest and most under-developed state on almost all metrics — poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality, longevity — of socio-economic development, has drawn volumes of analysis and opinion from media and academy pundits.

Nitish Kumar has continuously governed Bihar for 20 years during which despite his acclaimed good governance, this benighted state remains the country’s poorest, most illiterate, most corrupt and lawless. This is less an indicator of the chief minister’s competence, as it is of the depths of misery to which the electorate has been reduced during the past half century of open, uninterrupted misgovernance and neglect. By continuously neglecting primary and basic education while dividing hapless illiterates on the basis of caste, sub-castes, and religion under guise of delivering social justice, Bihar’s wily politicians symbolized by Nitish  Kumar and his predecessor Lalu Prasad Yadav who was chief minister for 15 years (1990-2005), have reduced the people of Bihar to such depths of despair that they have developed a Stockholm syndrome towards their oppressive rulers. Now accustomed to deep pain and suffering for fear of worse, they are unwilling to risk the possibility of change.  

Cognitive decline induced by prolonged deprivation of half-decent primary education and evidenced by innocent appreciation of pre-poll freebies — certain to come at the cost of reduced capital expenditure and inflation — explains why Bihar’s electorate comprehensively rejected the appeal of the new genre reformist Jan Suuraj party led by the highly articulate pollster turned politician Prasant Kishor, which suffered a comprehensive defeat in the assembly election.

Kishor, a former psephologist, focused his attention solely on economic development and extensively toured the state for 36 months for people-people meetings. Yet JS failed to win a single seat of the 238 contested, with all the party’s candidates losing their deposits for failure to win even 16.6 percent of votes cast. JS/Kishor’s lapse? He led a campaign centred on crucial issues of education and rampant youth unemployment — only 4 percent of Bihar’s adults are employed in industry and 30 percent migrate to other states to serve as low-wage casual labour.

For a society reduced to such depths of cognitive decline, and inured to stoic acceptance of limitless suffering, a massive education reform and upgradation drive is the only silver bullet. But tragically, cognitive development is required to understand this.