The Bihar Model

THE CENSUS TOWN OF SABOUR, on the outskirts of Bhagalpur, was first connected by rail to the colonial capital, Calcutta, in 1861. Five years later, the first train between Howrah and Delhi—the precursor of the Kalka Mail—passed through here. The East Indian Railway Company, however, began constructing what came to be known as the Grand Chord, which, when completed in 1906, shortened the distance between the two metropolises by almost two hundred kilometres. This section, which bypassed Bhagalpur, eventually became part of India’s busiest railway line. The industrial hubs of Asansol and Durgapur were developed along the Grand Chord, as were the coal mines of Dhanbad. Sabour did not see any such development. Today, its station is almost exclusively used by slow passenger trains, and its economy depends on agriculture. Life here is unhurried, with familiar routines often carrying more weight than national headlines.

One such routine was unfolding on a drizzly afternoon in July. As he often does, 75-year-old Radhe Yadav was sitting in a small hut where his friend lives and works as a tailor in the village of Sultanpur Bhitthi, near the Sabour railway station. His friend was on the floor, eating his lunch, while Radhe, seated on a chair, looked out at the rain. I asked him if he had enrolled himself in the voter list under the Election Commission of India’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision process. “I’ve been voting since 1970,” he told me. Yes, but had he filled out the enumeration form that the ECI was asking every voter to submit? Radhe squinted at me, confused. None of the booth-level officers mobilised by the ECI to carry out the exercise had visited him yet, even though it was the third week of the SIR, which is meant to verify the eligibility of each of Bihar’s 79 million voters. He could not understand why he needed to enrol again, since he was already registered.

Radhe’s friend Narad Yadav had just arrived at the hut. He said that he had seen a local schoolteacher distributing papers. The teacher had told him that it was for a census and that he would soon be visiting Narad’s village, English Farka. I told Radhe and Narad that there had not been a census in fourteen years and that the ECI was putting together a new electoral roll, but this did not make sense to them. I asked Radhe if he had the documents required for the one-page citizenship declaration that every voter was expected to submit to the BLOs by the end of July. “Yes, I have Aadhaar,” he said. When I told him that Aadhaar cards were not among the documents listed as acceptable by the ECI, he bristled. “That’s just what you are saying. Whenever we go for any work, they just ask for our Aadhaar card.”