NOWHERE MAN: Safir Ansari with his family in Sundarpur village. (Below) Raj Thackeray’s effigy being burnt in Patna

Sundarpur has little to justify its name. This distant village in Bihar’s east Champaran district reeks of filth, squalor and poverty. Barely 10 km from the district headquarters of Motihari, the village is a world apart — it has no connecting road, electricity or health centre. Sundarpur is also cursed with a river that gobbles up homes and farmlands.

Like most young men from Sundarpur, Safir Ansari grew up with the erosion and floods of the Sikhrahana, the river flowing in from neighbouring Nepal. Like them, he knew in his heart that he had simply no chance in the village of his birth and that he would have to leave it, as his father had, sooner rather than later.

Leaving home is always wrenching but there was no way Sundarpur, with little arable land, could have fed its 600-odd families. Certainly not his, Ansari figured. When the Sikhrahana swallowed up the local primary school that squatted on its bank, Ansari took it as a cue to leave the village. “I don’t know why but I felt it was time for me to go,” he says.

On a spring morning in 1994 he boarded a rattletrap bus to Patna on the way to Delhi. His three brothers who now live in Maharashtra followed him. They became migrants.

To be sure, migration from Bihar is not new. But Maharashtra Navnirman Sena boss Raj Thackeray’s public targeting of migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh has added a new political dimension to migration. Over the last couple of years, sporadic attacks have been reported on Bihari migrants in other parts of the country.

Local groups, mostly chauvinistic or militant, accuse the migrants of stealing jobs from local youth. Still, barring a handful of states, the entire country has come to rely on Bihari workers to build roads, buildings or dams; to till the crop fields; to run taxis and auto-rickshaws and to guard apartments and offices. In the words of a senior Bihar cabinet minister, hard-working Bihari migrants now form the backbone of the nation’s work force.

Indeed, more than two crore Bihar natives — almost a quarter of the state’s population — live outside the state. From Assam to Kerala and from Bengal to Maharashtra — they are everywhere. Every year they send home a staggering Rs 15,000 crore, according to an estimate by the Bihar Industries Association. “This remittance is crucial for the state and its people,” says former Bihar Industries Association president K.P.S. Keshri.

In East Champaran district, more than Rs 30 crore is sent by Bihari migrants every year, says Bhagwan Prasad Srivastav, post master of the Motihari head post office. “We get nearly 12,000 money orders a month,” he says.

Many in Bihar are still seething with anger at the way Biharis in Maharashtra were “attacked, assaulted and humiliated”, says Patna Science College’s statistics professor Binoy Kumar, who ran a “welfare camp” at the Patna station to “receive” the returning migrants. “We are Bihari, not Pakistani. The Thackerays cannot treat us the same way,” the professor says.

At 35, Ansari, who is of medium height, looks stocky in a white grubby full-sleeved shirt and blue striped lungi. He has a watch on his right wrist, the sole style statement that distinguishes him from his friends.

Ansari works as a tailor in a cloth-manufacturing unit in Noida near Delhi, sharing a room in a shanty with two other migrants from his village. He works 12 hours a day, almost seven days a week, making upto Rs 150 a day. For the last 10 years or so, he has not seen a single movie. “I can’t afford to waste money,” he says.

Back home, his wife Maubahn Khatun waits anxiously for the Rs 1,500 or so that arrives via a postal money order every month. “We have eight children and no other income,” says the frail woman, lying in a cot with her fractured right leg. She had a fall late last week when she was taking out their two-year-old son without lighting the lamp to save kerosene.

Needless to say, poverty drives most out of Bihar. Naresh Kumar, assistant manager of the Central Bank of India’s regional office in Motihari, says many people from the district migrated to faraway cities after a number of sugar mills in the area closed down.

Some sociologists believe migration is also an “escape” from the caste oppression in Bihar villages. “In some ways, migration is liberating,” says Kumar Rana, a research associate of Amartya Sen’s Pratichi Trust, a fact Bihar Communist Party of India leader Biswajit Sen agrees with. “How else would you explain the migration of people from the agricultural belts of Bihar with no record of excess labourers,” Rana asks.

In any case, the Bihar government or the Biharis are not to be blamed for migration. “If regional disparity is acute, people will migrate and when people migrate locals always feel threatened,” says Patna-based Asian Development Research Institute director Prabhat P. Ghosh.

Ansari comes home twice a year and on each visit he marvels at the change in his village. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd hasn’t yet stepped into Sundarpur but that does not prevent Ansari from contacting his wife. Several village youths have bought mobile phones. When he wants to talk to his wife or children, all he has to do is call one of these numbers and the young man goes to his one-room mud house and hands his wife the handset. All for Rs 5 only, he says.

If a migrant worker comes home with a mobile phone, villagers say he can also charge it for Rs 5, using a car battery a canny local resident has bought to make a little money in power-deprived Sundarpur.

But this apart, Sundarpur, where fewer than 40 per cent of the people can scrawl their names in wiggly signatures, remains steeped in the age-old traditions of a Bihar village. Azizunissa Bibi may be the local mukhia on paper. But the entire village calls her husband Mohammad Waliwulla “mukhiaji”. “I do all the work and talking usually, but my wife comes out or talks from behind a purdah when officials come calling,” the man says candidly.

But Ansari has no time for all this talk. He will have to leave now for Motihari on a borrowed bicycle. It’s an hour’s journey along a narrow mud track pocked with craters. He may be on “holiday” home but he must work to feed his family. He cannot afford to miss the Rs 80 that he gets a day working as a labourer in a road-building project in the district headquarters. Migrant or not, he has to toil to survive in the boondocks of Bihar.