Nitish Kumar accepts petitions during the janata darbar at Saharsa on Tuesday. Picture by Sankarshan Thakur

Saharsa, Dec. 13: To invite public grievance is to summon a sea upon yourself; everyone turns up waving a petition, even two, just in case it’s your lucky day.

Harried widows and deserted wives, pensioners and probationers, sharecroppers and landlords, the elderly and the handicapped, employees and the unemployed, even the oddity flogging a maverick claim. Among the throng that awaited chief minister Nitish Kumar at the janata darbar in the tumbledown Saharsa Stadium grounds was one Bipin Kumar Sah brandishing a document thick as a brick. “I have the solution to all of Bihar’s power problems,” he pleaded aloud, “but nobody listens. I have made a machine that produces power like a charkha produces cotton, cheap and simple. It’s all here, look and listen carefully.”

Sah hadn’t any machine, of course. He had a diagram with various twists and turns of circuitry and many fine annotations that only its insistent author could have made sense of, if at all. It was like some bewildering tantra chart and it lay attached to an explanatory note some two hundred foolscap pages long. Sah’s scheme would have left Nitish, himself an electrical engineer, bemused. Mercifully, Sah’s turn never came; he retired from the darbar, still hurt: “Nobody listens to me.” But to give Sah and his elaborate scheme a ear today would have meant ignoring a thousand others who had more pressing issues haunting them than a madhatter formulation.

The women came first, then the elderly and then the handicapped, each section neatly serried behind bamboo barricading. Nitish went up and down the columns, ringed by securitymen, collecting petition after petition, quick-reading them and calling attention to officials if he thought some worth immediate action.

His secretary held a megaphone and every now and then he would call to attention some of the topmost bureaucrats of the state: the welfare secretary please, where is he, the development commissioner, please come, IG saheb, the CM wants you, irrigation minister saheb, minister saheb, aapka maamla hai, please come soon. They were all kept on their toes, wondering what next they will be called upon to sort out. “It’s like being in class,” one of them quipped. “Never know when you’ll be on test and for what.”

From breached embankments and grabbed land to fratricidal murder and unpaid pensions, a whole catalogue of complaints confronted the chief minister all morning. At one point he was face to face with a woman who complained her husband had left her for a younger one and robbed her of her means. A patently personal issue, nothing the state can intervene in. Nitish was still moved to issue instructions: “Inka pehle dekhiye, kuchh baat-cheet se solution nikal aaye (Give priority to her, if a solution can be found with some negotiation).”

Not all problems dumped at the administration’s feet during mass contact yatras such as this one meet solution. But two things do happen: the rulers get to hear grassroots voices first hand and those making the clamour have the satisfaction of knowing they have at least been heard. “This is the first time in my memory that the top tier of government is bringing itself down to the districts,” said Madan Mohan Mishra, a retired schoolteacher who had come to the darbar out of curiosity.

“At the very least it gives the people the sense that the government they put in power is among them. Never have chief ministers in Bihar done such mass contact except at election time, if nothing else, this is a laudable symbolic gesture.”

Today’s janata darbar was virtually like the chief minister’s secretariat at work under the marquees of the Saharsa Stadium. Teams of officials, many among them the heads of their departments, went simultaneously to work as the petitions were handed in. “This has become an effective feedback instrument and safety valve,” said one of them, “because the government periodically arrives among the people and lets them vent, frustrations don’t build up.” And a fair amount of goodwill does. Nitish Kumar wouldn’t mind any of that. He’s sailing high on the sea he is summoning district after district.