Patna, Aug. 26: As the BJP prepares to roll out its poll campaign by trumpeting the Rs 1.25 lakh crore special package announced with a flourish by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, Bihar is wondering whether it will again become a victim of history.

Over the decades, the Centre has kept promising financial packages that don't always reach it, or, when they do, the state is unable to spend the money properly.

In 1989, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had announced a package of Rs 5,500 crore for Bihar - a large amount for the time - after visiting flood-devastated regions. But the money never came.

"After that the Bhagalpur riots took place and we lost power. But successive governments led by Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar never pursued the matter with the Centre," said Jagannath Mishra, who was the Congress chief minister of Bihar at the time of the floods of the late-eighties.

Politicians and economists are asking whether the Centre would keep its promise if the BJP were to lose the coming Assembly polls. "Would the Modi government remember the promise of the package then?" wondered aloud an economist under cover of anonymity.

State politicians, cutting across party lines, will argue that the Centre had always discriminated against Bihar, right from the time of the freight equalisation policy after Independence.

"Not only has the state lost in terms of funds allotted by the earlier Planning Commission, its fortunes have been mixed when it came to dissolution of funds by successive finance commissions. Whenever population and poverty were used as yardsticks, we gained. Whenever the criteria changed, we lost. But I do not blame the Centre for the state's backwardness. The state is also to blame because of its failure to spend funds. Every January, the state development commissioner writes to various departments, asking them to spend or surrender the money," said economist N.K. Choudhary, recalling how the late historian Bipan Chandra had, during his student days, advised him to work on India's "internal colony" of Bihar.

After Bihar's division in 2000, the state government led by Lalu Prasad had sought Rs 1.67 lakh crore as compensation.

"We carried out an exercise and found that in the past 15 years, the state government had spent only Rs 18,000 crore under plan expenditure. Mathematically, even if the Centre had given us that amount, it would have taken us over a century to spend it," said a retired official involved in the exercise of making a memorandum to demand Rs 1.67 lakh crore.

Hiccups remain when it comes to spending money, as apparent from Prime Minister Modi's taunts that suggest the state government had failed to utilise Rs 8,000 crore of the Rs 12,000 crore special assistance given to Bihar.

During Atal Bihari Vajpayee's regime too, Bihar was given a package for improvement of infrastructure under the Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana.

Nitish Kumar, then a minister in the Vajpayee government, wangled a commitment for an economic package because of the state's bifurcation in 2000.

Vajpayee, on December 17, 2003, announced in the Lok Sabha a package of over Rs 2,500 crore for strengthening electricity distribution, irrigation and roads in Bihar.

He also announced that the state would get Rs 1,000 crore per year during the Tenth Finance Commission period. But the release of funds and implementation of schemes was slow, and the UPA-1 government converted it into the Backward Regions Grant Fund, under which Bihar continued to get Rs 1,000 crore annually as central assistance.

Economists and politicians believe Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is not right in sticking to the special status demand and should instead ensure the money Modi has promised actually reaches the state.

"Special status to selected states was recommended by the Gadgil committee in 1969. He had put conditions like hilly, sparse population and bordering area. Times have now changed. Even the 14th finance commission has advocated doing away with special status category states. Besides, Bihar is not the only state. What about West Bengal, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha," asked former chief minister Mishra.

The question on everybody's mind is whether Modi's announcement would remain another jumla (a manner of speaking, made famous by BJP chief Amit Shah, who used the term to describe Modi's promise to bring back black money Indians had stocked in banks abroad and deposit around Rs 15 lakh in every Indian's account) and meet the same fate as Rajiv Gandhi's promised package.

"It will be unfair to call it just another political announcement. Let us wait and watch. The Centre has huge resources," said economist Choudhary.