We are like this only

Suppose, for a moment, you are a district administrator. A lady, evidently agitated, comes and informs you that a “false” candidate is sitting his board exams at a centre in your district.

What do you do?

Surely you shove all other pressing matters aside, go to the examination centre, grab the chap by the collar, and immediately book him for fraud.

But not if you are in Bihar. Here, you will first ask the lady, “What, pray, is your problem?”

That is exactly what the sub-divisional officer of a Bihar district — incidentally travelling with me on the Danapur Express — did. His colleagues, also our co-passengers, who were till the previous moment disagreeing with one another on everything, suddenly nod vigorously in agreement.

The lady’s problem, the SDO reveals, was that it was her son who was asked to be the proxy candidate. On refusing, he was beaten up in true “Bihari” style. But finding a replacement was not a problem.

The SDO was still not convinced. Then the lady told him that the actual candidate, Ashutosh Kumar, was from her nanihal (maternal village), and had a mole on his right arm.

SDO sahib now changed into a pair of trousers — in Bihar, bureaucratic rules are flexible enough to allow an officer to do his paperwork in the lungi that he is most comfortable in — and arrived at the centre. Admit cards were checked and signatures verified. The photograph and signature tallied with the appearance and handwriting of the young man, an inconspicuous presence among hundreds filling out their answer-sheets.

Then came the surprise of surprises. The mole was in the right place but the trained eyes of the SDO saw through it in a fraction of a second. “Aap yeh godhna kab godhwaye (When did you get this tattoo done)?” he asked. The young man insisted that it was his birthmark. At that moment, the officer did not have the equipment to call his bluff. So he asked conversationally where the young man’s nanihaal was. “X, Sir,” he said politely. “But Ashutosh Kumar’s nanihaal is Y.” (The names of the villages have been concealed because revealing them would give away the name of the district — something the SDO did not want.) The man now went down on his knees and started howling. Things did take their logical course after this, which is also a minor triumph in a state where a large number of frauds sit every examination, starting from the school-leaving one.

Right now, of course, the problem of false candidates has paled before the leaking of question papers, catapulted recently into the front pages of national newspapers by the Indian Institute of Management’s common entrance test scandal. But this little cottage industry of Bihar, the paper-leak syndicates, had been doing well for itself before the CAT was let out of the bag. The leaking of the pre-medical examination paper of the Central Board of Secondary Education earlier this month makes it difficult to rule out the possibility that the syndicates are back in business after the arrest of their most important player, Ranjit Singh.

The mastermind behind the CAT paper leak has been known variously as Suman Singh, Ranjit Singh and Indrajit Kumar. But the name that has stuck is Ranjit Don, the donhood a gift of the vernacular media of Bihar. A dubious MBBS from the Darbhanga Medical College, Ranjit dabbled in the pharmaceutical business for a while before investing his intelligence in the “education sector”. He quickly created a market for leaked question-papers, assuring his clients success in examinations of all kinds, specially in medical entrances. The market for leaked papers, a function of the swelling ranks of the unemployed, was huge enough to make him a millionaire in a few years. Ranjit’s story makes the anecdote at the start relevant because he too made a humble beginning as a proxy examinee in his home district, Nalanda.

By coincidence or by design, most paper leak syndicates are based in this district of Bihar. A joke in Bihar’s babudom is that this is because all intelligent Biharis hail from this district. Ranjit was born and brought up in and controlled his operations from Nalanda, which, like most districts of Bihar, has not managed to acquaint itself, let alone keep up, with the advances in information technology.

In Bihar, an individual’s worth is known to go up several notches once he is behind bars. Thus, though Ranjit harboured political ambitions for long, it was only after he became a resident of Beur jail that frenetic attempts began to field him against George Fernandes in the Nalanda Lok Sabha constituency. When Fernandes left the seat for his compatriot, Nitish Kumar, Ranjit tried to contest from Begusarai. But the Patna high court put a spanner in his works by refusing to grant him bail to file his nomination papers. There is no doubt that he will remain valuable in political circles for some time now, and once the legal loopholes are found, will even contest. The coming assembly elections in Bihar could be a good bet.

Ranjit and his kind seem to proudly proclaim that not external aids but a state of the mind makes Bihar what it is today. It would be quite wrong to think that this means the people of Bihar possess unparalleled cunning or are by nature crooked. It is probably because the opposite is true that things have gone so horribly wrong in this state. The average Bihari is a simpleton, complex or complicated things baffle him. He is thus the natural target of those who make up for his simplicity and naïveté with their intelligence and cunning.

But why do those who are marginally more intelligent than the average Bihari, take to crooked ways? It could be because the state has little use for their intelligence legally. Here we have a chicken-and-egg problem: is the current state of Bihar because of people like Ranjit, or have the Ranjits been led astray by the conditions in the bankrupt state? The question appeared even more valid when a practising physician of Patna known to be close to Ranjit, claimed that Ranjit was a blot on the reputation of Nalanda, which has produced the largest number of doctors and engineers in the state. But Ranjit and his friends must have played a major role in fetching Nalanda the distinction.

There is no easy answer to whether Bihar created Ranjit Don or the Ranjits made (or unmade) Bihar. There are just a set of contradictions that stare the beholder in the eye. The rickshawwallah on the streets of Bihar does not cheat his client, but a student has no qualms about using a proxy candidate or taking the help of Ranjit Don before his board exam. Bihar has one of the lowest literacy rates in the country, but one of the highest rates of success in the national civil services exam. It is possible for a Bihari politician to have Rs 2,100 in his bank account and a BMW in his garage.

The conundrum that is Bihar does not appear to be in a hurry to be solved.