Bihar Elections: Baisi’s Tarabari Village Exposes Nitish’s Claim of Development

Kishanganj (Bihar): Want a glimpse into Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's claims of ‘development’? Let’s visit this village in Purnea district’s Baisi Assembly constituency, which is going to polls in the final and third phase of elections on November 7.

Sandwiched between two rivers — Kankai and Mahananda -- Tarabari village has no roads and bridges connecting it to the world. When the two rivers swell every year between March and July, the entire area gets submerged. The flood waters erode the soil, and at its worst, forces people to shift their houses. Even in this year’s floods, around 200 houses were washed away. Floods have made villagers relocate five times in the past 46 years.

For a visit to Tarabari village, which has a population of 15,000, one needs to park the vehicle near Baisi town, walk down the sandy and muddy river bed for around four kilometers, cross the river with the help of a manually operated boat, descend again on a sandy and muddy stretch for the next three-four kilometres before reaching the village.

A road passes from another corner of the village to connect it with the nearest towns of Baisa, Amour, Baisi, Banmankhi, Barhara and Bhawanipur. This road, if it can be called so, after around two kilometres, vanishes into the water streams of Kankai.

Mohammad Tahzeeb, a resident of the village, says poverty and living like nomads are part of his life. “I and many others fellow villagers have faced difficulties since childhood. I bought small pieces of land with my hard-earned money several times to lose them to the river,” he tells NewsClick pointing toward the river that had swallowed the plots he had bought so far.

Though most of the villagers in Tarabari earn their livelihood in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, Tahzeeb stays back in the village and works as a daily wager because his two children are young and there is no one, except him, to look after the family.

Md Badruzzaman says the village has been a “living hell” since 2017 when a devastating flood caused large-scale damage. “Since then, we face floods every year. The river keeps changing its direction, engulfing hundreds of houses and new areas of the village into it. The soil erosion turns the patches into river,” he says.

“We have already lost over 100 acres to the river. We met our MLA (Haji Abdus Subhan of the Rashtriya Janata Dal or RJD) and MP (Jawed Azad of the Congress) several times, pleading with them to ask the government to divert the river that submerges our livelihood. But our repeated pleas were not heeded,” he says.

A bridge was proposed from Tarabari to Janta in Baisi when Mohammed Taslimuddin was elected as MP in 1996 and became a Union minister. But the construction of the bridge never began. The proposed site was later shifted to Amaur where a partial bridge has come up, but it is still incomplete. The construction work is facing a technical problem because the riverbed episodically shifts every year, turning the land into the river’s mainstream.

Manzarul Haque could build a three-room house with small savings from 20 years of hard labour as a daily wager in Bihar and Rajasthan. But the devastating floods this June and August snatched the roof over his head, as his house was washed away by the rising river.

Recounting the horror of the August night when flood water entered his house, Taslimuddin says: “There was hue and cry everywhere in the dead of night. As the water entered the village, we started vacating houses and running for safer places with children and elderly people. Majority of us could not even get the time to take out our household belongings, such as beds, clothes, utensils and food grains. In a matter of minutes, our houses disappeared forever,” he says with tears in his eyes.

“Now, I am temporarily living on a piece of land owned by a fellow villager. How will I be able to secure a permanent roof over our head?” he asks, adding that “it seems to be impossible given the little monetary earning, which is even insufficient to make ends meet”.

Shah Alam, a resident of the village who works with a flower shop near Ajmer shrine, lost everything along with house in the floods. “We were sleeping when the water entered our house. By the time we could do something, we were in waist-deep water. We somehow managed to save our lives. We saw my house, which had got constructed after years of savings, falling into the river because of heavy soil erosion caused by the flood,” he says.

Every second person in the village has the same story of destruction to narrate. But this isn’t enough. The health facilities available to the village only lay bare the sorry state of affairs. There is no government hospital, not even a primary health centre in the Baisa Tehsil under which Tarabari and other neighbouring villages fall. There is one primary health centre in faraway Amour.

“In case of a medical emergency, we have three options: depend on jhola chaap doctors (quacks), take the patient to a hospital in a town on a charpai (a traditional woven bed). This is done with the help of at least four people who carry the charpai on their shoulders and cover the distance till the river bank and then cross the rivers through boats, which is extremely difficult. The third option is to let the person suffer, or even die,” says Rajender Sah.

Asked how people gather the courage to live in this village, Tulsi Lal Sharma said there was no other option. “Most of the people here depend on farming, which is also tough because the flood water washes away everything they sow in their fields. Because of poverty, they cannot shift to towns. We have become used to it. We do everything for survival,” he said.

The village panchayat is considered a comparatively literate one as compared to other villages in the region. It has 15-20 government employees (mostly teachers), 25-30 graduates and 4-5 peers (religious scholars). Some youth of the village have moved to Delhi, Kota and Madhya Pradesh for technical education. The Tarabari panchayat has four primary, two secondary and one higher secondary school. There are two colleges in the entire Purnea district for a population of around 18 lakh.

“We cannot send our daughters to colleges because of the long distance and absence of any means of communication. One can reach here from September to March or maximum till May. After that, the entire panchayat gets cut off from rest of the district because of floods. People do not want to marry their daughters with boys in our village because of the connectivity problem,” says Monazir Ahmad, former sarpanch (village head) of the panchayat.

According to him, the devastating floods in Kosi, Mahananda and their tributaries every year have pushing inhabitants into social, economical and educational backwardness.

“There is no other way but to migrate. Even those who have land are not able to produce because of floods,” he says.

All of them are extremely unhappy with their MLA, who, they alleged, never visited them. They say they will vote for anyone, but to the current legislator who trying his luck for the fourth consecutive term.

“Neither our MLA, nor MP did anything for the welfare of the village. The two could not even spare time to visit us when the erosion took place. We don’t have roads. There is no bridge to connect us to the town. Baisi is our nearest town, which is around seven-eight kilometres. But we don’t have any road to go there directly, except crossing the river through the boat. If we take an alternate route, the distance rises to 50-60 kilometres. But our representatives have nothing to do with our sufferings. Therefore, we will teach them a lesson in this election,” say the villagers.

“We voted for NDA’s Santosh Kushwaha and he won the 2010 Assembly polls. But he never showed up. He later joined the Janata Dal (United) and successfully contested Lok Sabha elections. In the bypoll, we supported RJD’s Haji Subhan but he also did nothing. We tried all parties but it has been of no use to us,” they said.

The MLA, too, accepted that nothing has been done for the village, but defended himself.

“I did that whatever I could do in the time I got. There was no road in the village panchayat. I extended two PCC roads being built by the mukhiya by 500 and 550 feet,” he told NewsClick.

Other candidates and government officials could not be reached for comments.

Muslims constitute over 40% of the total voters in Baisi, of which Tarabari is a part. The rest include yadavs and mahadalits.

Three Muslim candidates are in the fray from here. They are Haji Subhan from the RJD as Mahagathbandhan (RJD-Congress-Left alliance) candidate, Syed Ruknuddin from the Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Muslim Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and Israil Azad from Pappu Yadav’s Jan Adhikar Party.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (which is in alliance with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar-led JD-U) has fielded Vinod Yadav as its nominee.

There seems to be triangular fight on the seat between the AIMIM, the Mahagathbandhan and the BJP.

In the 2015 Bihar Legislative Assembly election, 12 contestants were in the fray for the Baisi Assembly seat. It was a one-way contest with RJD’s Abdus Subhan winning by a huge margin of 38,740 votes.

The top three candidates split 72.3% of votes between them. Rashtriya Janata Dal's Abdus Subhan got a total of 67,022 votes, while independent candidate Binod Kumar secured 28,282 votes. Jan Adhikar Party (Loktantrik)'s candidate Syed Ruknuddin Ahmad grabbed the third spot with 21,404 votes. The top three parties got 41.5%, 17.5% and 13.3%, respectively.