The Bihari Migrants: The Silent Burden-Bearers of Modern Civilisation

 **2003**

The word *Bihari*, in areas surrounding Delhi and the North Indian plains covering Haryana, Punjab and other states, wherever development works are going on, is spoken with a contemptuous grimace.

It is a big book of lawlessness, depravity, exploitation, class and casteism, poverty in the land of emigration.

Though the majority of Biharis belong to the species who give output, in terms of breakneck labour from dawn to dusk, in hugest multiplication to the few morsels of cheapest eatables they take two times a day.

Yet there are a few. We have to accept it as almost inevitable, given the law of poverty and destitution breaking the shackles of morality and conscience, truth, law and liberty.

They break the order of things and, in order to jump-start into the modern consumerist bandwagon, get a shortcut.

Enter the world of crimes.

And as one dirty face pollutes the entire pond, they take to their heels, leaving the entire class of Biharis branded as the evils of the age.

It becomes the title to their identity. The chapter head to their long, bitter hours, unremitting story of poverty, struggle and redemption, and final decimation in the inglorious filth of the dirty street.

These are the long, long passages of silent hard work of building private and public institutions, roads, apartments, airports, flyovers.

They are the silent, mute, highly efficient, uncomplaining mules of the modern age whose backs carry the burden of modern civilisation's building blocks.

There is a massive buildup of concrete and stone in the selected corridors scattered in the North Indian plains.

They are the creaking wooden wheels of the big country wagons which carry the modern materials.

Apart from the petty wages, what else do they get from the owners and users of these supermodern facilities?

These are the looks of scorn, blaming them for the rampant hood of crime in the area.

But modern crime needs modern teeth of organisation and sound management.

Individual dives by these poor, frustrated fellows into the pools of misery are oftentimes the first and last, which end in comparable misery for the perpetrators as for the victims.

Leaving behind their barren homeland for relatively better pastures, they now spread over the vast country, hiding on farms, in domestic circuits.

But their dirty shanties in the vicinity of their project sites appear, and now almost define, as the obnoxious blot on the face of the modern urban scene.

In almost every way they are unwanted, yet rather paradoxically wanted in almost every other way.

Every creation is born by a pleasure of its particular kind.

It is another matter that after its coming into being, it shows a certain displeasure of its own kind.