Vote Bharatiya Janata Party in the Bihar elections this month and you may get laptops, scooties, dhotis, sarees, e-literacy, power, roads and colleges. But under the broad rubric of development, the BJP’s vision document, released on Thursday, also contains promises targeted specifically at Dalit and Mahadalit constituencies in the state.


In an election branded by Lalu Prasad as a battle between the backward and the forward castes, the BJP seems anxious to shed its tag as the party of the upper castes. Earlier this week, for instance, senior BJP leader and Union minister Giriraj Singh had said that there would be no “sawarna” chief minister if the party came to power in Bihar.


Now, the vision document says that if you are Dalit or Mahadalit, you will get television sets and discounts at Atal Medicine Centres. If you are landless, you may get five decimals of homestead land. Though the BJP’s vision document is careful not to specify any one caste or community of the landless, it has been read as a move to reach out to the backward constituencies.


None of these ideas is entirely original. On land, in particular, the BJP merely seems to have ramped up schemes already in place. But while using land as a means to win over Mahadalits and other backward groups, political parties in Bihar have always had to walk a tightrope.


Citing land


Bihar, once part of the colonial Bengal province where the Permanent Settlement Act was in force for centuries, comes freighted with specific feudal structures and inequalities, as the zamindars who collected tax for the British also owned the land. The zamindari system wound up but the entrenched inequities remained, and being landless remained a feature of being Dalit, tribal or backward caste.


The early idealism of the Bhoodan Movement of the 1950s and ’60s, where large landowners were exhorted to donate part of their property for distribution among the landless, dispersed in a cloud of scams and thuggery.


Later efforts to redistribute land, like government initiatives to sign off plots to SC/STs and other weaker sections in the 1980s, did not meet with much success either. About 2.49 lakh landless people were given land deeds but most were unable to take possession or muscled out of their property.


In one of the radical moves made in his first term as chief minister, Nitish Kumar set up the Bihar Land Reforms Commission, which submitted its report in 2008 and recommended more efficient methods for the distribution of Bhoodan land as well as greater rights for sharecroppers and tenant farmers. As the report started to stir upper caste resentments, Nitish Kumar, possibly anxious to preserve his “coalition of extremes”, chose not accept the recommendations.


After Nitish Kumar’s backpedalling on land reforms, property for Mahadalits and other backward groups has come in the form of bounty doled out by the state government. But these plots are for homesteads. The more fraught question of agricultural land has been left alone.


Under a scheme launched in 2009-2010, 2.46 lakh Mahadalit families were identified in a survey and were promised three decimals of land. A sum of up to Rs 20,000 was set aside by the government for the purchase of each plot. Last year, the Nitish Kumar government announced that 2.21 lakh families had been distributed their plots and the remaining 25,000 would get theirs soon. He also announced that land records were being updated under the National Land Records Modernisation Programme, to make holdings transparent.


When Jiten Ram Manjhi was placed in the chief minister’s chair last year, he announced that the government would buy three decimal plots at circle rates and lease them out, free of charge, for 30 years, to landless Dalit families in urban areas.


Still dispossessed


Inevitably, these schemes suffered in implementation, the sense of dispossession among Dalits and Mahadalits did not go away and land marches still criss cross the state. In 2010, these marchers were asking for the Land Reform Commission recommendations to be put in place. In 2015, they were asking that the Forest Rights Act be implemented, the land rights of adivasis and of people holding titles to Bhoodan, ceiling and other government lands be recognised.


The BJP has promised to raise the three decimals to five, and left the number of beneficiaries open ended. But this plan is likely to face the same limitations as the schemes that preceded it, including the perception that political parties are willing to ensure land for Mahadalits and Dalits, so long as it does not disturb their upper caste support base.