War & Conflict: - Bihar

Bihar is a state located in the northeast of India that borders Nepal to the north. It is a predominantly agricultural state, almost 88.7% of the people in Bihar live in villages, so a majority of the inhabitants of the state live in villages sitting on plots of rich fertile land with lush undulating rivers intersecting the land, and providing water for the numerous paddy fields, and anything else that may choose to grow here, and to some extent it sounds like the ideal scenic paradise.

In reality however, Bihar is far from that, almost 33.7% or approximately one-third of the state’s population live below the poverty line. It remains one of the poorest states in India and that is partly due to the fact that the state is plagued with communal problems that is largely due to the uneven distribution of land.

The largest landowners in the state belong to the upper castes or the forward castes that make up only 15.5% of the population of the state, while the other castes that make up a bulk of the population own almost little or no land, and that striking disparity is the root of the problem.?

Communal and sectarian violence caused by the rift between the castes, centered around the ownership of land, is an all-too-common facet of Bihar, and that makes it ideal recruiting ground for the communists.

As recently as 2024 there were cases that involved the burning of houses, and that tends to suggest that communal and sectarian violence is still a problem that ordinary villagers in Bihar have to grapple with daily.

The most shocking case of sectorial violence in recent times occurred on the 19th of September 2024 in Krishnanagar in the district of Nawada when a land dispute turned violent, and a group of locals opened fire and set alight approximately 21 houses.

On the 21st of September, 2024, the Hindu reported that the number of killings over land has come down from 60% of all murders recorded by the state crime bureau to 46.69%. Despite the fact that the rate has gone down, it is still high, and it has to go down a lot lower before it can be said with any degree of certainty that communal violence is a thing of the past in Bihar.?

The present land ownership dilemma is a legacy of colonial rule, when land was leased to a group of people known as intermediaries in exchange for rent, a fairly common rental agreement in many parts of the world.

The system was known as the Zamindari system, and under the system, the British East India Company granted large tracts of land to intermediaries known as Zamindars, in exchange for rent.

Following the dissolution of the British East India Company in 1874, Britain assumed direct control of India, and the new establishment continued with the existing system, and the Zamindari system continued uninterrupted until British rule in India ended on the 14th of August 1947, and the ownership of the land or the titles to the land passed on to the intermediaries, and once the titles had passed these intermediaries became the rightful owners of the land, and all its chattels.

Some sort of state intervention over landownership may not be all that bad an idea, to counter the current threat of land-violence.

However, it is not all bad news for Bihar. The insurgency problems of the past seem to have abated somewhat, and the communists don’t seem to be making much headway. Everything said and done, there may still be light at the end of the tunnel.

Copyright ? 2025 by Kathiresan Ramachanderam