For these ‘baiyyas’ from Bihar, poll promises are made to be broken

Johnson Rai was selling vegetables at the Koyambedu wholesale market in Chennai when his phone rang on October 24. It was his brother from Purnia on the line. Amid the humdrum of haggling customers, the conversation was brief — “Papa has died.” It was a cardiac arrest.

Johnson nodded, cut the call, and went back to business. His father had been unwell for some time and Johnson, who works for a wholesaler dealing in exotic vegetables in the market, had been sending cash home. “Two days before he died, I sent home ₹20,000,” he tells The Hindu. 

After that call, Johnson took a metro to the Chennai airport, hoping to board a flight to Purnia. He had heard about the airport in his district but had never taken a flight before. “The person at the counter said there are no such flights,” he says. Flights to Purnia are available from Kolkata, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Delhi.

Johnson’s plight — which perhaps typifies every migrant worker, skilled or otherwise, in the country — is one of the central themes of this Bihar election. The BJP, JD(U), and the RJD have promised jobs and opportunities that will stem this ‘palayan’, or migration. Roughly, three crore Biharis work outside the State. But for these ‘baiyyas’ — as the word ‘bhaiyya’ is pronounced in Chennai where the consonantal sound /v/ is replaced by the softer /b/ (buh), thus enabling a Hindi word to seamlessly find its place in a Tamil speaker’s vocabulary — such poll promises are made to be broken.

‘It is a jumla’

And Deepak Kumar of Motihari knows it too well. A graduate, Deepak had tried his luck in Patna before going to Pune where he learnt moulding and worked in a factory for six years. He briefly returned home to be with his family and then took up the job of a security supervisor at a metro rail construction site in Chennai. “I have old parents and two children back home. No job in Bihar will pay me enough to support them,” he says. On being told about the RJD’s promise of one government job per household, Deepak laughs it off, saying, “Everyone knows it is a jumla (false promise). Leaders can say anything to get votes.”

His friend Jaggu, who later introduced himself as a “10th fail”, interrupts the conversation, saying, “We don’t need government jobs. Set up factories in Bihar.” He cites the example of the Tamil Nadu government that reaches out to foreign countries to invest in the State. “If industries come up in Bihar, we will work there and spend our money there. The State’s economy will automatically improve,” he says.

Both Deepak and Jaggu concur that the eastern States are India’s “labour factory”, and people from there build high-rises and infrastructure elsewhere, toiling far away from home for a few thousands. While joking, Deepak makes this point, rather poignantly, “It is only in Bihar, Bengal, and Odisha that you will find people who will leave their homes for a salary of just ₹10,000.”

Before arriving in Chennai, Jaggu had worked in Maharashtra and Karnataka — both industrialised States. He says that in the hinterlands of Bihar “koi kisiko jaanta hoga, jiske paas kahin koi kaam hoga” (“someone knows somebody who has something to offer somewhere”).

At the Koyambedu market, one such ‘somebody’ is Mohammed Aladdin who had come to Chennai from Purnia in 2016 as a coolie. Nine years later, Aladdin, who speaks fluent Tamil now, manages a wholesale fruit shop and recruits other workers from Bihar. “Hum isko bhi le aye hai (I have brought him too),” he says, pointing at a load worker waving from behind a heap of watermelons. 

In these polls, Aladdin is backing Tejashwi Yadav, but he does not buy the RJD leader’s government job pitch. “These people will say anything. After getting votes they will vanish, we all know that,” he says.

Unlike the other Bihari migrants here, Aladdin is rather well off and is travelling home to vote in the second phase on November 11. “I have an agent who will book a flight to Purnia via Hyderabad,” he says while fiddling with his phone to play a Bhojpuri song. Once his soiled Bluetooth speaker crackles to life, he signals his colleague to shut shop for the day.

But on the other side of the market complex, Johnson is still not done. The shop closes at 5 p.m. and he is busy arranging Chinese cabbages and zucchinis on the shelves. Asked what his plans are for the evening, he replies, “Kuch nahi (nothing).”

Johnson will sleep till midnight and, after a truck of vegetables is unloaded at 1 a.m., by two in the morning he will start selling vegetables again. His father has left behind a family of eight and for them Johnson must work — for the ‘baiyya’, unlike the netas, has promises to keep.