Scavenger Journalism

There is a peculiar confidence with which our TV anchors speak. They sit in studios colder than morgues, lit like wedding halls, and deliver predictions about Bihar as if they were reading God’s diary. In their telling, Bihar swings whichever way the studio breeze blows. But Bihar, ancient, stubborn, sly Bihar, does not swing for anyone. It remembers.

And there is one memory etched into Bihar’s bones: the years they call jungle raj.

You may dislike the phrase. You may find it exaggerated. You may treat it as propaganda. But in Bihar’s political subconscious, jungle raj is not a slogan—it is a lived chapter. It is the memory of lawlessness hanging in the night air, of guns taking precedence over governance, of young men disappearing into the shadow economy. The rest of India may have moved on, but Bihar’s voter has not. He keeps his memories like old receipts tucked into a rusted box.

So when our experts on television, those custodians of foreign editorials and stale analysis, declared that Bihar had turned its back on its past, they forgot one simple thing: Bihar never forgets its past.

This is why the average Bihari voter, who has seen both hope and horror, picks continuity over chaos. Give him fifty rupees a month that arrives on time, and he will reject the shiny promise of five thousand that disappears like smoke. Give him a system that creaks but functions, and he will shun the fantasy of instant paradise offered by those who helped create past nightmares.

But ask our media sages, and they will call this behaviour irrational. They only see Bihar through bias, distance, and their own ignorance. They do not see the scars.

Meanwhile, the RSS — an organisation profoundly disliked in those studios — understood what the studios cannot: that Bihar’s distrust of jungle raj is not manufactured; it is organic, generational, and enduring. The RSS did not rely on speeches or slogans. It relied on footsteps, conversations, chai stalls, and repetition. It relied on the wisdom that information from a familiar face carries more weight than a speech delivered from ten feet above the ground.

While the anchors were performing for the camera, RSS workers were sitting quietly in village courtyards, sipping tea, listening to stories of the past — and reminding people that the future need not resemble the jungle raj they escaped.

Some call this manipulation. I call it understanding the mood of the land.

The media, of course, continues to hover like scavengers around Western newspapers. The Washington Post calls something a crisis; our analysts faint. The New York Times sighs; our commentators collapse. No wonder their verdicts fail. They pick up yesterday’s scraps of foreign thought and serve them as today’s insight.

Reality, like Bihar’s voter, refuses to swallow that.

India is a country of courtyards, not newsrooms. A conversation at a tea stall carries more truth than three hours of prime-time debate. A neighbour whispering, “I have seen this with my own eyes,” outweighs the eloquence of ten political speeches. The old India, the India of instinct and lived memory, won in Bihar.

And that memory includes jungle raj — the fear of returning to a time when the night belonged to the powerful and the law belonged to no one.

This fear is not hysteria. It is inheritance. It is wisdom learned the hard way.

My metropolitan friends, fortified by air purifiers and imported water bottles, will never understand this. They were convinced the pandemic would destroy India. Yet the workers who walked eight hundred kilometres survived it. India’s body is stronger than its commentators. Its memory is sharper. Its judgement is older.

That is why Bihar voted the way it did.

Let me repeat a truth I’ve said for years: if a politician wants to win, he should pray that the media abuses him. Praise is venom. Criticism is oxygen. Prashant Kishor is a perfect example — a man who lives in the media but not in the soil. Bihar votes with its feet on the ground, not its eyes on a screen.

The Bihar election has issued a quiet obituary: the age of the political pundit has expired. Those who once predicted the nation’s mood can now barely predict their own TRPs. Bihar has told them gently but firmly to retire.

India is a civilisation too old to be fooled by theatrics. It remembers its traumas. It guards its stability. It rejects the siren call of jungle raj not because someone tells it to, but because it has lived through it.

And to those experts who still wish to interpret India without touching its soil, he might add: the next time you analyse Bihar, first learn to hear the sound of its fears — and the silence of its memories.

The voter remembers. The pundit forgets. Bihar votes accordingly.