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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  2014 polls: the BIMARU factor
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2014 polls: the BIMARU factor

Reference to BIMARU states has revived at a time when the outcome of the general election will be decided by these very states

A file photo of Ashish Bose, one of the country’s foremost demographers who passed away this month. Photo: MintPremium
A file photo of Ashish Bose, one of the country’s foremost demographers who passed away this month. Photo: Mint

Ashish Bose, one of the country’s foremost demographers, passed away this month, just a year ahead of what would have been the 30th anniversary of his coining of the term BIMARU: Bihar (B), Madhya Pradesh (MA), Rajasthan (R) and Uttar Pradesh (U). He had identified them in the context of the stickiness of their demographic statistics. Over the past three decades they have come to signify much more—a sad narrative of social and economic stagnation, which given their massive demographic size is now posing a drag on the rest of the country.

Reference to BIMARU has revived coincidentally at a time when the outcome of the ongoing general election will be decided by these very same states. This is because the electoral footprint of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the challenger to the two-term Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), is most dominant in these states. Between them these four states account for 174 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. The BJP’s challenge will be won and lost here.

If it wins then it would be because BJP under Narendra Modi would have hit the right note with its message of aspirations laced with the traditional appeal to social identity based on religion and caste. Like Bose, the BJP had rightly focused itself on these battleground states early in the campaign.

In his memoirs Headcount, Bose recalls how he had come up with the term in an attempt to impress upon policy planners—under the leadership of the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi—on the need to rework the existing population policy, which sought to replicate Kerala’s demographic experience across the country. According to him, Gandhi showed keen interest, and in 1985, within his first year of assuming power, sought a report on restructuring the family planning programme. One of Bose’s colleagues suggested the report should be restricted to one and a half pages. “I ignored those ridiculous suggestions....how could I compress my ideas on such a complex issue into one-and-a-half pages?" he wrote.

Instead, he coined the term BIMARU, which even three decades later has not lost its flavour. Bose admitted that in Hindi it translated into sick, but that was never the idea; even though these states accounted for the bulk of the poor in the country (and continue to do so). He classified these four states as “demographically sick"—indicators covering the average age at marriage, number of children per woman, practice of family planning, the maternal and infant mortality rates and life expectancy at birth were dismal. “I wanted to describe the crux of India’s population problem and therefore left out the smaller, demographically sick states," he recalled.

While Gandhi concurred in principle with Bose, the approach largely remained an unfulfilled blueprint. This was largely because Gandhi got politically distracted after his name was dragged into the alleged payoffs made to procure Bofors guns for the army.

What happened in the three decades since the coinage of BIMARU is that it has come to be used as a pejorative in policy circles to describe the laggards. It did not help that the status of these states worsened relative to the rest of the country after economic growth took off in the late 1990s and accelerated to record highs in the first decade of the new millennium. It is not that the demographic and economic statistics have not improved, but they have failed to keep pace with the rest of the country.

At the same time, with the country’s demography acquiring a younger profile, the electorate in these states has become restless. Failure of the economy to create an adequate number of jobs (on an average about 1.5 million of the 12 million added to the labour force every year are being absorbed), unabated inflation and, of course, governance failures has only roiled the circumstances further.

In this situation Modi’s appeal to the aspirations of the populace—by promising to fundamentally alter their circumstances—is proving to be compelling. In the past it has worked for Nitish Kumar in Bihar and helped him to work around the traditional divide of caste. If opinion polls are to be believed, then Modi’s appeal is poised to work similarly.

Assuming this message works and BJP indeed regains power after a decade, there is a message in Kumar’s experience as the head of a BIMARU state. People renewed their faith in him in the last state election, but the pace of promised change has been difficult to come by and, as a result, once again social identity is emerging as an influencing factor—captured in the resurrection of Lalu Prasad who had pioneered the Muslim-Yadav electoral formula.

If Modi has to succeed where Kumar is looking to fail, then the key is fixing the BIMARU states. Electorally winning them is the necessary condition. But resolving their vexing socioeconomic status is the necessary and sufficient condition for Modi to be able to deliver on his promise to alter the country’s political lexicon.

Anil Padmanabhan is deputy managing editor of Mint and writes every week on the intersection of politics and economics. Comments are welcome at capitalcalculus@livemint.com

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Published: 21 Apr 2014, 12:24 AM IST
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