Bihar gets its Samrat: Can the new Chief Minister chart a revival?

Samrat Chaudhary, the son of a seasoned politicians and a former member of the RJD, took over from Nitish Kumar as Bihar's 24th Chief Minister and the first from the BJP's stables. Can he use political stability and his personal popularity to bring about change in the beleaguered state?

On April 14, Nitish Kumar, Bihar's chief minister for a record ten terms, finally announced his retirement from state politics.

The septuagenarian, who entered the fray in 1974 as a member of Jayaprakash Narayan's revolutionary movement against Indira Gandhi's autocratic policies, took oath as a member of the Rajya Sabha on April 10, bringing down curtains on a two-decade long reign marked by rapid economic growth and stability yet marred by periods of opportunistic coalition politics and ill-tempered political mudslinging.

In his place arrived Samrat Chaudhary, a firebrand leader who quickly rose up the ranks as one of the BJP's strongest state leaders after joining the party in 2018. The son of six-time MLA Shakuni Chaudhary, Samrat initially joined his father's Samata Party but the entire family later joined Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal in 1999.

Samrat's political career with the RJD was a saga of disappointments. Initially made the Minister of Horticulture under the Rabri Devi government, he had to vacate the ministry in less than three months after a probe found him to be underage. In 2000, he won the Parbatta constituency to become a first-time MLA, only to lose his seat again in 2004 after a court found him ineligible. He lost the subsequent by-election and had to wait until 2010 to regain his stature as an MLA.

In 2014, Samrat joined Nitish Kumar's JDU just after Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party stormed into the centre as the nation's single-largest party. He was immediately appointed the Minister of Urban Development and Housing during the tenure of Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi and in 2018, joined the BJP where he rose to become the state unit's president in 2023 and ultimately the chief minister in 2026.

Samrat's elevation, blessed by an aging Nitish Kumar who had been increasingly withdrawing himself from public view, appears to be a consensus move to hold the BJP-JDU coalition together as the state government adjusts with the departure of a tall leader whose reputation was synonymous with that of his political party.

Samrat may be a convenient political choice, but will his tenure bring in long periods of political stability, growth and prosperity that Bihar desperately needs?

A cursed land of plenty

Bihar' story since independence followed decades of central neglect and domestic political upheavals that mirrored British apathy following the war of independence in 1857 which saw the colonial power view Bihari soldiers, then part of Bengal regiments, as particularly untrustworthy and disloyal.

The province came under British rule in October, 1764, following the disastrous battle of Buxar. The combined armies of Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, the Nawab of Bengal Mir Qasim, the Maharaja of Benares Balwant Singh and the Nawab of Awadh Shuja-ud-daula folded in less than a day against organised formations of an army fielded by the East India Company that consisted of less than 2,000 British soldiers.

The battle birthed decades of an inhuman Company policy of extraction that gave rise to waves of zamindari and peasant revolutions as the Company demanded fixed revenue payments for each bigha of land while paying little heed to waves of severe drought that left peasants impoverished and millions losing their lives to famine and disease.

The forced extraction gave the East India Company a vital revenue stream to finance its expansion across India, but completely collapsed the region's economy.

The final poison pill was a mandate to force farmers to grow indigo on 15% of their fertile lands - a crop of little value to native Biharis but a prized asset for the British who shipped indigo back to Britain to be used as a high-value dye for their booming textile industry. The rich, vibrant blue color from indigo crops was in great demand in Europe, and used in a variety of clothing from greatcoats to suits to navy uniforms.

The East India Company, and later the British empire, also made Bihar a gold mine for opium production. Millions of farmers were forced overnight to compulsorily grow poppy seeds which were then shipped to China to destroy the latters' opium industry and give the Company a monopoly on narcotics production.

Prices paid by the British to farmers for opium was so low that the money never covered the cost of cultivation or minimum subsistence. The empire flourished, but Bihar's millions of farmers, forced to grow cash crops they never consumed themselves or had the freedom to sell in the open market, were forced into utter penury or death.

Six years after the Battle of Buxar, the Bengal and Bihar provinces suffered a devastating famine that killed up to ten million people and severely affected 30 million people, a third of the region's population. The East India Company didn't reduce taxes, didn't try to find a solution to the problem, but continued to hoard whatever was left of the produce to feed its army.

The Great Famine of 1770 destroyed Bihar, its rich cultural and social milieu, its agricultural innovations, and the social cohesion that kept the once-great region united and relevant to Indian polity. Hungry and desperate men sold off their possessions to join the army to fill their stomach, the women and children had nowhere to go and died of starvation and disease, and the province ceded its reputation for self-sufficiency that continues to haunt it to this day.

Subsequent and recurring periods of famines and droughts over the next century further impoverished an already broken society. If that wasn't enough, the Company introduced the Permanent Settlement policy in 1793. The policy effectively turned farmers and peasants from landowners to field-ploughing mules. All the land was transferred to a selected group of zamindars who made the farmers till the lands, sold cash crops exclusively to the British and also paid fixed and exorbitant land taxes to the Company.

The policy was a perfect genocidal soup that ensured the Company continued to receive significant tax revenue from Bihar. Zamindars who could not pay their stipulated taxes had their lands auctioned, giving them little choice but to force farmers to produce more amid recurring droughts.

The population was made to turn against itself as the zamindars, rather than the British, emerged as the villains of the society, forcing the zamindars to carry out a series of armed uprisings against the continuing injustice. In 1781, the first-such uprising took shape, led by Fateh Bahadur Sahi, Raj Narain Singh and Raja Akbar Ali. It predicably failed against the military might of the company, leaving the broken, emaciated populace shorn of any avenue to extricate itself from the planned genocidal plunder.

The planned destruction of the handicraft industry through extortionate taxes and export restrictions also forced millions of artisans and craftsmen into peasantry, the sole industry from where the Company actually intended to procure goods. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Bihar was nothing but an impoverished supplier of raw materials, indigo, opium and farm produce exclusively for use by the British industry and the army.

The absolute destruction of agriculture and industry forced local young men to either disperse across the country for opportunities, a trend still seen today, or to join the East India Company's army. By 1857, tens of thousands of Biharis served in the Bengal native infantry regiment even as they faced severe racial and hierarchical prejudices. After the war, even that sliver of opportunity was taken away as the empire stopped hiring soldiers from the province given their active participation in the revolt.

When the British finally left India in 1947, India as a whole was grappling with intense illiteracy, poverty, malnutrition, a lack of industry, and a desperate financial situation. Even then, Bihar's per capita income lagged at 40 percent of the country's. Life expectancy stood at 36 years, the official literacy rate was below 14 percent (4.22 percent for females), malnutrition was rampant, and almost the entire population was engaged in agriculture, mostly as landless peasants and farm hands.

From British apathy to Gunda Raj

Much has been written about why a nation with stellar military and economic credentials like India fell so quickly to British trickery, but the fall of Bihar rankles the most. Blessed by the silky currents of the sacred Ganga, the Kosi and the Mahananda and their tributaries, Bihar is home to 95% of India's pyrite reserves and significant reserves of coal, iron ore, limestone, mica, quartz, gold, copper and uranium.

Amidst all the natural opulence lie the ruins of the province's social, cultural, historical, military and philosophical heritage. Much like the burnt out remains of the Nalanda, the Vikramshila and the Vaishali stupas that dot the rich, fertile plains, the promise of proven human endeavour has been paralysed and broken by widespread violence, corruption, divisions and the erosion of civilisational pride.

Such goes the story of a land that once hosted the world's greatest university that drew students from far and wide. A region home to the powerful Shishunaga, Nanda, Maurya, Gupta and Pala empires, the wisdom and guile of Chanakya and generations of learned scholars who taught emperors, wrote the shastras, and shaped a culture that dominated until the eighteenth century.

When a Chinese monk called Fa-Hien visited Pataliputra in the fifth century, he described the city as a prosperous, well-administered and peaceful one with a lenient administration and a well-behaved, honest, law abiding and religious citizenry that shunned violence and alcohol. The palace looked like it was built by spirits or gods, capital punishment did not exist and wealthy citizens ran free hospitals and rest houses for travellers.

Fifteen hundred years later, when I travelled from Delhi to Kolkata on the Rajdhani Express with my parents and sister, I was introduced to a Bihar that encapsulated the very definition of anarchy, a lack of structure, a lack of civil etiquette and propensity to violence that I could gather in my young years.

We avoided the train that traversed Patna, preferring the Gaya route that was faster and ran across the most beautiful hills and valleys nature could conjure. On the rare occasion when we had to catch a train that crossed Patna, I could easily make out when we entered and left the state. The train halted at stations where it wasn't supposed to, and our coaches suddenly filled up with scores of people pushing the reserved passengers to make room for themselves. They would invariably get off after a brief journey, mostly in Danapur or a station in the vicinity of Patna.

The terrifying hours we spent traversing Bihar left an indelible mark on my soul. We couldn't argue with the invading mob, we had no way of taking back our possessions were they taken away from us, there was nothing resembling a police uniform and I as a little boy could see the fear behind the silent faces of my mother and sister as they clung to the corner of their seats and looked out of the window, wishing the minutes away.

These experiences made me wonder about the lived experiences of people who spent their entire lives in the lawless state. Bihar was then under the iron grip of the Lalu Raj, often called the jungle raj, the gunda raj or the mafia raj that ran a reign of terror defined by waves of murders, dacoity, extortions, rapes, and financial corruption that made the state lose a semblance of prosperity it had gained post independence. By 2011, despite the Nitish Kumar government bringing in a measure of economic recovery, Bihar's per capita income still stood at 40 percent of the national average, same as it was in 1951.

Continued post-independence struggles

If the central government gave the state a glimmer of hope after independence by abolishing the zamindari system and giving farmers the ownership of their lands, it also took the state's greatest hope of prosperity away through the Freight Equalisation Policy of 1952. At the time, Bihar had rich reserves of pyrite, coal, iron ore, mica, bauxite, limestone and gold - enough for businesses to set up factories and production plants and usher in a new wave of industrialisation and human development.

Instead, the policy ensured that businesses could set up manufacturing plants anywhere in the country by subsidising the cost of transportation of raw materials. This led to major industrialisation in coastal states from where it was easier to transport goods abroad, and the likes of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Orissa continued to wait for industrialisation to arrive.

Governments in the centre also showed little interest in industrializing Bihar. As statistics showed, the state saw the arrival of some large-scale public sector enterprises, but central government funding towards industrialization in the state used to be less than half the national average in five year plan allocations.

A lack of political stability post independence also prevented the state from charting a path of incremental economic growth. Before Lalu Prasad Yadav arrived in 1990, Bihar had already seen 25 to 30 change of governments in 43 years, including several periods of president's rule. The fractured democratic process, marked by caste equations rather than economic goals, led to a breakdown in policy-making that kept the state running on handbrakes.

The twin poison pills of central government apathy and local government failure were things that the 86 million people of Bihar did not deserve after centuries of extreme hardship and societal collapse. As leaders fattened themselves through clever coalition politics and sent people straight into fresh rounds of political violence and savagery with promises of prosperity, the state suffered as educated and enterprising people left in droves, never to return again.

This was even before the decade-long reign of Lalu Prasad Yadav had begun. By the time Nitish Kumar took the chair of the Chief Minister in 2000, Bihar lay in ruins. The state's mineral-rich regions in the south were gone, and Bihar had attained a reputation of a region marred by strife, thuggery, casteism and murderous inclination that still clings to it like a leech on steroids.

The worst impact to the state's prospects had been the flight of skilled labour and the state's intelligentsia. Over 30 million Biharis - all educated, able-bodied and enterprising men and women, worked, bought homes and paid taxes in other states. Some recent government estimates place the figure at above 3 crore Biharis who live and work outside the state, and about 7 lakh continue to leave every year.

Bihar's baby steps towards reformation

Amidst these challenges, Nitish Kumar's reign, though interrupted at times by compulsions of coalition politics, saw Bihar undergo long periods of stability with violence kept to a minimum. The ruling JDU's long alliance with the BJP, especially after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister, saw the state bag big ticket investments, road and highway projects, and take benefits off Modi's centrally-funded agricultural, housing, infrastructure, power, transportation and energy projects.

One of the most promising investments arrived in the state in the form of the massive Electric Locomotive Factory in Madhepura on the banks of the Kosi, thanks to a joint venture between Alstom and Indian Railways in 2015. Built at a cost of Rs 1,300 crore, the facility churns out about one hundred 12,000 HP electric locomotives every year.

Other major completed projects included the Adani group's 2,400 MW ultra-supercritical thermal power plant in Bhagalpur, the Barner reservoir, the 192-kilometre Varanasi-Aurangabad six-lane highway, the Parna-Purnea expressway, a 20-kilometre long six-lane river bridge over the Ganga near Bidupur, the redeveloped Mahatma Gandhi Setu, the 125 kilometre four-lane Patna-Buxar highway, and the Patna-Gaya-Dobhi highway.

Though these much-needed projects served as initial building blocks towards making a prosperous state, Bihar until recently lacked monuments to connect with a once-glorious past whose memory faded long ago but whose stories still ring loud to this day.

The people of Bihar have survived appalling conditions for centuries. They now need a quiet place to reflect on their journeys, shed themselves of an innate fear and a sense of vulnerability that tormented them for ages, and prepare for a future replete with learnings from the past.

The Bihar Museum in Patna, spread over an area of over 13 acres and completed in 2015, new combines tasteful architecture with stories of an ancient past right up to 1764 when the East India Company won the Battle of Buxar. A walk through the great halls of the museum takes one through beautiful and ornate sculptures and designs crafted by skilled artisans during Magadha's days of glory.

"The mission of this grand endeavour is to bring every resident and non-resident Bihari to its vicinity and to cherish and take pride in our roots," the museum's mission reads. "The mission also is to enamour the whole world with the rich prospects our state has to offer. Also this is an endeavour to claim our rightful place in the present and future of the world by showcasing our glorious past."

Return of the Samrat

As Samrat Chaudhary takes over the mantle of the state from Nitish Kumar, he knows that he is possibly administering the best version of Bihar in five hundred years, or at least since 1764. The state has tasted the fruits of development, but the challenges that lie ahead of him are immense. Bihar doesn't just need its citizens to prosper, but also to redeem itself as a stable, efficient and orderly society Fa-Hien once wrote about.

If he seeks inspiration, he only needs to look back at the 1.5 million Biharis the British shipped to the Caribbean as indentured labourers to work on plantations in the 18th century. The hapless people took the long, arduous journey to Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius, Fiji, Guyana, Suriname and other parts of the island chain on creaking ships shorn of any luxury to find means to survive, and survive they did.

Those resilient Biharis worked ceaselessly amidst torture and racial discrimination, preserved their language, culture, food habits and way of life, and built prosperous societies over centuries that beautifully integrated with those of African indentured labourers shipped in from Africa. Indians now know many of them as successful cricketers representing the West Indies, but their successes encompass fields far beyond cricket.

Today, Trinidad & Tobago's prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar traces her roots to Buxar, Prime Minister of Mauritius Navin Ramgoolam's ancestors arrived from Harigaon in Bhojpur, the former Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth's ancestors hailed from Balia in Uttar Pradesh, and the ancestors of Suriname's former president Chandrikapersad Santokhi, who passed away on 30 March 2026, hailed from Bihar.

Bihar's utter lack of modernisation or development was not the fault of its enterprising people, and Samrat needs to look beyond narrow caste equations and political expediencies to chart a course that carries its people to prosperity like they did in far-off islands, completely disconnected from their native lands for centuries.

The immediate challenges are enormous. People in large parts of the state continue to suffer from multidimensional poverty with the per capita income hovering just over ₹50,000 annually. The state ranked lowest among 27 states on several Human Development Index markers such as infant mortality, child marriages, female literacy, and nourishment. An alarming 41% of girls are getting married before turning 18, and 28% of women have never attended school. One of the few bright achievements has been a reduction of the fertility rate to just 2.03.

Bringing up the per capita income and HDI indicators closer to the national average could take decades given the scale of the damage but effective policy-making, rapid industrialization and heavy investment in education and healthcare on a mission mode could reverse the trend much quicker given the sheer amount of natural resources, human capital and political stability the state now enjoys.

As a seasoned politician who grew up in a politically charged environment, Samrat has the knowledge and experience to set up a cabinet of efficient, dedicated policymakers who can work towards a shared goal. But in a state like Bihar where coalition politics, deep-rooted corruption, broken institutions, and a lack of funds continue to hamper growth, Samrat's path will be much tougher and the very institutions needed to rejuvenate Bihar need to be reformed first.

Revolutionary leaders across India etched their names in history through sheer will and strength of their personalities. Samrat has established his credentials as an influential party worker adept at coalition politics, but does he have the credentials to drive reforms through walls of bureaucratic and systemic barriers? Only time can answer those questions but Bihar, wounded and maligned by centuries of oppression and apathy, cannot afford another failure.