People First International

Mauri lies deep in the countryside of Bihar in north-east India: a bone-cracking two-hour drive from the house my father grew up in. Two weeks after Manjhi's murder, 600 armed men crept through prickly cacti and delicate mustard flowers to reach the village. Before long they had it surrounded. Bullets began to clatter across the village while strings of dynamite were wound around two large brick homes; the families cowering inside were dragged out into the wintry sun. Before the homes were blown apart, two men, both from landowning families, were shot in the head.

Here on India's fertile Ganges plain, tit-for-tat murders are part of a long-running war in which no insult goes unanswered, no bloodshed unavenged. The violence dominates the lives of millions in Bihar, India's most poverty-stricken, lawless state. Manjhi was shot not because of what he had done but because of who he was: a Dalit, formerly known as an untouchable, living in a mud hut on the edge of Mauri. He worked as a bonded labourer in the fields of his killers, Bhumihar landowners whose large brick houses occupy the centre of the village. He drank from a different well, used a different temple and never strayed over the invisible line segregating Dalits from Bhumihars.

His crime was to fish in a pond deemed out of bounds by the landowning caste that controls the village. There was a seething tension on both sides in the weeks leading up to his death. His killers were members of a high-caste militia; his avengers leftwing guerrillas claiming to be champions of the poor.

The upshot is that Mauri has no more Dalits. Around 800 scattered in terror when the guerrillas withdrew, knowing revenge was imminent. Silence hangs over their 110 deserted huts. Beside the dirt track that leads out of Mauri, passers by point the way to a nearby colony of Musahars, the caste to which the Dalits belonged. Meaning, "rat eaters", the caste is the lowliest in Bihar. As we arrive in their makeshift quarters, a fast-gathering crowd of bent-limbed adults and children with scorched hair rush to explain how they were treated when they worked for the landowners. "They paid us just enough rice to fill our stomachs," says Ram Balak Manjhi. "There was nothing left to sell." He looks decades older than his 39 years. Mauri is his home, he says. Once the tension subsides, he will return.

Back in the village, I ask the wealthiest, paunchiest landlord what will happen if the Dalits return to Mauri. He inspects his pink, manicured nails and replies nonchalantly, "We'll kill them."

The state of Bihar contradicts modern India's optimistic vision of itself. "Bihar" has become an expletive, a butt of derogatory jokes made by people in certain metropolitan circles who have never visited the place. Underlying the ridicule is a potent fear in the minds of many Indians that Bihar is a template of what this ascendant economic power could yet become. It is also where my father comes from and where my family still live. It is the place where I was first taken in India; where I sat stifled and mute in dingy rooms, to be stared at by relatives with whom I had nothing in common but blood.

For India's burgeoning middle classes, Bihar is a byword for everything they most fear: feudal and caste cruelty, criminalised politics and grinding poverty. Most Biharis live in a state of penury that even parts of sub-Saharan Africa have left behind. Meanwhile, other states in India have begun to enjoy living standards that approach those in much of Southeast Asia. Bihar has potholes while elsewhere flyovers spring up. Rickety donkey traps line the roads - in a nation that worships SUVs. There is not a shopping mall, IT park or call centre in sight. So low, in fact, is the state's consumption of electricity that satellite images of Bihar, taken at night, show it as the heart of India's darkness.

For those who believe India is set to join China as the next economic superpower, Bihar reveals the width of the gap between rhetoric and reality. Industry has fled. The state's coffers are empty, leaving Bihar unable to provide for a population of 83 million. Almost a quarter of India's poorest people live here - and India has one third of the world's poor. If the country is to leap forward, Bihar must go with it.

Given the state's difficulties, you might think no outsider would ever want to go there. Not so. To millions of Buddhists, it is their Mecca, their Jerusalem. For Bihar is the land of the Buddha, the place where he found enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, where he spent most of his life teaching, and the place where he died. They come, from richer nations in the east and against the warnings of guidebooks, to follow in his footsteps. Most find Bihar's squalor shocking. The Chinese author Sun Shuyun writes of Bihar: "Today wild elephants and tigers have been hunted to extinction, and the ancient forests cleared. But the brutal reality of today's Bihar was every bit as frightening as wild animals would have [been]."

It was all so different when my father left Bihar in 1962. Then, it glistened with promise. Though one of India's poorest states, it was the starting point for great shifts in the country's history. Bihar gave the nation its first president: it was here Mahatma Gandhi raised the flag of revolt. And, in the words of American academic Paul Appleby, the state had the "best administration" in the country. Budding intellectuals from across north India were drawn to its medical schools and universities, whose degrees were the country's most highly rated.

My father was 28 when he came to England, leaving a wife and child behind in India. He planned to return to them after a few years of medical studies, but that changed when he met and fell in love with my mother, a teacher from Somerset. His decision to stay with her caused such family tumult that my father didn't return to Bihar for 25 years. Once a dutiful and adored eldest son with a future mapped out for him, he became the family pariah: divorce, disobedience and miscegenation were all taboos.

Marriages in our family had always been within the Rauniyar Vaishya sub-caste. In the intricate system that is more fundamental to India than race is to America, my family's caste is traditionally made up of petty shopkeepers and stallholders. Although education lifted my grandfather's generation into medicine, engineering and academia, caste continued to dictate their family ties.

In England, my father escaped its reach (and instead ran into racism). Yet caste has persisted as both an identity and menace in the lives of the family he left behind. My aunt and uncle have become life members of their caste's national federation. They travel miles on Indian railways to attend conferences on how to "uplift and better the community": exactly as my grandfather had done as the organisation's secretary in the glow of independence.

Growing up in Britain, caste had no resonance for me. I first visited India and met my Bihari relatives when I was 16, with my younger sister Anna and my parents. On reaching Khagaul, the village where my father grew up, Anna and I were staggered by its resemblance to Jorvik, the Viking settlement in York we'd not long before visited and which recreates the England of a thousand years ago. We were shaken, too, by the chasm of culture and bitterness between our half-sister and us. But caste, at that time, was invisible to me. It was only when I began living in India that I realised it is the basic building block of society in Bihar, affecting their dress, their marriage, their political party.

The flavour of India's democracy differs greatly from state to state. After my father left, Bihar grew fiery with a new politics based on caste rights. Democracy lent power to people from lower castes, who form the electoral majority, and in the 1990s they made the most of it. Lower-caste rule in Bihar was unimaginable for my father when he lived there. In his time, the upper castes cornered the bureaucracy and the patronage that flowed from it. The Dalits managed to eke out an existence thanks to government jobs and education quotas, but for the great mass of people in between there was nothing.

"We were stuck in the middle, so we didn't have any advantages at all," my father tells me. "There was horrendous discontentment that you had to be upper caste to get anything in life."

For the first few decades of India's life, the Congress party of Jawaharlal Nehru - dominated by wealthy, upper-caste, English-speaking intellectuals - ruled almost unchallenged. There was little space for earthier politicians, who began to organise into groups defined by linguistic, religious or caste identities. In Bihar, new regional parties voiced the bitterness of low-caste peasants about the routine atrocities of upper-caste landowners. Several neighbouring states had introduced land reform; in Bihar, with no legal path to prove ownership, disputes over land were settled through the barrel of a gun. In the early 90s, resentments spilled over into party politics.

That rising indignation finally became the silent revolution that swept the Congress party - created by Gandhi and Nehru - out of its north Indian homeland. By 1996, the national parliament contained more parties than ever before, most of them elected from the regions. However, instead of dissolving caste injustice, the new rulers have cornered special privileges for their own particular "backward" community. Bihar's haves and have-nots have been pitched against each other.

How this translates into everyday events is recorded on the pages of India's newspapers. On the day I arrive in Bihar's capital, Patna, there is news that a 14-year-old public schoolboy has been kidnapped for ransom in broad daylight, and a 60-year-old jeweller has been shot dead and robbed while driving in the morning rush hour. By the end of the day, another schoolchild has disappeared. Kidnapping for ransom is said to be Bihar's only growth industry. It is worth millions of pounds in a state in which average incomes are little more than 50p a day. As many as six people are reported abducted each day, though the actual number could be far higher because victims' families usually pay up, fearing reprisals if the police are alerted.

With caste continuing to determine individual wealth in Bihar, most extortion victims are from well-heeled, upper-caste families. Commonly, Bihar's politicians have a hand in the crime and reap the profits. In the absence of businesses offering donations, politicians hook up with local dons and recoup campaign expenses by extorting money from individuals. A fifth of parliamentary candidates in the 2004 general election had had criminal charges filed against them, including for murder and kidnapping. The only bar on candidates standing for election is if they've been convicted. Given that lawmakers have become lawbreakers, it is unsurprising that cases run for years, with few resulting in convictions.

The threat of extortion has made guns commonplace: an armed guard patrols my family's favourite sweet store; another stalks the windows of a photographic studio. In one of the city's wealthy private doctors' surgeries, Dr Ravindra Naryan Singh sits at his desk between an examination table and a loaded double-barrelled gun. He demonstrates how quickly he can reach it, adopts the aim position and laughs wickedly at the paradox. "Yes, I'm prepared to kill people if I have to."

Singh has himself been the target of death threats and extortion demands, and now lives in a security cocoon. A small closed-circuit television screen nestles between models of the knee joint and spine. A bodyguard with a pistol at his waist leans on the desk. Patients are searched and have to pass through a metal detector at the waiting room door. Police and private guards watch Singh's home around the clock, and escort him to and from work. At public functions, he is never without a bulletproof vest. "I can't succumb to these people's threats, because I can't change my place of work at this time of life."

Singh, 57, was born and raised in Bihar. He spent six years working in Britain before returning 22 years ago to build his thriving orthopaedic practice. "I came back for the love of the place. But I can't expect my son to stay. What sensible person would?"

Mohindra Prasad, a 72-year-old retired engineer, sits on his front lawn amid well-tended chrysanthemums in one of Patna's middle-class districts. He is not a rich man, but in a state as poor as Bihar his new Suzuki car signified relative wealth to a gang of kidnappers who abducted him during his evening jaunt to the bridge club last May. They blindfolded him and shunted him between hideouts outside the city, barely feeding him. "They were so fearless," he recalls. " 'Why should we fear anyone?' they said. 'We're working for the big guns ruling the state.' "

Prasad himself has an unnerving calm. When the kidnappers demanded 10m rupees (£125,000), he told them, "Forget it. Just shoot me now."

In the end, a ransom equivalent to £4,500 was scraped together through a private loan and donations from family and friends. The kidnappers instructed Prasad to tell the police and media that he'd escaped. "That's what they tell everyone to say, but don't believe it. If they come back, then they've always paid up."

To understand how my family's home state became this way is to grasp the contradiction of Indian democracy. It granted political equality - the principle of one man, one vote - to a society without the principle of one man, one value. In the years after my father left, two responses to the problem evolved: one was street politics, the other ambitious policy-making.

My uncle led the latter. Now 76, retired and living in Patna, Ram Nandan Prasad was, the last time we met, heading the biggest affirmative-action programme the world has seen. As India's first chairman of the National Commission for Backward Classes, he spent three years from 1993 travelling the length and breadth of the country, sifting India's socially privileged from its oppressed and putting in place reservations for lower castes in government, education and jobs.

I stayed with him for several weeks when I visited India in 1996, unaware that I was witnessing a man directing a government-sanctioned people's revolt. He told me why he'd never want to live anywhere but India, about the greatness of Gandhi, the strength of Hinduism and why, as a woman in India, I should never drink alcohol in public. I gave him potted insights into Britain, where he had never been but about which he was exhaustingly inquisitive and well read. When he wasn't working, we visited family and friends in his white Ambassador car and strolled around his beloved cactus collection in his government residence in Delhi.

He was not a politician - although the post gave him cabinet status - but a retired judge, only the second member of his caste to have risen to Bihar's high court. He had met, face on, the practice of high-caste patronage in the judiciary.

Now it is early evening, under a pink sky, when I reach his home and see him anxiously leaning out of a window, waiting for me. He is concerned about my safety. Acquaintances of his have recently been kidnapped and neighbours were robbed at gunpoint not long ago. Patna is his home town, but he doesn't know whom to trust. My aunt, Sahanna, never goes out after dark. Their daughter, Anupama, will not let her 10-year-old son play outside, as she herself once did, for fear he may be abducted.

"Bihar was not so different from the rest of India when you last visited," my uncle says. In the intervening years he has watched time unravel reform. Healthcare, schools, drinking water and roads have regressed, he says. State hospitals don't have medicines or operating facilities; schools don't have teachers because they haven't been paid for months. The electrical factories, mills and pharmaceutical companies have closed down or moved elsewhere. The only growth area is private schools and clinics, for the few who have prospered.

For my uncle, most tragic of all is the criminalisation of Bihar's politics, where elections are won by a show of brute strength. The reservations he implemented were intended to create a more just society but, unwittingly, bestowed caste categories with political identities. Politicians from low-caste backgrounds boast of their "backward" origins, building constituencies through unashamed pledges of favouritism.

The man who personifies this political sea change is Laloo Prasad Yadav, who effectively ran the state from 1991 until the end of last year. His wife, Rabri Devi, took over his title of chief minister for the last eight years, after he was charged with corruption. A key political figure, he is now India's minister for railways, running the world's second biggest workforce. Outside Bihar, at the dinner tables of India's well-to-do, Laloo is derided as an uncouth yob responsible for Bihar's calamitous decline. For the millions of low-caste Biharis who have voted him into power for the past 15 years, Laloo is one of them: the son of an impoverished village cattle herder, raised in a mud hut, their champion, who crushed centuries-old upper-caste tyranny.

Laloo belongs to the Yadav caste, which falls into the same "backward" category as my family - the largest bloc in Bihar's demography. Although he amassed votes from all lower castes and Muslims with his promises of social justice, it is the Yadavs whom Laloo catapulted into power.

I visit Laloo while he is de facto chief minister. When I reach his compound, built around a colonial mansion in the heart of Patna, he is sitting outside on a wicker chair, wagging ringed fingers at Indian TV reporters quizzing him about the kidnapped children and how he rates his chances in the imminent state elections. His head is wrapped with cloth, in the traditional rustic way of Bihar's villagers. On his feet, however, are spotless white, dainty shoes.

I tell him my family are Biharis living not far from his compound, that they are anxious about the rising lawlessness and the disappearance of hospitals, schools and roads. But before I can finish, Laloo cuts me dead. "The privileged ruling class have been fighting with me for 15 years," he says. "Their mentality is feudal. They've misbehaved, exploiting us for centuries. I was grazing buffalo, and because I'm now in government, they're always blaming me."

In short, Laloo paints my family's complaints as high-caste resentment. I have not revealed their caste, nor that he knows my uncle and is in my cousin's wedding photographs. He tells me I speak very good English. I tell him I've had a lot of practice. "In my house when I was growing up, there was no one even literate," he retorts, always ready to boast of the "backwardness" that sustains his political identity and electoral support.

He gives me a guided tour of his compound, in which he has crafted a Vegas-style version of rural Bihar featuring a sumptuous shed for his 200 cows and two majestic Arabian horses, which he theatrically demonstrates he can control with a whisper. I ask what he has given Biharis. "Communal harmony: there has been no rioting, and in my work for the weaker sections of society, I've given courage to Dalits and backwards."

In Khagaul, the market town near Patna where my father grew up, poor Biharis say Laloo gave them what no one else has: self-respect. One shopkeeper tells me that landlords no longer rape low-caste women with impunity; another man says that when Laloo visits a village, he shuns the homes of the rich and sits and eats with the poor.

What he hasn't delivered is development. And if he did, the social churning that comes with economic progress would undermine the ancient feudal divisions that ensure political allegiances. Laloo has held Bihar static by paralysing the state. He flies across its green fields in a fleet of private helicopters, but famously chortled to a group of farmers who begged him to build a road to their village, "Whatever for? Where are your cars that you need roads?"

You can see evidence of the state's inertia everywhere: in a Patna school 400 barefoot children have one teacher between them; there are no traffic lights on its streets, no sewers, and rubbish collection is via families of scavenging pigs. It is an inertia that has consigned 22,000 state employees to a limbo in which people turn up for work in offices that no longer function, to do jobs for which there is no money. Bihar is India's least urbanised state.

In the dank, cavernous workshop of Bihar's redundant transport corporation, I meet Dwarika Paswan, standing solemnly in front of an oily old engine as if it were a grave. Hired 30 years ago to repair a then-healthy fleet of public buses, Paswan has had nothing to fix for a decade. So he turns up for work and sits idle for eight hours a day by the machine tools he once operated. For his efforts, he receives a quarter of his £100 monthly salary, last drawn in full 17 years ago. Already a poor man, the 52-year-old has become destitute. He is owed thousands in unpaid wages, he says. To stay afloat, he took out loans and removed his children from school. He and 300 colleagues continue their absurd routine, he says, because if they walked away, the state would dismiss them and never repay its debt.

Since I visited Laloo, state elections have put an end to his 15-year rule - but not to Bihar's status as India's dead weight. Although Laloo's successor, Nitish Kumar, also a member of a "backward" caste, has pledged to reverse its fortunes, Bihar's problems persist. Starved of investment, its public services have ossified; caste still saturates its politics.

Those who can walk, do. My cousins, nieces and nephews have all fled to India's booming cities where there is opportunity and where they intend to stay. My aunt Renu tells me she is relieved that my cousins are settled hundreds of miles away from Bihar, in places of safety and hope. She and her husband, my father's younger brother Ravindra, now live alone, rattling around the rapidly dilapidating building in Khagaul that once bustled with extended family and doubled as my grandfather's surgery.

I never met my grandfather - my first trip to India was in the aftermath of his death - but his legacy within the family is of a highly respected doctor, to whom poor, sick Biharis would travel for treatment, whose standing gave status and income to everyone under his roof.

My grandfather's betterment began in Darbhanga Medical College Hospital in the north of Bihar, where he trained as a doctor in the 1920s. It was there he met my grandmother. I grew up hearing my father's memories of the fun he had in Darbhanga when he visited from Khagaul as a child: being spoiled by his mother's family, who were shopkeepers and showered him with sweets; playing in the grounds of opulent marble palaces amid the lotus ponds of the town's princelings. As a boy, he travelled to Darbhanga by ferry across the river Ganges, followed by a slow train ride through the night. I went by road, over a mile-long bridge that has since been built across the river and through acres of blooming, flat fields which flood each monsoon.

My father had told me he remembered the college hospital to be "neat, modern and spacious, with roads dividing lawns". Instead, I find it ruined: no longer a place of promise or transformation for students. Stray dogs run through the corridors of the casualty wards, rusting ambulances are grounded in a swampy bog, syringes litter open sewers outside the wards and on squalid mattresses lie frail, destitute patients, desperate enough to risk their lives in a hospital so starved of money it can't afford to feed them.

I ask a harassed medical student, Dr Ranjan Kumar, if he plans to stay working in the state, as my grandfather did, once he qualifies. "No, no. Not in Bihar," he says, panicked at the thought. "I have to achieve a lot in my life. I can't do that here."

As I walk away, I look back at the shattered windows of the outpatients' department, below which piglets guzzle on strewn medical waste, and I am thankful that my father is not here, with me, to see it.