Save Bihar before it turns totally lawless

Lawlessness is known to take many shapes and forms in Bihar. The latest episode of an attack on a group of schoolgirls on their campus by boys and their family members as revenge for the girls protesting against sexual harassment goes beyond the ordinary. The retaliatory attack by boys from a neighbouring school — who sneaked into their campus in Supaul district to write lewd slogans and were shooed out by the girls — raises fundamental questions about law and order in the state if a mob can so brazenly take the law into its own hands.

Caste issues are also suspected to be behind it, with the girls mostly from so-called lower castes suffering in the attack, with around 40 of them grievously injured from beatings with sticks, stones and rods and needing hospitalisation. The attackers slipped away long before the police came, and posting police guards later is like locking the stable door after the horse had bolted.

This is the second episode recently involving minor girls, which only shows the Bihar administration had learnt nothing from the horrors of sustained sexual attacks and exploitation in a slave trade, even murder, of girls living in a state-funded shelter home in Muzzafarpur that shocked the nation just months ago.

The brutal treatment and cynical manipulation of 34 girls at the home run by a politically influential person shocked the nation’s conscience. It also transpired that a monk had been harassing scores of students in Gaya.

The pattern of rising crimes against women in Bihar is made clear by such incidents involving scores of hapless girls from poorer sections of society trying to make something of their lives by seeking education. The Opposition is not wrong in pointing out that the State was surrendering to criminal elements or was acting to protect them.

The response from the State has to be far more noticeable, with the chief minister seen to be directing stringent action against such atrocities and violation of human rights.

The name that Bihar and its chief minister may have earned for good administration, which was said to have been pathbreaking when compared to an earlier era, is under severe scrutiny now. Action should be taken to round up all the adults who had accompanied the boys on the rampage with sticks and stones. The police has so far arrested mostly minors, and unless the village is hauled up for this mob violence there will be too little to instil fear for the consequences of breaking the law. The standard bureaucratic response of “strict action will be taken” will not suffice any longer.

Bihar is slipping back into a state of lawlessness, and these shocking events aren’t symptoms as much as the disease itself.