This week Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi brought ‘Bhaiyya’ back into the political business. Along with Congress party’s senior ally Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, CM Channi told the poll audience that he would not allow ‘Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi De Bhai’, who have come here to rule, to enter the state.
Bhaiya, literally a reference to an older brother, is a term of address to express respect for someone more experienced or wiser than otherwise. But when you address an autowallah or vegetable seller, or a stranger addresses you (if you are a man) using this word or received, it does not make sense.
In a metropolitan set-up, ‘bhaiya’ is often used for someone who is viewed as having a bureaucratic job or is employed in a blue-collar area. The original meaning of respect is that the word being addressed has been changed into a resident feeling of contempt for the person being addressed.
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Bhaiya is apt for a lift attendant, a rickshaw-puller, a construction worker who is cleaning your hands at the gate of a metro train station or a hawker who sells a pair of earphones at a traffic signal to boost your energy levels. Struggling to keep up. When you are returning home after a busy day at the office. But the same word ‘bhaiya’ is hard to hear in a five star hotel, pub or even at the airport.
The word ‘Bhaiyya’ is essentially part of an economic trend in India now. It emerged from economic inequality in development. But this economic inequality is also politics. The politics of ‘Bhaiyya’ probably took its roots in Maharashtra as Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray wanted to deepen his party’s roots from the Mumbai-Pune region.
Bal Thackeray’s original campaign was against South Indian migrants working in Mumbai. ‘Utho Lungi, Bajao Pungi’ was the initial slogan of the Shiv Sena cadre as they attacked madrasas – this is how it was addressed to all South Indian diaspora. The Madrasis were seen as taking away all the good jobs that the Marathis would have had in Mumbai.
In those days, in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘bhaiya’ had become a part of political vocabulary. It was found that ‘bhaiyas’ were taking all labour-level jobs, especially in textile factories in Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra.
These ‘bhaiyas’ were identified from migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar who were working in Maharashtra. He has been a target of the Shiv Sena and later its splinter group, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), Bal Thackeray’s nephew and Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s cousin. A series of attacks were launched on these ‘bhaiyas’ in 2008, which remained in the national headlines for days.
A highly acclaimed book, “Surplus Labor and the City: Study of Bombay”, published in 1976, stated that migrants from Uttar Pradesh were the second largest community of textile workers in Mumbai, after locals.
Uttar Pradesh and United Bihar being two of the most populous states in the country, there was always a surplus labor force for the industrially developing Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka or the agriculturally progressing Punjab and Haryana. Earlier, Kolkata was a strong attraction for job seekers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
While states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat and Punjab made rapid economic progress due to industrialization and the Green Revolution, Bihar simply failed to catch on. Its per capita income has either slipped or stagnated in proportion to the national average – from about 60 percent in the early 1960s to about 37 percent now. However, in terms of population growth, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar overtook the other states of the South, West and North.
More people meant more job seekers. Less economic growth meant less job creation. And the ever-increasing gap in literacy levels compared to the national average meant the migration of a huge labor force from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to the prosperous states of Maharashtra and Punjab.
These poor people lived in the slums of rich states or on agricultural farms, who had no political, social or economic interests. ‘Bhaiyya’ became a nation within the country on the target of leaders who fuel identity politics.
Attacks on migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in Mumbai in 2008, Gujarat in 2018 and Channi’s “not intended on them” remarks have led to the politico-economic failures of successive governments of two large Hindi-speaking states. .