‘Ek Bihari sau pe bhaari’: This is a phrase I have heard hundreds of times growing up in a Bihari household. While the phrase echoes the pride of coming from a state rich in culture and knowledge, it is marred with something deeper – the fight to survive and the shame that comes with it.

Being a 90s kid, the horror stories of Bihar aren’t something unfamiliar to me. The history of my homeland was always told to me in quiet whispers – the kidnappings, the caste wars, and the corruption seemed like a part of the culture to me. Bihar seemed like a place you’d live in only to leave, which is what my parents did. This is why reading Mrityunjay Sharma’s Broken Promises wasn’t a jarring experience for me, it was a familiar story of distorted idealism in a broken state, a story I have been hearing since I was a child.

The cynicism and chaos highlighted in Broken Promises wasn’t unsettling because it was familiar, but because of how current it sounds. Credit where credit is due, Bihar has come a long way in terms of education, infrastructure and even aspiration – yet the mindset that feeds caste, poverty and political dependence hasn’t moved an inch.

Sharma’s book – which primarily explores the journey of Bihar from 1990 to 2005 – opens with the movie-esque success story of a young politician, Lalu Prasad Yadav. A young, oppressed man born into a family of poor farmers in a small village in Gopalganj fights against caste-based politics to become the Chief Minister of Bihar – this story is a real reflection of the aspiration in each Bihari’s heart.

The theme soon shifts from the rise of a politician to the downfall of a state, how the man fighting against socioeconomic biases in the state fueled caste-based violence and one of the biggest financial scams the country has seen.

Broken Promises delved into the real-life version of the iconic film Gangs of Wasseypur, describing a state where criminals were backed by political clout, wielding desi kattas and carrying out gory murders without major consequences – an action driven purely by caste-based politics.

One of the most disturbing incidents described in the book was the murder of G Krishnaiah, a 37-year-old IAS officer who was the District Magistrate of Lalu’s own Gopalganj. The officer was pulled out of his car, beaten to a pulp and then shot dead in 1994 by a mob led by gangster-politician Anand Mohan. It was an incident that came to symbolise Bihar’s complete collapse of law and order.

I remember hearing stories from my parents narrating the blatant disregard for law and order in Bihar back in the 90s. My mom often told me how top bureaucrats once walked into the office of the Chief Minister with duffel bags full of cash, demanding the removal of my maternal grandfather from the top post of Principal Chief Conservator of Forest in Bihar.

I often heard stories of extortion and lawlessness, how people were abducted from inside their homes, their possessions looted in broad daylight, their rights taken away in the blink of an eye. However, both my mum and Sharma’s book told me the same thing – this was Bihar in the past, things have changed now.

While reading the book, I remembered a small piece of news from 2023, about how the Bihar government tweaked the prison reform rules leading to Anand Mohan and his aides walking out of jail despite their life sentences. The move, which sparked up a massive political uproar, was purely fueled by appeasement – a clear reflection of how Bihar is still driven by political rivalries and caste, 35 years later.

While I grew up listening to stories of a lawless state, I have seen Bihar change before my eyes in the last decade. My ancestral locality of Rajender Nagar in Patna, earlier just a small refugee colony with little to no amenities, now has 4-lane roads, developed housing societies, educational institutes and any other sign of development a layman looks for.

As captured best by the end of Mrityunjay’s novel, the Bihar we see today doesn’t function in the same loud chaos, it now moves forward with a quiet ambition.

The people of Bihar have changed too, holding education and employment higher than appeasement politics. Be it a young teenager in a small government school or a middle-aged PhD holder, each person in Bihar is well informed, away from propaganda and in touch with the ground reality of the state.

And the ground reality immediately puts into perspective how Bihar operates through a series of systemic failures – the third most populous state in India has the highest unemployment rate and lowest per capita income.

Despite change on paper, the basic issue in Bihar remains the same. It remains a state which pumps out a large chunk of academically gifted intellectuals and bureaucrats, but rarely gets anything in return. Nearly every person chasing education in Bihar strives to move out of Bihar, as if aware of how progress stands still in the state.

It’s as if Bihar’s progress is destined to happen elsewhere – in Delhi boardrooms and UPSC ranks – not from the soil it was born from.

Even though Broken Promises leans more into the past, the upcoming assembly election makes it read more like a habit. The caste lines Mrityunjay speaks of haven’t vanished – they are simply more polite now, layered beneath development slogans.

The author also subtly identified how Bihar’s favourite habit is ‘Bakaiti’, the habit of all talk and no bite which is the undoing of the state. Everyone knows how to talk of progress and change; no one wants to outgrow the politics that feeds on division.

The real tragedy isn’t that Bihar hasn’t changed, it’s that we refuse to trust the change. For every young person who leaves the state, there is a quiet, lifelong labour of justification – explaining how the state still struggles, why the old narrative still lingers and why being a Bihari feels like carrying both pride and apology in the same breath.

Bihar, for me, isn’t just its politics, it’s the acceptance of it. The divisive caste debate is now comfort, poverty is now a policy, and the state has now stopped demanding better. Every five years, new alliances are built on the same fault lines, and each generation learns that survival, not transformation, is the only realistic goal – which is the actual broken promise in Bihar.

Mrityunjay’s Broken Promises reminds us that the real betrayal isn’t just political; it’s psychological. Biharis keep rebuilding the same walls that confined us, writing the same script for political parties every five years, taking us back to square one. And until we admit that the Bihar of the 90s no longer exists – except in the way we insist on keeping it alive – no election promise, however grand, will ever be kept.