Predators on the hillside, Jamui is everyplace

The talented leave Bihar the day they can. The ones who stay are left contesting for everything. Nothing is uncontested. Not land, not honour, not a girl on a hillside.Madwa Pahad, a hillside popular with young couples seeking privacy, became the site of the Jamui assault. (India Today Image)Jamui did not happen because Bihar is cursed. Every time Bihar makes news, it is this kind of news, and every time the state is called the nation's shame, Biharis like me feel it in the gut. The reaction is understandable because the wound is fresh, and because we have forgotten that what happened in Jamui has happened in nearly every state in this country. It will happen again somewhere with better data connection and worse conscience. Which is almost everywhere, barring a few isolated islands in metropolitan India.Two days ago, the national capital found its Jamui near the Nehru Place Metro station and Epicuria Mall, which attracts South Delhi's young. A teenaged girl dared to visit the Astha Kunj Park right next to the busy district with her male friend at 8.45 pm on Sunday. Three men, including two siblings, posed as cops, separated the two and gang-raped the girl.Bad things happen everywhere. Bihar's problem is not that they happen here. Bihar's problem is that nothing balances the bad news out. Other states get one horror story a month and ten good ones to bury it under. Floods, famines, feuds, migration, no mitigation. Bihar gets one horror story, then another, then a press briefing in which a senior politician calls it an "isolated, minor incident". This time, JD(U) state president Umesh Kushwaha went further back, all the way back to 2005, to remind everyone how much worse the jungle raj used to be. Politics began in earnest, and almost nobody in that entire chain of reaction stayed with the two 15-year-olds in the video the perpetrators circulated as an achievement.Two Class 10 students, a boy and a girl, took an evening off coaching classes near Jamui and stopped to click a few pictures, the ordinary teenage business of an ordinary evening. Young people have to find places where they can share a moment of togetherness because a girl having a boyfriend is still a sin society does not speak kindly of. They were at Madwa Pahad, a spot popular among young couples, when a group of six or seven men, minors included, surrounded them, asked whether their families knew, hit the boy, and chased them both when they tried to leave. One man lifted the girl and ran into the dark while the boy kept pulling him off her. The image of an unwashed man carrying a teenage girl away shook the country. In the clip she can be heard pleading to be let go, promising they will never come back. They did not even file a complaint at first. Police found them after the video went viral, using the scooter number.The local MLA, who is a minister, called it "moral policing" gone wrong. Moral policing is a coward's phrase, used to soften the blow of a dastardly act. This was not moral policing. It was a full-fledged group sexual assault. The men were looking to take her into the seclusion of that hillside, violate her, and film her while they did it. If the boy had let go, they would have succeeded. This has happened in the same sequence in so many states, I don't need to recount them. Search the internet at your own risk. I gave you the trigger warning. I know this terrain well. I am familiar with the predators, the prey, and the horror of the hunt. I know the kind of spot Madwa Pahad is, the kind every district in Bihar has one of: a hillside or a riverbank that photographs well and is watched by nobody. Couples go there to afford some privacy because a suffocating social order leaves them nowhere else to be alone. The predatory men who wait there know exactly what they are exploiting: that love is already treated as a crime in most households, so the couple will not report anything, and once emboldened, the same men will try it on the next couple, and the one after.The accused have been picked up. The last of them, the main accused, was taken only after he was shot in the leg, in what is called a half-encounter. These predators were not from elsewhere. They were boys from the nearby village who, most likely, have done this before. Earlier victims never spoke up because the stigma is double: the stress on sex in the sexual assault, and the original sin of having had a boyfriend in the first place.Now watch what happens next. Give Jamui a few weeks and identity politics will move in to manage the story rather than solve it. It happened in Gurgaon. Within days of being arrested for nearly killing a woman biker, the accused got a car rally celebrating him and a mahapanchayat in his support. If a man who nearly killed a woman on camera can be turned into a community mascot, Jamui will get the same treatment the moment caste or religion offers a side to defend.I reposted an old line of mine saying Bihar has a culture problem, and proud Biharis swooped down on that one sentence, asking why bring culture into a criminal matter. Then there were others who pointed to vulgar Bhojpuri lyrics as if filth in song and dance were a Bihari invention. It is not. Every region of this country has its version; every state has its arkestra (orchestra) and reka dance (record dance), your mileage may vary, mine certainly has, across states.Vulgar songs leaking into popular culture are not unique to Bihar. What is unique is the absence of anything sitting above them, the absolute lack of cultural moorings. So, all you and they who live in Bihar see is vulgar pelvic thrusts set to a raunchy tune layered by expletive-laden filth in the name of lyrics that cannot be quoted here.The voices of Bharat Sharma Vyas or Sharda Sinha have drowned in the noise of auto-tuned, bass bullies blurting out double-meaning dance numbers from DJ trucks.Grinding poverty took away whatever finer taste might have existed here generations ago, and taste, like language, is not inherited. It is taught by the air around you. There is no serious music tradition here to speak of, no classical dance school of the kind a child might wander into in Chennai or Pune, or nearby Kolkata, no ecosystem where beauty is absorbed by accident.There is only competition, brutal and constant, over the one government job that might exist for every thousand boys chasing it. Every family wants an IAS officer and gets, at best, a decent college seat, itself a rare commodity in this state.You go to bookshops, you won't find stuff that offers only the joy of reading. These shops are stacked with competitive test books, if there is space after textbooks. Outside Patna, you would struggle to find a library or a museum. The grace of Bihari culture, the remains of its glory, nearly every monument is lost to the vagaries of time.Life is hard, and the hardness is perceived in every breath. The talented leave the day they can. The ones who stay, the ones with neither the marks nor the means, are left contesting tiny tracts of land, and they do it often with blood. Nothing is uncontested. Not land, not honour, not a girl on a hillside.There is a second absence sitting right beside the first, and it explains more about Jamui than the missing community cultural event or the missing dance school ever will. Bihar is, by every survey and every poll pundit's favourite cliche, among the most politically aware populations in the country. A rickshaw-puller here will explain seat-sharing arithmetic better than most anchors on television. Decades of Mandal-era mobilisation gave caste identity real electoral weight: a voice, a quota, a lota in the name of the leader who looks and speaks like you. That is empowerment, and nobody needs to apologise for wanting it. But it arrived as a headcount, as votes, as seats to be won, without the one lesson that ought to travel with any power, which is moderation. Adversity is supposed to build character. In Bihar, hard times ate people up.There was nothing to temper the vagaries of human nature. There is nothing at stake for people who literally have nothing to lose. Violence of all kinds sits inside the minds of millions of young men. They are not holding it back because they cannot let it out. They are holding it back because there are fewer opportunities, on a given evening, to vent. Because when they get an opportunity, they pounce on it, a him, or a her.A society can be fiercely political and completely unmoderated at the same time. That's how it should be. In fact, it usually is one because it never got round to being the other. Political awareness without civic restraint does not raise citizens. It raises men who feel no particular need to be ashamed of themselves.Hand them a screen and cheap data and multiply the monsters. We keep treating the phone as a bystander in these stories when it is closer to being the weapon, and it is being handed, year after year, to a population that has never been taught restraint of any kind: political, social, or personal. Give a person a grenade with no instruction on how to hold it, and you get a blown-up hand before you get anything useful done with it.We have given an entire generation of undereducated, underemployed, over-idle young men a device with a camera, a cheap data pack, and an endless supply of content calibrated to inflame exactly the appetites a functioning culture is supposed to teach you to manage, plus a political climate that has already shown them what closing ranks around your own looks like. The result is an endless stream of pornographic content produced by sexually repressed local influencers, consumed by sexually repressed young minds, politically radicalised and sensually vulgarised.Their grievance, if it can be called that, is simple and ugly. Women of the 21st century are not available to their 19th-century fantasies, while appearing, on Instagram Reels, to be "clearly available" to less manly but sophisticated contemporary men. The only way they have known to acquire the unreachable is to snatch it in the dark. Not long ago, people avoided travelling with family after dusk, mostly because of men like these, who jumped on the vulnerable and took whatever valuables could be taken. The weaker sex was the most vulnerable valuable. Jamui is a reminder that the dusk brings a risk, that this is the Year of the Lord 2026 is just a number. There are predators lurking in the dark. That girls are not safe. Too many incidents in the recent past attest to that, the government's denials notwithstanding.The BJP and JDU leaders keep reminding people of the jungle raj. Well, the jungle wasn't much better before Lalu Raj. It has been true of Bihar after Lalu too. Governments have changed since Independence, the people have seen little change. Intermittently, the law and order situation has improved or deteriorated while the dark side of Bihar has not become any brighter. The scale and intensity of the darkness may vary. YMMV, again.Caste, religion, and the state government will all fight over who gets to be embarrassed by Jamui. None of them will address the fact that it takes one bored evening, more filth in the palm, and one culture with nothing to fill the gap, for this to happen again by the weekend. Full signal, or tower as they call it, but zero sense. Civic or otherwise.(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)- Ends(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)Published By: Sushim MukulPublished On: Sep 22, 2026 20:40 IST