The promise of village resurgence: Gandhiji’s vision
The vision of panchayati raj was invoked by
our national leaders and thinkers as a revival of a glorious past, in which, as
per the usual story, each village had its own panchayat, or committee of five
wise men (pancha), to govern itself.
Each village essentially arranged its own activities, its own defence from
outside forces, and its own economy, with very little interference from the
centre or from other polities.
It is generally recognised that village
self-governance was a basic tenet of the Gandhian framework. Since village
self-governance is also a basic idea of the panchayati raj system, it is
natural to think (erroneously) that all that has been done is to give effect to
Gandhiji’s thought on the best form of governance for India
We can discern here the germ of a
contradiction, since it appears that Indian society had developed traditionally
on the basis of hierarchical position and caste affiliation, rather than
allegiance to the local community, whereas western thinking encouraged one to
view all men (and latterly, women) as equal, and democracy as a fundamental
right of all people. In other words, the autonomy that today’s believers
advocate is only a relative one, circumscribed by their other ideals of a just
society, a completely egalitarian, even communistic set-up with everyone
working together to a common ideal. We obviously do not see the existing
villages as anywhere near that ideal. The autonomous village council,
therefore, would not have the power to create what would amount to unequal
social hierarchies, or allocate property in (to our mind) unjust ways, or
discriminate against persons based on race, caste, gender or any other such
criterion.
This concept of Gandhiji’s may be
characterised as basically an “ordered anarchy”, with familial links to other
utopian or idealist philosophers like Tolstoy or the American romantic
environmentalists Thoreau and Emerson (Ganguli, op.cit., p.171). Implicit in
this is a picture of a saner and kinder world order: if all people limited
their wants and refrained from coveting additional power and wealth,
communities also would be non-accumulating and self-regulating, and in turn
states would become non-acquisitive and non-aggressive. Gandhiji, being
suspicious of the effects of state power and bureaucracies on society and
communities, was not apparently a votary of the modern organised welfare state;
he may not even have been sure about the merits of Western models of democracy,
preferring instead to entrust leadership to a set of wise people: “True
democracy is not inconsistent with a few persons representing the spirit, the
hope and the aspirations of those whom they claim to represent… Bulk is not the
true test of democracy” (Gandhi, quoted in Ganguli, ibid.). There seems to be
an underlying ambiguity, therefore, in Gandhiji’s concept of the people’s role
in democracy, and perhaps this reinforced the ideal of entrusting the village
community to the committee of wise persons, the panchayat, from which the system of panchayati raj gets its
appellation.
However, there were also dissenting voices,
however muted, that saw the emancipation of our people from poverty and the
dead hand of caste and religion, only in the development of modern productive
relationships and market mechanisms and institutions. The institutional structure that has actually
developed, then, looks like an uneasy compromise between these different and
disparate streams of thought, and the PRIs as actually realised are a far cry
from what Gandhi envisaged (without in any way implying that Gandhiji’s was the
only way, or even indeed a feasible option in the real world). So one comment
we may safely make about our present-day PRIs is that they are NOT a
realisation of Gandhiji’s esentially anarchic polity of self-sufficient village
republics in an hierarchy-free network.
It is interesting that among the prominent
and important actors at that time, it was a champion of social justice and
equality of opportunity like Ambedkar who had differences with this approach.
Unlike the Gandhians who had a basic distrust of bureaucracy and the State, Ambedkar
in fact stressed the features of the Draft Constitution that provided for such
strong, independent, institutions in the triune polity of the Indian republic:
an independent judiciary, a strong civil bureaucracy to service the executive,
and of course the parliament of elected representatives. A strong centre was an
essential counterbalance to the states in taking forward the affairs of the
country:
“The Draft Constitution has sought to
forge means and methods whereby India
Further,
“…there can be no doubt that the
standard of administration depends upon the calibre of the Civil Servants who
are appointed to these strategic posts. Fortunately for us we have inherited
from the past (a) system of administration which is common to the whole of the
country and we know what are these strategic posts. The Constitution provides
that without depriving the States of their right to form their own Civil
Services there shall be an All India Service recruited on an All-India basis
with common qualifications, with uniform scale of pay and the members of which
alone could be appointed to these strategic posts throughout the Union .” (ibid., p.483)
Instead of trusting the ‘village republics’
to provide protection to minorities and depressed classes, it would be the
State, backed by constitutional guarantees and Directive Principles, that would
do so. A lot of detail was prescribed because:
“Constitutional morality is not a
natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people
have yet to learn it. Democracy in India
India
As described above, a recurring motif in
writings on India ’s tryst
with panchayati raj is a picture of India
“The conqueror, or usurper, directly
or through his agents, addresses himself as sovereign or representative of the
sovereign to the head of the township; its officers, its boundaries, and the
whole frame of its interior management remain unalterably the same; and it is
of importance to remember that every state in India is a congeries of these little republics.” (italics added).
According to Inden, most of these are
capsule representations that can be traced back to the statement of a
prestigious servant of the East India Company, Sir Charles Metcalfe
(1785-1846), who became Resident at Delhi at the age of 27, and went on to act
as Governor-General for two years (Mason, 1985). His description of a ‘village
republic’ first appeared in a British parliamentary inquiry of 1810.
“Not surprisingly, Mill, Utilitarian
advocate of political economy, began this tradition, first reproducing the
passage in his discussion of revenue, the category under which most accounts of
villages were classed in nineteenth-century discourse … Elphinstone included it
in his would-be replacement for Mill’s History
in 1841, the first part of which was updated by E.B.Cowell, H.H.Wilson’s
student, early in this century... And it has appeared in varying renditions
countless times since. Even Marx, relying on the writings of two on-the-spot
commentators, Colonel Mark Wilks (1760?-1831), Company servant in Madras from
1782 to 1801, and Sir George Campbell (1824-92), who held high posts in India
between 1842 and 1874, produced a text on the Indian village in Das Kapital.” (Inden,
op. cit.)
As a prominent world thinker who may have
been unduly impressed by Metcalfe’s somewhat grandiloquent characterisation of
the idealised Indian village, Karl Marx’s attention turned to India during the
1850s, amidst the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and transfer of control to the British
government. According to Draper (1977), Marx quoted the 1812 report of a House
of Commons committee (the Metcalfe report, that is) three times in reference to
the societal pattern in India, and interpolated the comment: “Every village is,
and appears to always to have been, in fact a separate community or republic”
(Marx, quoted in Draper, op. cit., p.527). But Marx’s judgement was not really
flattering: Marx (with Engels) thought that Indian society had no history at
all, apart from the successive intruders “who founded their empires on the
passive basis of the unresisting and unchanging society”; he declared of the
Indian village community, “rotting in the teeth of time”, that “no one could
think of any more solid foundation for Asiatic despotism and stagnation” (op.
cit., p.527), that their very isolation has “given rise to a more or less
central despotism over the communes”, that they were “contaminated by distinctions
of caste and by slavery”, characterised by an “undignified, stagnatory, and
vegetative life” (ibid., p.554). And Engels declared that these ancient
communes “formed the basis of the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism,
from India to Russia”, and that it was “only where these communities dissolved
that the peoples made progress of themselves” (Engels, quoted in Draper, op.
cit., p.555). All this is just to remind ourselves that the description of our
“little republics” was not always laudatory.
It is therefore quite likely that Gandhi
and others also got their characterisation of the Indian village as a ‘little
republic’, from a study of these same colonial and Western intellectual
sources, to which we may add Sir Henry Maine, who served as legal member of
council in India, and who wrote of a joint system of cultivation and the
“council of elders” in the Indian villages (Maine, 1871, p.110). Apart from their observation of the existing
Indian villages themselves, the colonial administrators and writers may also
have been swayed by some degree of nostalgia for an imagined ancient history of
the Teutons or Germanic branches of the Aryans in ancient and medieval Western
Europe, which had all but disappeared there as it became a ‘modern’ society,
but which still survived in its original, Aryan form in India, which was still
an ‘ancient’ society, as elaborated in Maine’s writings. Inden feels that not
only was the concept attractive to the colonial writers as evoking a sense of
their own ancient past, but the emphasis on India as a land of autonomous
villages was a part of the efforts of the colonial intellectuals to
“deconstitute” the Indian state, by constant reiteration of the village
republics idea: “Just as the modern succeeded the ancient in time, so the
modern would dominate the ancient in space” (Inden, op. cit., p.132).
During the Constituent Assembly debates,
Ambedkar refers to these concerns:
“Another criticism against the Draft
Constitution is that no part of it represents the ancient polity of India India
Ambedkar goes on to say, of these village
“republics”:
“That they have survived through all
vicissitudes may be a fact. But mere survival has no value. The question is on
what plane they have survived. Surely on a low, on a selfish level. I hold that
these village republics have been the ruination of India
Being active in the real world, of course,
Gandhi and other protagonists of the village-autonomy credo could not have been
so unmindful of the effect of outside forces on the village, especially the
development towards private property rights and titles, whether in antiquity or
in their own times. Obviously one reason for the perceived independence of our
villages would have been the sheer lack of communications, which meant that
each settlement would have to stock up against calamities, and each household
also would have to make provision against future needs if it were to survive in
the long term. Of course the intermittent passage of campaigning armies of
whatever hue or persuasion, could not have left these communities unaffected or
unruffled; and obviously, the closer the village to the centre of power, the
more it would have been integrated into those structures through trade, barter,
tribute, employment and patronage.
Thus was the picture of autarky, stagnation
and misery of the Indian villages built up by the colonial writers. But there
are also available more realistic accounts of the institutions of community
self-governance in historical times, as gleaned from the epigraphical record,
which I refer to in the next section.
References
Ambedkar,
B.R. 1948. Basic Features of the Indian Constitution. Pp.474-494, in
V.Rodrigues (Ed.), 2002, 2004. The
Essential Writings of B.R.Ambedkar. Oxford
University Press, New Delhi
Draper,
Hal. 1977. Karl Marx’s Theory of
Revolution. Vol.I.
State New York South Asia ,
Delhi-110091.
Ganguli,
B.N. 1973. Gandhi’s Social Philosophy.
Perspective and Relevance. Supported by the Council for Social Development.
Published by Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd. Delhi
Inden,
Ronald B. 1990, 2000. Imagining India Oxford London
Wilks,
Mark. 1820. Historical Sketches of the
South of India: In an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysoor, From the Origin
of the Hindoo Government of that State, to the Extinction of the Mohammedan
Dynasty in 1799, first published 1820, reissued digitally 2013 by Cambridge University Press,
New York.
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