The Hindu : Clouds over panchayati raj

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Saturday, Sep 13, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Clouds over panchayati raj

By Pran Chopra

Panchayats have become local agencies for implementing a plethora of Centrally-sponsored schemes and those drawn up in distant State capitals.

AT FIRST SIGHT it looks as though panchayati raj, the latest and lowest layer of federalism in our polity, is as firmly entrenched in our system as is the older and higher layer comprising the Union Government and the States. Like the democratic institutions at the higher level, those at the panchayat level, the PRIs, are also written into and protected by the Constitution. Just as there must be an independent finance commission at the higher level for framing the financial relations between the Union and the States, so must each State have one for framing the financial relations with its own PRIs. A State and its panchayati raj institutions cannot encroach on each other's constitutional rights any more than the Union and State Governments can on each other's.

This means that all the essential features, which distinguish a unitary system from a federal one, are as much enshrined at the lower as at the upper level of our federal system. But look closely and you will discover a fatal flaw. The letter of the Constitution as well as the spirit of the present polity have exposed the intra-State level of our federal system to a dilemma of which the inter-State and Union-State layers are free. The flaw has many causes. But all of them are rooted in an historic anomaly, that while the dynamics of federalism and democracy have given added strength to the rights given to the States in the Constitution, they have worked against the rights of panchayats.

At both levels of our federal system there is the same tussle between those who have certain rights, or believe they have, and those who try to encroach upon them if they believe they can. Thus the Union Government was able to encroach massively upon certain rights given to the States by the Constitution. It even dismissed many State Governments for thoroughly unjustifiable reasons. It got away with that for two reasons.

First, the single dominant party system, which characterised Centre-State relations for close upon two decades gave the party in power at the Union level many extra-constitutional political levers, and it used them with abandon against State Governments, particularly against those formed by parties which were emerging in Parliament as Opposition parties. Second, the Supreme Court had not yet begun to extend the limits of its power, which it has been lately doing, perhaps also with some abandon.

But all that has changed over the past decade or so, because of several reasons. While the sudden spurt given to a multi-party democracy by the overthrow of the Emergency in 1977 turned out to be short-lived, the spurt became a long-term trend later on because of the ways in which a vigorously democratic multi-party system works in a political society which is as assertively pluralistic as Indian society is. It gives political clout to all the various segments which constitute that society. Secondly, because of the linguistic reorganisation of States in the 1950s, many of the most assertive segments have found their most assertive expression as States. Thirdly, with single-party dominance becoming a thing of the past at the Union level, governments can be formed at that level only by multi-party coalitions in which State-level parties are major players. This has made it impossible for the Union Government to do much about anything unless it also carries a sufficient number of State-level parties with it. Consequently in the Centre-State tussle for a share of the powers enshrined in the Constitution, or created by the political realities of the day, the balance has been tilting towards the States. This has made Indian federalism as well as Indian democracy more real than they used to be. But a very unfortunate side-effect is that India's long-awaited and much-desired panchayati raj system, which was inaugurated with such fanfare in the early 1980s, has become less real. By that much, democracy as well as federalism have lost the chance to become that much stronger at the grass roots level.

The chance began to be lost because of a very simple fact. By the time the PRIs came on the scene, most of the political space in our federal system had been occupied by the Centre in the first 30 years of Independence, and most of what was still left after that was occupied by the States in the next 20. PRIs might have hoped to wrest some space from their immediate neighbour, the States, just as the States had wrested some from the Centre. But having at last managed to checkmate the Centre's encroachments on their rights, the States were not about to allow the PRIs, the latest and weakest of claimants for power, to do some encroaching of their own.

Even at the making of the Constitution, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a tussle between those who wanted more power for the Centre and those who wanted more for the States. But the States were not yet the vibrant political reality they were to become later, and the desire for a more powerful Centre as the source and symbol of new India's power was widespread. Therefore a compromise was achieved without much effort. The Centre got more powers than is usual in federations, and such powers as were acquired by the States were, for the first time, given constitutional protection against arbitrary infringement by the Centre.

But something very different happened by the time the powers of PRIs came to be drawn up, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. First, the only national party left, the Congress, had gone deeper into a siege mentality. Finding itself surrounded by State-level parties, it had built walls against them instead of winning them over. Next, the States retaliated by blocking Congress proposals for panchayati raj in Parliament, suspecting that the Centre would try to use panchayats to by-pass State Governments by building them up as a friendly protégé within the enemy's gate.

The suspicion fed on the fact that the powers proposed by the Congress for panchayats were very similar to many of the more lucrative powers of State Governments. Therefore, panchayati raj would eat into State raj if the powers of panchyats got the same protection that State's powers had won by being enshrined in the Constitution. State-level leaders also feared, perhaps, that if panchayat-level leaders captured some of the larger PRIs, such as district-level panchayats, they would exert pressure on State-level leaders through intra-State multi-party federalism just as State-level leaders had exerted it in the 1990s on the Central leaders through multi-party inter-State and Union-States federalism.

As they were to admit in private later, it soon became obvious to Congress leaders that there was no way the panchayati raj amendments they wanted to write into the Constitution would pass muster unless State-level parties were given their pound of flesh. And a hefty pound it turned out to be, and one capable of being added to as the dynamics of multi-party democratic federalism developed further. The amendments were allowed only after it was agreed that the powers of panchayats (and municipalities) could be listed in the Constitution. Illustratively, they would be defined and endowed on PRIs by the State Legislature acting at its discretion.

This left the door wide open for the States to exert the power of the new political fact that while on the one hand the Union as well as the State Governments can afford to ignore panchayats as long as they can keep the MLAs happy, on the other hand, the Union Government has to be sensitive to the demands of State-level parties. This has given State-level actors strong beachheads on the shores of both inter-State and intra-State federalism, and they have been expanding the beachheads ever since. By using various administrative devices and non-elected parallel structures, State Governments have subordinated their PRIs to the State administration and given the upper hand to State Government officials against the elected heads of PRIs. For all that they are locally elected by adult franchise to orient village schemes towards meeting needs and preferences conceived and expressed by the local power, panchayats have become local agencies for implementing schemes drawn up in distant State capitals. And their own volition has been further circumscribed by a plethora of "Centrally-sponsored schemes". These are drawn up by even more distant Central authorities but at the same time tie up local staff and resources on pain of the schemes being switched off in the absence of matching local contribution. The "foreign aid" syndrome can be clearly seen at work behind this kind of "grass roots development".

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