The puppeteer and the healer
Every state government has an undying urge to play puppeteer to village panchayats on assuming office, to create terraces of power at all levels, down to the grass roots. Incumbent ruling groups in panchayats have to either wilt under the might of the funds-doling state government or make way for the new ruling dispensation’s new puppets who will control local government.
The ruling party’s puppeteering unleashes a new wave of instability, where ruling groups are unseated by engineering defections, buying up independents or vacating posts of sarpanch and deputy through carrots or sticks, as seen in Goa and other parts of India. This prolonged nautanki only ends up confining village governance to a mere sideshow.
Now for the puppeteer to cry hoarse that the puppets are playing musical chairs despite he pulling the strings, is nothing short of a local adaptation of comedy circus.
So when the Panchayat Minister (and he may not be alone on this) suggests that panchayat elections on party lines are the panacea for the very problem parties create, nothing could be further from the truth. One would rather believe that his utterances are the first stone to test the panchayat waters with a long term intent of politicizing village life, in complete contravention of the spirit of the 73rd Amendment, which is firmly grounded in village as a social unit and governance by community consensus, as a tribute to the Gandhian model of gram swaraj. The Mahatma was critical of party politics and even wanted the Congress to be dissolved once Independence was attained. He advocated partyless democracy and to even remotely suggest that parties should field candidates at local government elections is against the very spirit of gram swaraj, and also because village panchayats were specifically inserted in the Part IV of the Constitution on the Gandhian model to appease Mahatma Gandhi, since India adopted Parliamentary Democracy at the Centre against his wishes.
The rider to the suggestion of the Panchayat Minister is of course that this is a novel idea, the magical cure for undesirable happenings in panchayats, the ultimate therapy which is now up for public debate. It holds the promise of ‘discipline’ among the puppets and will get ‘paralysed panchayats’ working when the puppeteers themselves are pulling the strings. The long term plan is to attempt to bring party politics to the threshold of households and to divide the village community on party lines. The short term plan is to put its ‘yes men’ as projected representatives of the village community. But even then, it is doubtful that 29 powers under XI schedule of the 73rd Amendment will be devolved to empower panchayats, instead the ‘yes men’ will stop hankering for devolution and quietly follow party diktats (in the name of party discipline), which would signal the end the assertion of village rights.
If the state level puppeteers are serious about constancy in local bodies, they need to go back to the draft Goa Panchayat Raj Act and suggestions of the then House Committee which were discarded by the government of the day. All that is needed is a simple amendment to the GPRA by allowing for direct election of sarpanch by the people for a five year term, as in Karnataka, or give a minimum term of two and a half years to the sarpanch even if he/she is indirectly elected. This would offset party based village rivalries, tension and possible violence during electioneering, reduce the exercise of money and muscle power and other unsavoury fallout of party politics.
Another aspect of puppeteering are panchayat awards, which are against the Constitutional provisions which only permits military awards.
As gram sabhas in Goa are already bracing up for battle, it is best to leave party politics out of the village, because in this case at least the healer’s antidote ~ of party based elections in local bodies, seems far worse that the problem ~ of instability in panchayats.
