The Self-enclosed Worlds of Village India
AUNINDYO CHAKRAVARTY
[ Tuesday, April 18, 2000 12:07:08 pmTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
last year, just before the general elections, a television correspondent went to
a little village in the jhabua district of madhya pradesh. she asked the local
people, who the prime minister of india was. the answers she got ranged from
kantilal bhuriya to magan singh, via, the rather interesting, veshto patel. when
asked who they'd vote for, pat came the reply -- sanjay gandhi. for this
correspondent, born into an army family, this was a new lesson in nationalism.
in this village, literally in the heart of india, the nation-state operates in
absent-minded slow motion --if it does at all and this is not an isolated case,
nor is it an exotic example of backwardness. in fact, for millions in our
country, the term desh means the village, and not the nation. for them, local
identities matter much more than the larger identity of the nation. yet, for
most of us, living in cities and towns, the nation is our primary identity, and
it is through the ideology of nationalism that we `live' our relationships with
other people. that is the peculiar paradox of our state-system -- it has a
self-image of being a nation-state, in a country where the writ of nationalism
is restricted to certain, largely urban, domains. what is this nation-state?
historically, it has emerged in modern societies along with the market-system.
at the level of the market, everyone is an equal, where people are tied to each
other through the mechanism of exchange. the law, therefore, recognises each
individual as a citizen -- with individual rights and individual interests. and
the state protects those rights and interests.
Social contract in the fable of the `social contract' that forms the basis of
the state, individual interests are represented in the state, and the state
functions in conformity with the way in which the majority of individual
interests coalesce. the key word then is, precisely, the `individual citizen',
and the collective within which these citizens live, appears as one based on an
external connection between individuals. as it is an external connection between
individuals this collective derives its identity from the territory that the
boundaries of the nation-state defines. this identity acquires a genealogy, an
imagined past for this territorial unity. for those of us who live as citizens,
nationalism exists as our primary bond. we believe that the nation is the
original collective, existing from the very beginning of history but the man in
the village is still not ruled by the market, although in all appearances, he is
part of a money economy. the wages he pays or gets, the prices of goods he buys
in the local haat, are still governed by old rules of custom, where hierarchies
reign. here, the moneylender's rate of interest is undisturbed by the rbi's bank
rate. older bonds of community continue and they shape the very identities of
individuals in the countryside. these are the identities of caste, jati, of
kinship and the village.
People do not relate to each other as citizens and the `state of the citizens'
--the nation-state --has little meaning in their lives. no wonder then, veshto
patel is their prime minister, for they cannot distinguish between the terms
pradhan mantri and pradhan, or the headman. umbrella coalition the structure of
power-relations here is entirely different. indeed, it works as a parallel
state-form. lateral and vertical ties between caste and kinship groups form a
loosely articulated configuration. it has its own dynamics and a relative
autonomy from the machinery of the modern nation-state. people organise along
lines provided for, within this semi-autonomous power structure. their very
lives are lived within this structure, which has its own customary laws and
hierarchies, not recognised by the nation-state and its legal system. in other
words, these are two different domains of power. our system of representative
government, however, does not take these local identities and their
inter-relationship, into account. the electoral system, deriving from the
westminster model, sees everyone as a citizen -- an independent voter, with an
independent interest. what determines voter behaviour in an urban constituency
is entirely different from that in a village. in the village, the voter votes
for his local leader, often based on jati and kinship ties. which political
party manages to get those votes, depends on how well it has been able to
organise local power-lords and tap into already existing links between them
--links that obtain within the parallel `state'.
Political behaviour, then, is determined by a complex interaction between the
artifices of the nation-state and the power structure outside it. the state had
been trying to solve this problem, by extending its reach, its authority. for
the first four decades after independence, a strong centralised state had
managed to preside over an umbrella coalition of all these power structures.
that was the real basis for the congress party's unchallenged rule.
paradoxically, it is the withdrawal of the state since the mid-eighties, that
has unleashed a lop-sided expansion of the market and further exacerbated the
uneven development of regions. in the south, where the market has had
significant success, this has created conditions for a larger supra-local unity,
which is dismantling traditional systems of power. rethink on system but in the
north, it has created pockets of increased backwardness, where older identities
are resurfacing with a vengeance and acquiring new institutional forms. here,
the fragile alliance between the two domains of power, has broken down. that is
why electoral fortunes change every year and so do the vote-bases of different
political parties.
Uneven development has also resulted in the domination by regional parties in
the south and caste-based parties in the north. no single party is able to get a
majority, and government formation has become contingent on unhappy marriages
between disparate partners is there any solution to this paradox, this
contradiction inherent in the very nature of our pluralist society? the
nation-state had tried to provide a solution, by trying to extend its domain of
operation and replacing older power-structures. but that hasn't really worked.
instead, other pockets of power, other alliances have emerged in the interstices
of the nation-state. perhaps it is time for a serious rethink on the
representative system we have received. after all, the only way in which india
can progress is to establish real representative democracy, which does not
restrict itself exclusively to the idea of the nation.
[Times Of India, Tuesday, April 18, 2000]