The grassroots upsurge

His predecessor in this has beenJyoti Basu. While no single factor can explain the CPI (M)’s dominance over West Bengal, panchayat raj is certainly one of them. There is validity to the criticism that the CPI(M) has converted panchayat raj in West Bengal into cadre raj, but it also explains what keeps the cadres with the state political authority.

Analysts failed to reckon with the crucial point that the 1998 assembly elections were the first to be held in MP after the panchayat raj revolution swept the state. They focused on the minority of assembly segments which went to the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections of 1998, and concluded that the assembly elections would be a pale imitation of what had occurred earlier in the year.

They went wrong because the vote in February/March was for the central government. With Vajpayee as a son of the soil of Madhya Pradesh, the swing to the BJP in the state was a more-or-less foregone conclusion. Had the favourite son turned in a better performance, the chief minister’s performance might have beenovershadowed; the Prime Minister’s failures, however, served only to highlight the chief minister’s achievements.

Madhya Pradesh in 1998 has what it did not have in 1993: 4,80,000 elected representatives to the panchayats at the three levels village, intermediate (janpad) and the district. Some two-thirds of these are Congress activists or Congress sympathisers. This gave Digvijay a cadre of some one-and-a-half lakh stakeholders in his panchayat raj system.

I say “his” because his most stringent critics, including those from within his Congress, focussed on panchayat raj as the proximate cause of what they then saw as his impending downfall. One correspondent described panchayat raj in Madhya Pradesh to me as the “decentralisation of corruption”. Of course, it is. But why should that be any worse than the centralisation of corruption? Panchayat raj cannot eliminate corruption; but it does render the corrupt accountable to a small community that does not need the media to learn about the misuse ofpublic money in its locality.

The panchayats in Madhya Pradesh have been so significantly endowed with real authority, real responsibility and real resources that the excuse which works in the states like UP and Rajasthan that panchayats are just a shell without substance does not work in MP. If not full, the shell is clearly somewhat filled. Results are, therefore, expected.

Sometimes results are delivered. Sometimes they are not. The worst is when the MLA sets up a mafia with the bureaucracy to block the passage of resources to the panchayats or, even worse, when he sets up a mafia with the elected panchayat representatives to swindle the local community. This is what explains the massive defeat of nearly a third of the sitting MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, some 70 of the Congress and some 50 of the BJP. There is a close correlation between those who misused panchayat raj and lost; and between those who used panchayat raj and won. Digvijay Singh was bang on when he said that the anti-incumbency fa-ctorworked not against the government but aga-inst non-functioning MLAs.

Where Madhya Pradesh has scored over West Bengal, to emerge in just five years as the best example of panchayat raj in the country, is that it has combined governance through panchayat raj with well-conceived programmes of grassroots development. This was also true of West Bengal at the commencement of panchayat raj there; elected panchayats were associated with Operation Barga, the legalisation of sharecroppers’ rights which revolutionised feudal agrarian relations.

But after Operation Barga, the communists ran out of ideas; which is why panchayat raj there has soured over time into cadre raj. IN MP, it has been Digvijay’s human resource agenda focusing on livelihood security, primary educaton and health that has given development substance to the democratic shell. The greening of Jhabua, the country’s most spectacular example of environmental regenerations; the extraordinary spread of water-shed development, possible only throughintense community participation; and the education guarantee scheme, are getting to be known as world-best schemes of participatory grassroots development.

The education guarantee scheme is, perhaps ,the most apt example of misplaced political perceptions on the part of those who have been taken aback by the results of these elections. Under this scheme, any group of 25 learners in a tribal area (40 for non-tribals) can ask through its gram panchayat for a school. The proposal is evaluated not by the bureaucracy but through peer group review at the janpad panchayat level. Within 90 days of the receipt of the janpad panchayat’s recommendation, without any further bureaucratic processing, the state government credits Rs 8,500 to the gram panchayat’s bank account. Since January 1997, when the scheme was launched, over 20,000 such schools have opened, averaging 40 a day.

Yet, because some panchayats have sold their teaching posts to the highest bidder, many politicians, specifically dissident Congressmen,were convinced that teachers’ recruitment by the panachayats would spell Digvijay’s doom. In the event, it has assured his victory.