When lower middle class can pluck the fruits of progress

The most significant outcome of Independence has been the disempowerment of the earlier elite—the landed gentry—and the empowerment of a large and growing middle class as the new elite. This middle class have so entrenched themselves in the body politic that they are substantially able to secure for themselves their entitlements (and, indeed, much, much more), and the consequent enrichment of this middle class has come to be both the proof and the symbol of the progress we have made. Increasingly, national goals and the national image are being defined and realised in terms of the aspirations and ambitions and value systems of this class.

However, one has only to step out of the shopping malls and cinema multiplexes to step into the teeming mass of humanity which constitutes the lower middle class, the poor and the utterly deprived of our country—Gandhiji’s ‘‘dumb millions’’. Democracy has, of course, given the dumb millions a voice. And that is why, every five years, they strike back, almost routinely replace one section of the ruling elite by another. It is the masses who determine the outcome of elections. But between elections, it is the middle class which determines the course and outcome of governance.

So, for economic progress to translate into equitable progress, the masses require the empowerment that has enabled the middle class to secure their entitlements and move as firmly as they have down the road to self-enrichment. For once they assured themselves of their entitlements, the middle class positioned themselves to build their personal future and determine the future of the country. Thus, the fundamental lesson of the last six decades of Independence must be that if we are to spread prosperity to our people as a whole, we must revert to the Gandhian vision of participatory development through participatory democracy.

Rajiv Gandhi used to say that while we were, indeed, the world’s largest democracy, we were also the world’s least representative democracy. Consider just one figure: the number of MPs elected in India by close to a billion people is one hundred less than the MPs elected to the House of Commons by an electorate which is one-twentieth the size of ours! And it is thus Rajiv Gandhi’s initiatives for grassroots development through grassroots democracy, in both rural and urban India, that has so altered the nature of democracy today that we have close to 2.5 lakh elected institutions of local government spread through the length and breadth of the country. And, more impressive still, of the approximately 30 lakh representatives elected to these institutions, at least 10 lakh are women—an exercise in gender empowerment which, in scale is without precedent in history or parallel in the world. Moreover, the most deprived sections of our society, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, are not only represented in proportion to their numbers but a full third (and, in practice, a little more) are positions filled by the women of these communities.

Unfortunately, this silent revolution in empowerment is being virtually blacked out in the media. In consequence, it is either ignored by the middle class, especially the urban middle class, or paraded as a parody: horror stories of caste-based khap panchayats without clarifying that these panchayats are not the Panchayati Raj Institutions of the Constitution; sneers about the ‘‘decentralisation of corruption’’ as if the middle class have a monopoly entitlement to corruption; and jeering at the ‘sarpanch-pati’ rather than acknowledging the lakhs of women in the panchayats who are exercising their public office with the utmost responsibility.

Indifference and hostility in the already empowered sections of our polity and society do stand in the way of genuine devolution to the masses and their institutions. But it does not stop the trickle of devolution. And the fact that there are 30 lakh elected representatives out there demanding their entitlement to a share of governance is a countervailing force of growing importance in the power equation. Fortunately, Constitutional sanction makes Panchayati Raj irremovable, irreversible, ineluctable. Merely by being there, these institutions are slowly securing empowerment and being empowered.

The task at hand is to accelerate, widen and deepen this process of empowerment so that these ‘‘institutions of self government’’, as the Constitution describes them, become the ‘‘principal authority for planning and implementation,’’ as has been provided for in the national Rural Employment Guarantee programme. That is the model to replicate and build upon in all development programmes, all the while remembering that one of the most significant observations of the Sarkaria Commission was that most people most of the time are mostly concerned with what happens in their own neighbourhood. Panchayati Raj empowers the local community to determine its local destiny while remaining part of the larger destiny of the State and the Union.

It is, therefore, as much a requirement for equitable progress as it is for national integration.