Opinion Consensus,Modi-style

Theoretically,Gujarat can now flog its urban voters to replicate even something close to the 99.90 per cent voting that the dead-and-gone Soviet Union used to gloat over,at its Municipality,city Corporation and panchayat polls. And as things stand,the samras will also go the exact opposite way in its gram panchayats,seeking to ensure that no polls are held in any,and no voting happens. How Modi intends to address this dichotomy is still not clear. The Bill is silent on samras. The Gujarat government has also not announced the punishment for voters refusing or failing to be herded into the booths.

But behind the hype is an irritant: Many basic support structures considered vital for any evolving and maturing polity remain nascent or stunted in Gujarat. This is not about the country’s worst and sustained communal and casteist ghettoisation,a pivot of Gujarat’s social and political life,its underbelly. It is about the degeneration,even disappearence,of some of the core premises and institutions that structure and shape political life elsewhere.

If debate and dissent is a pre-requisite in a democratic polity,the state assembly meets for barely more than the mandatory minimum days,logging one of the country’s lowest sittings to decide and transact public business. The state has never been famously liberal,but it is not just about banning a book or a movie on suitable occasions. It is about the space for democratic dissent and debate in its socio-political domains.

Trade unions,for instance. Very few have a cohesive or effective presence in Gujarat,the national ones barely live on the walls. Few attempts at collectivism have survived in recent years,especially after the state’s textile sector folded and its massive rump of unorganised labour has hardly any effective regulatory protection — when over four lakh-odd diamond workers were thrown out of their jobs last year,and many killed themselves in desperation,only a few had an ESI cover or even a PF account to fall back on. The unions that survive are the apologetically inconsequential Majoor-Mahajan Sangh (Employers-Employees union) and the mostly rag-tag bunch of openly casteist worker’s bodies divided among themselves. Almost all of Gujarat’s higher educational institutions — barring national showpieces like the IIM and the NID — remain under tight control of either the party in power or big business. Hardly any political or democratic consequence figure in the campuses.

Gujarat’s civil society is at best a fond notion — some argue it doesn’t even exist. The hundreds of NGOs in the state mostly use the vacuum of the state’s abdication or withdrawal from what may be usual roles — including any meaningful rehabilitation of the kin of the 1000-odd officially killed in the 2002 carnage. But a big chunk remain too dependant to do any free opinion-building or catalysing of thoughts.

For the rest of the country,the paradox of the must-vote Bill and the samras may remain a conundrum. But if the stick is used for one,it is the carrot for the other. There is money for villages going for samras from the state coffers,as “development incentive”: Rs 1 lakh for the first “consensus” election,more for the ensuing “successes”. By last count,over a quarter of village panchayats in the state have opted for samras,many also lured by priority government sanctions for development work in their surroundings.

There have been many reports of armtwisting and even threats to get all development work stalled,when a villager or two had wanted to contest. Reports also,of district and block-level officials conniving with influential locals force villagers to agree on their sarpanches,and how people of the upper castes in caste-dominated Gujarat usually have the final say on who their “consensus” leader is to be.

There is this report of the Working Group on Democratic Decentralisation and PRIs set up by the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Panchayati Raj,which looked at samras: “ The strongest voices prevail automatically (and) reservations in favour of women and the socially disadvantaged does not make much sense in a consensus situtation because one can just as easily silence the poor. Second,elected representatives can hide behind a consensus decision to avoid responsibility and accountability to their voters…”

But other advice may be more popular in Gujarat. Like the one of M.S. Golwalkar,the man who gave Hindutva its theoretical legitimacy,writing in his Bunch of Thoughts: “Gram panchayats are the cornerstones of our socio-economic system… If the common people are uneducated and ignorant they can easily be swayed… (So) stipulating that elections to panchayats shall be unanimous,or that there are no elections at all,would be a very useful step…”

Few would say it is not useful. Not when gram panchayats make up the bottom building blocks for power at the state level.

rajeev.pi@expressindia.com