Opinion Is democracy dying? A postcard from a village in Odisha

Forty-five years on, the landscape of the village has changed radically. Already a large, multi-caste village back then, it has grown immensely in population. The most spectacular change is in the physical appearance of the village. The old concentric circles are gone. Instead, the village today resembles a drawing board where an indifferent Lego player has strewn bits and pieces of architectural types, where pucca buildings of all possible styles jostle for space. The money for this building boom has come from central schemes like the expansion of the national highway, the railway line and a huge canal that now cuts through the village. These have pumped cash into the hands of those who have lost land, many of whom happened to come from the lower social strata. Practically all houses are connected to electricity, piped water, cooking gas, and have toilets. A pucca road connects the Pana and Juanga neighbourhoods directly with the national highway.

Underpinning this new pattern — chaotic at first sight — is a complex and semi-fluid structure of the co-existence of competing elites. Mobile phones, rituals and deities — Durga, Shiva, Jagannatha and Govinda, drawing devotees from different castes — are much more in evidence than before. The political clout that had emboldened the young hotheads among the Panas to challenge the dominant Khandayats in 1977 has now found an institutional shape in terms of the composition of the panchayat where the lower social classes dominate. However, the upper social strata has found a new avenue to exercise influence, in the shape of the “village committee”, which organises the village jatra, manages rituals and processions and holds loutish behaviour in check by imposing fines and social boycott. The overlap of membership between the two — the panchayat and the village committee — signifies the muted nature of social conflict. Instead of overt conflict, there seems to be a unity of purpose — to acquire electoral power and cash this in — through getting contracts in the myriad “developmental” activities in the village and its vicinity. Freewheeling transaction, cutting across castes and factions, seems to transcend the truculence I had noticed in 1977.

There was little evidence of the political waves sweeping over Delhi, either in the local Odia papers or in the local political rhetoric. Presiding over all this, through an unbroken run of 23 years as chief minister, is Naveen Patnaik, leader of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), and son of the visionary Biju Patnaik, a former chief minister. To my question, “how come the BJD is so solidly placed in the village whereas all the cash and benefits flowing into the village are the doing of Prime Minister Modi,” the response I got from several respondents was revealing. “The Prime Minister does what he should, but we get rice at one rupee a kilo, thanks to Naveen Patnaik”. The sophisticated vote-splitting — Modi for Parliament and Patnaik for the assembly — and careful strategising that connects local power and the cornucopia of patronage showed me how the Kashipur that I knew in 1977 has caught up with the most sophisticated electorates of the world. “And how about the decline of Indian democracy?” The answers I got to this question were all a variation on the main argument of existential phenomenology: “Existence precedes essence.” (Sartre).

The life-world of voters is the key to their electoral choice. Choice generates the cash, and not the other way around. Cash does not buy votes, but issues germane to the life-world of the voter do. The kaleidoscope of India’s electoral space results from localities and regions, following their own trajectories. These countervailing forces, activated in elections that are not synchronised, are the myriad little feet of India’s democratic centipede, which keeps moving, notwithstanding the disapproval of global ranking agencies and the metropolitan elite’s disdain of this “Indian way” of politics.

True, meta-issues such as the Lohia-inspired anti-Congressism of the late 1960s, “garibi hatao” of Indira Gandhi, and the subsequent “Indira hatao, desh bachao” slogans can meld the local and regional trends into a national narrative. But this can work only when it effectively connects with the life-worlds of voters into a national leitmotif. That requires the agency of leaders with adroit organisational skills, who sense an opportunity and seize it. Up against the BJP with its second-level leaders at the peak of their careers, its legion of karyakartas at constituency levels working seamlessly during, and between, elections, and the capacity that the party has demonstrated to recruit from the pool of retired diplomats, civil servants and military officers, and give them appropriate positions, and its ability to co-opt regional leaders, the leaders of the opposition have demonstrated no such mettle. “Rahul bachao” as a surrogate for a fight to “restore democracy in India” cuts little ice with the folks in Kashipur, and I suspect, in much of India’s rural electorate. As of this writing, the 2024 general elections might still turn out to be rather like that of 2019, a “maintaining election” rather than a “transforming” one, like those of 1967, 1971 and 1977.

The writer is emeritus professor of political science at Heidelberg University, Germany. His earlier study of Kashipur was published under the title ‘Ballot Box and Local Power: Electoral Politics in an Indian Village’, in the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics