scorecardresearch
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Support Our Journalism
HomePageTurnerBook ExcerptsIn Bihar, gram sabha isn’t what you think it is. It’s a...

In Bihar, gram sabha isn’t what you think it is. It’s a ‘Gram Sham’

In 'Last Among Equals', M.R. Sharan gives a glimpse into the ground reality of Bihar's politics, quite literally.

Follow Us :
Text Size:

Eight years ago, I first attended a gram sabha in the village of Mahant Maniyari under gloomy skies that showered and prematurely ended proceedings. It was as dramatic as they came. Few other gram sabhas in Bihar’s 8,400 panchayats would have been as eventful. That, however, is more of a statement on how much of a private, undemocratic affair such sabhas tend to be.

On paper, a gram sabha is a spectacular idea. It envisages a grand get-together of the
entire village. The mukhiya and other local government officials put forward plans for the
coming year; the villagers debate and discuss them, proposing ideas of their own. In the
end, a consensus is reached and a document prepared. A path is charted, one paved
by the villagers themselves. The mukhiya is merely a gatekeeper. A gram sabha is,
therefore, ‘the largest deliberative institution in human history’.

Predictably, the asli zindagi of gram sabhas is markedly different. Often, they are a charade, a Gram Sham. In many parts of India—Bihar being no exception—the mukhiya
and his team of brokers, contractors, local bureaucrats and political entities huddle
together and produce a document that best fits their interests. The interests of these few
are often at odds with those at the margins.

You cannot know this, of course, unless you go to a village or are told by someone in
the know. The documents are perfect: the numbers add up, the counter-checks tally, the
signatures are legible and legitimate. What’s more, they often look like the outcome of
reasonably meticulous research, having taken into consideration the opinion of a wide
range of people from the village. However, these documents inhabit a reality all of their
own.

Indeed, this is a phenomenon that harks back all the way to the early British civil
servants who were ordered to keep excessively precise records of an imprecise, chaotic
society. Seeing no way—and realising quickly that no one really cares—the early British officers fudged their way to medals and honours. When they left, their Indian counterparts
perfected this truly dismal art. Our party attending the gram sabha included a group of young researchers, and Ashish Ranjan, the inspirational activist from Araria who co-ran the
union of unorganised workers, JJSS.

Mahant Maniyari’s sabha should have been just another sham. Indeed, in the days that
Sanjay Sahni was an electrician, that is what it was. Now, however, things had
transformed—the mazdoors had begun to bridge the distance between themselves and the state. The gap was almost wholly eliminated when it came to the NREGA. An apathetic, deaf state had been forced to listen; would the mukhiya and his team of ward members, the panchayat’s democratic face, begin to listen too?

Sanjay Sahni, who had by now fought this entrenched local elite for more than a year,
did not believe so. Initially, he wanted nothing to do with the gram sabha. The previous
year, a thousand mazdoors had worked on various NREGA schemes in these villages,
all by themselves, under the banner of their own unregistered labour union—the Bihar
Manrega Watch. The BMW, as we saw in the previous chapter, ran its own parallel sabhas.

But the gram sabha, enshrined in the Seventy-third Amendment of the Constitution, was
an important institution for democratic dialogue. If Sanjay and the mazdoors could fix
the seemingly unrepairable NREGA system in these villages, perhaps it was time to
push the envelope a little. Sanjay was hesitant, and not without reason. Politically, the
mukhiya and Sanjay had reached an unspoken understanding: the NREGA was the
mazdoors’, the political authority the mukhiya’s. All of this fell into place organically,
there was no formal agreement.

Over time, the mazdoors asserted themselves, and the mukhiya and his brokers had
ceded ground. To have everything play out in a sabha would mean rocking a steady
boat. Why bring tensions to the fore? In the end, however, Sanjay decided to participate. He felt that, just as in the case of the NREGA, it had fallen upon Mahant Maniyari’s mazdoors to be model citizens, to show the way for the rest of the state.

We got to the sabha venue—a small open space by the panchayat office—well in time.
As ever, Mahant Maniyari’s women mazdoors were ready and waiting. A makeshift
stage was set up; chairs were arranged for the dignitaries. Sanjay and Ashish were
natural candidates for occupying a pair of these chairs. The rest of us, although we
were asked to accompany them, preferred to sit elsewhere. For some reason, I chose to
perch on a seven-foot-high wall directly behind the stage. A few male mazdoors soon
followed suit.

My vantage point allowed me a brilliant, Sanjaya-esque view of the proceedings: a
consultant with the World Bank, who had also come to observe, walked around with a
camera in hand, steadily taking pictures; children huddled in a corner, with some brave
ones even climbing up the wall I was on and peering about curiously; above, the clouds
were an ominous grey, the scent of rain gripped the air; suddenly, there was a commotion in the panchayat office; and finally, the mukhiya of Mahant Maniyari walked in, files and notebooks in hand.


Also read: Urban India’s opposition to alcohol prohibition shows its ostrich-like & elitist attitude


We got down to business without much ado. Ashish conducted the proceedings. He began by providing some context. The gram sabha, he explained, came at the end of a series of ward sabhas. A ward is the sub-unit of a gram panchayat, each represented by an elected ward member. Ward sabhas are minigram sabhas. Here, men and women met with their respective ward members (colloquially referred to as ward ‘numbers’) and proposed NREGA projects. Some mazdoors wanted to build roads, others canals, still others drains and so on. The ward members noted all these ideas down in their notebooks. Not every project could be undertaken in a single financial year. Thus, it fell upon the gram sabha to choose between the various ward projects by a voice-vote.

The mukhiya rose and read out from the list of proposed projects for the first ward. The
responses came in the form of cheers, grunts or silences. Very soon, we ran into problems: we did not have mazdoors from all the wards present at the sabha. Therefore, the mukhiya would read out a whole list of projects from a ward—say, the third—and no one would have an opinion on any of these. Things, however, took an exciting turn when we came across a ward which had a fair representation in the audience. However, those present were confronted with a list of projects they had never seen before. Every named project was met with opposition. The ward member grew restive. Clearly, this was a list generated out of thin air, not through a ward sabha. Instead of pointing this out (and thus be forced to turn instigator himself), Ashish pretended like he did not understand. He chided the mazdoors for proposing a list of works in the ward sabha and then summarily rejecting all of them in the gram sabha.

The mazdoors retorted by saying that there had never been a ward sabha. The ward member panicked, the mukhiya stuttered, the mazdoors roared. It began to drizzle. Seizing his chance, the concerned ward member, a short, moustached man who could have been an extra in a movie, made a dash for the stage. He let out an incoherent stream of words. No one really knew how to react, and for a few crystal moments, we simply watched. Suddenly, he grabbed the notebook off the mukhiya’s hands and left. By now, the rain was steadily pounding down, the mood had turned sombre, the proceedings distracted. The mukhiya hastened the end, citing rain.

Had Gandhi and Ambedkar watched the sabha at Mahant Maniyari, they would have both returned home smiling. For Babasaheb, this would have been a confirmation of his beliefs a full sixty-five years after he espoused them. This sabha at Maniyari had a battery of facilitators—Ashish and the rest of us—to ensure effective proceedings. Yet, we had nothing to show for it. Our best achievement was to reinforce a sorry truism: elected representatives are corrupt and narrow-minded. What else but parochialism and ignorance could result in these leaders being repeatedly elected?

The Mahatma would have pointed out that the sabha comprised more women than men. More jatis than you could count on your fingers. More Dalits than upper castes questioning their leaders. Hindus and Muslims roared as one when confronted with farzi lists of projects. Granted, this was an unusual village. And yes, we had no reasoned debate on anything, no people’s plan chalked out. But the significance of the Sabha, the Mahatma would say, lay beyond mere outcomes; it was living proof of how far we had come as a people and of the immense potential at hand. This was India, his India—their India—diverse but unquestionably democratic, lumbering but moving forward.

Excerpted with permission from Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar’s Villages by M.R. Sharan, published by Context, December 2021.

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube, Telegram & WhatsApp

Support Our Journalism

India needs fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism, packed with on-ground reporting. ThePrint – with exceptional reporters, columnists and editors – is doing just that.

Sustaining this needs support from wonderful readers like you.

Whether you live in India or overseas, you can take a paid subscription by clicking here.

Support Our Journalism

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular