Uproar in Gram Sabhas mirror caste hold

Chennai: The uproar seen in some of the Gram Sabhas (GS), held on May Day recently in south and west Tamil Nadu districts, only reminded one of the famous Bridge game adage: ‘Bottom of Something, Top of Nothing’.

Under the Panchayati Raj Act that promised more decentralisation of powers to the village panchayats, the Gram Sabhas were given an exalted consultative and participatory role – all persons registered in the electoral rolls relating to a village are its members.

To make sure that people at the grassroots level have a say in the process of local development and governance, the GS were assigned a range of functions from drawing up local development plans, power to control local plans and resources, say in their Implementation and even “social audit of all schemes for the welfare of the people.”  Yet, Grama Sabhas are only seen as a recommending body at best with no real executive powers.

While States too had to pass the appropriate legislations after the Centre’s historic Constitutional amendment Act, post-1994, Tamil Nadu had constituted at least three committees – the L.C. Jain Committee, headed by the late well known Gandhian Economist, the Ko. Si. Mani Committee and the M K Stalin Committee – when the latter was the Rural Development minister during 2006-11 tenure of DMK - to recommend more powers to the Local Bodies.

For example, the quorum for the meeting of Gram Sabhas posed an issue; a quorum of 10 per cent was said to be unattainable in the smaller cluster of hamlets, or considered too unwieldy for the bigger village panchayats. The Tamil Nadu government then made some changes to its State law to make the clauses more realistic, including on participation of women and Dalits in the consultative process. And Gram Sabhas have been mandated to meet four times in a year in the State – January 26, May 1, August 15 and October 2 - Gandhi Jayanthi day. All this looks very impressive on paper. But with no elected Local Bodies in place, the GS meetings have been more a procedural compliance than a substantive action.

Despite these limitations, the GS in four village panchayats in Thoothukudi district was in the limelight this May Day. The gathering of villagers that day at Therkuveera Pandiyapuram and Maapillaioorani in Thoothukudi Union and two others outside the Union, Poovani and Vellur, reportedly passed unanimous resolutions seeking the “permanent closure” of Sterlite’s copper smelting plant in the port-town of Thoothukudi on environmental grounds.

However, there was a procedural hitch, with officials reportedly claiming that the resolutions adopted by the respective GS would not be deemed resolutions as they have not been signed by the respective Panchayat secretaries. So, they would at best be considered as “demands of the people to the government.”

Or again look at the happenings at another GS at Nilavarapatti near Salem on May Day. The villagers there with kith and kin staged a sit-in virtually all through that night after the local people’s unanimous demand to pass a resolution opposing the proposed Rs.10,000 crore Salem-Chennai ‘green corridor’ highway project, was not accepted by the officials at the GS meeting. The villagers’ apprehension was that the mega-road project would gobble up tens of hundreds of arable lands, besides cutting through mineral-rich hills in Tiruvannamalai district, which could possibly lead to large scale ecological imbalances.

The fear and insecurity that grips the people of Nilavarapatti panchayat is no different from the ones expressed by several villages around Ammarappar hills in Theni district who are opposed to the India Neutrino Observatory project.  And on the same day, the GS at four other village panchayats in Omalur taluk of Salem district - Kamalapuram, Pottiyapuram, Thumbipadi and Sikkanampatti - witnessed uproar as people argued and tussled with the officials “to get resolutions passed” against land acquisition for the Salem airport expansion project. But they too face the unseemly prospect of being seen as just recommendations to the government.

Such in-built filters in the decision making process raises larger concerns about decentralisation of powers to the Local Bodies, and Gram Sabhas as arbiters.
Officials, scientists and project overseers at a higher level could always say that in the absence of technical/professional capacities built up at the grassroots level, the people’s response to any project that poses a threat to their immediate livelihood is largely “emotive” and “limited” that disallows long-term benefits.
Gram Sabhas were meant to break the age-old caste hegemony at the village level exercised by the dominant castes in the respective areas/regions, by bringing in universal participation of all the eligible voters and with due representation to women and disadvantaged sections of the population in any village. But in practice, as some scholars have pointed out, that in the absence of capacity building – euphemism for lack of technical expertise - a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ to a project also tend to reflect the interests of the respective dominant castes and the inherent caste biases continue to be powerful institutional motivators.

This does not belittle or invalidate people’s intuitive perceptions about the pros and cons of development projects at the village level. With higher literacy levels and with so much information available on any issue on the Internet, and which are easily replicable and diffusible through the social media today, the Gram Sabhas have found new tools of empowerment, even if not strong enough to break the conventional bureaucratic red-tape.

But ironically, the hold of caste in ordering social preferences, still play a big role in our society, as the dynamics of some of these GS meetings indicate. And why is still caste so important in Indian society? There are several views that have been emphasised by sociologists. Yet one response which is perhaps not sufficiently debated, is that the basic caste identity, the fears, the insecurity, hopes and aspirations that go with caste or jaati, may have to do with ‘Eschatology’.

‘Eschatology’ even if largely associated with the Judea-Christian religions, is not purely a religious/theological notion or set of beliefs about what happens to one after death, going to heaven or hell, and so on as received in popular discourse. An ‘eschatology’ in the Indian or even the larger South Asian context for instance is different; it has to do with a cyclical notion of time, rebirth, karma and so on, that alternate imaginations to caste hierarchies that speak of a more inclusive, broad-based humanistic emancipation of the people is still at best a mirage.