Decolonizing Panchayats: Exploring Gandhian decentralization as a mechanism for grassroots involvement

As far as experiments go, India has been a successful one, it is the largest representative democracy in the world, the largest number of voters and the largest number of political parties across the spectrum. It boasts of a reasonably free press, a reasonably independent judiciary and a reasonably technocratic bureaucracy. However, as much as representation has been successful, participation or the direct involvement of people in the governance has been a failure. This paper firstly explores why despite having a long tradition of institution like panchayat, Indian democracy remains centralized? Why do panchayats, despite regular elections and affirmative action in favour of disadvantaged sections, face a scenario of decreasing participation with each electoral cycle? Secondly, this paper explores the possibilities associated with the application of a Gandhian model of decentralization and whether it could decolonize panchayats and regenerate participative mechanisms rooted in Indian society? The research uses secondary data published by the state and published studies on panchayats to frame the problem. Postcolonial theory specially Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of heterogeneity of the historical timelines of colonial societies and Bourdieu’s concepts of Field, Practice and habitus is used to explain the colonization of Panchayats. In Europe, the ‘maison du roi’ differentiates into the bureaucratic field, juridical field and the political field giving birth to the modern democratic state. In pre-colonial India the ‘maison du roi’ does not exist, and therefore the birth of the so called modern democratic India is not a natural process. Colonization is a process which is different from mere conquest and one of the essential elements of this process is the destitution of indigenous institutions. Amongst various other destitutions, colonization of India also destituted the Panchayats. Whatever the state of pre-colonial Indian society; the social fields had their own struggles, the social forces that characterised the field were unique to the Indian society. Colonization transplants new modern fields into the colonial Indian society and the agents within these new fields lose agency as they are unaware of the practice of these new fields. They carry forward their habitus that had developed in the pre-colonial indigenous fields into the new modern colonial fields. Since these agents are unable to produce or reproduce the symbolic capitals associated with these colonial fields, they either lose agency in these fields or they start converting material capital into the symbolic capital of the field. The colonial fields get corrupted structurally and this structural corruption is inherited by the post-colonial fields of independent India. When Panchayats get revived in post-colonial independent India, the structural corruptions of the post-colonial political, juridical, and bureaucratic fields are inherited by these new panchayats. Gandhi had already sounded a warning to this effect in his 1908 work ‘Hind Swaraj’. He was quite wary of modernity and its violent repercussions and suggested a different model of decentralization, limitation of state and revival of Panchayats. Gandhi suggested concentric circles of co-equal institutional framework, where the individual is at the centre and power radiates outwards from this centre.