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It
is often argued that in view of widespread communalism in India,
reverting control over local resources and decision-making to
village government will lead to vested interests controlling
power and further abuse of the disadvantaged and the weak. This
actually was a major issue of disagreement between Ambedkar and
Gandhi. Ambedkar held that if village governments are thus
empowered, it will further the exploitation of disadvantaged
communities while Gandhi pleaded that only through such
grassroots empowerment, social ill and discords will gradually
give way to a self-reliant egalitarian society. Today, many
politicians, academics and self-styled well-wishers of the
common people vociferously argue that since communalism has
greatly increased over the 50 years since independence,
disadvantaged communities will experience extensive abuse at the
hands of village governments, if they are empowered.
To facilitate rational analysis of this issue, it is necessary
to understand the genesis of such exploitation. The 400-year
experience of gram swaraj in India has forcefully demonstrated
that wherever genuine grassroots empowerment prevailed, there
was complete social harmony promoting a self-reliant and
culturally advanced society. It is only where vested interests
such as feudal lords, high priests and the state bureaucracy
deriving authority from the state, started controlling power
that abuse and communalism started raising their ugly head. The
feudal lords connived with the state bureaucracy to control
land, assign tenancy at will, and abuse farm workers. The high
priests converted castes based on profession (similar to the
Smiths and Carpenters of the West) to those based on birth,
placed themselves on the top, and made the weak untouchable. All
indulged in "begar", exclusion, and abuse of women.
Yet, till the nineteen century when in 1830, Sir Charles
Metcalfe, the then British Governor General of India recorded
his famous minute showering praises over the institution of the
"tiny village republics of India", the gram panchayats
were active and vibrant in most parts of India. The British
imperial rule gave them the deathblow, transferred the control
over land, water systems and forest to the state governments,
instituted the patwari, thanedar and district collector at the
local level, and made the cultivators the tenants of the state
or of the feudal lords. After independence, our leaders
abolished the feudal system but retained the rest. The feudal
lords, however, used the bureaucracy and abused the centralised
revenue and civil courts to retain control over land. The abuse
has continued and exploitation and communalism has further
increased during 50 years since independence.
Politicians, professionals and NGOs raise
the bogy of communalism, as they feel threatened by referendums
and local empowerment.
The antidote to communalism is, as
stressed by Gandhi, true local empowerment. Local empowerment is
a legal right of the people in a democracy. If the educated
elite hold that the common people have no right to it, they will
have to opt for some other form of governance such as the
Chinese single party neo-fascism. They cannot have democracy to
themselves and deny it to the majority.
The British Prime Minister at the time of independence, Clement
Atlee, in his speech in the House of Commons on March 15, 1946,
said, "We are mindful of the rights of minorities and the
minorities should be able to live free from fear. On the other
hand, we cannot allow a minority to place their veto on the
progress of the majority". In reality, in the name of
minorities, the nation and the people including minorities, all
have been abused.
Before concluding, it may be mentioned that in this Constitution
a non-political institutional mechanism, councils of
stakeholders consisting of representatives of various interest
groups, for resolution of conflicts at sub district and district
levels, has been provided. The state and national politics that
abuses social issues will have no jurisdiction over such issues.
PEOPLE
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