“What is the village
but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism”
In light of Gandhi’s views that local participation being
essential for democracy and the importance of a Panchayati Raj system of
village councils, with village as a basic unit of governance and politics has
been the objective behind the 73rd amendment that has left the
system of Indian polity transformed forever. Local participation, the
importance of “local opinions” and “local expertise” to solve local problems at
the local level, the logic may seem undeniable. Here is the question, the local
people understand the local problem better, true, but are they in a position to decide upon a
solution for such a problem, do they have the knowledge, the proficiency and
the knowhow to actually work up a solution and see it through?
Let us now imagine a typical villager, a potential candidate
to enhance the essence of democracy by actively taking part in the grass root
level government. Our typical villager is now entrusted with the responsibility
of choosing a panch and a sarpanch. Being a typical Indian villager, our
character is plagued by prejudices based on caste and faith, which makes the
typical Indian villager susceptible to appeals along the communal lines. The
differences in human society which is hard lined into them since birth,
building up an attitude intolerant to these differences and proliferate the
superiority of one’s caste or faith over the other, empowering this typical
Indian villager, who embraces provincialism and communalism that addles the
attempt to make a choice in exercising the political right to vote is nothing
but an abuse of the personal power our villager is being entrusted with. And
also, by choosing someone who was alluring such votes along the communal
differences, who will abuse power during their tenure of office nurturing and
further deepening the communal strains to hold the vote bank intact, thus our
typical Indian villager has fostered communalism; our system has created a
means to empower communalism. Now even a greater evil comes when chance places
our typical Indian villager as a potential contender for panch or a sarpanch.
Our typical villager, who has not been educated enough to think clearly to
overcome the narrow-mindedness of a villager, who has still not discontinued
the hereditary village temperament of tagging fellow villagers on the basis of
their birth, how can we expect our villager to be any different or how can we
trust our villager to handle the cornerstone of governance of a country?
The image of a typical Indian villager was created by me after
I read an article titled “Panchayat polls
worsen tension” dated 30th May, The Hindu, where the deciding factor of the village sarpanch was a
30 year old disputed mosque in the Atali village. The elections that is yet to
be conducted, its fair and simple what is determining the verdict, one set of
voters who want the mosque to remain there and the other set who would want the
mosque ruined, whichever opinion would muster the maximum sympathies will
define a winner, whose only motive would be to decide/fight for or against the
existence of a mosque. So, we have
empowered our villager, to do what? To determine the fate of a Mosque! Though
the idea of decentralization was introduced with pure intentions it has been
belittled by the narrow mindedness of the targeted audiences and hence a novel
idea goes to waste. Though it is acknowledged that education is a part of
empowerment, it is important that education itself is stressed before
empowerment and also a quality education is imparted that would make them
adhere to logic, sense and merit that would vest our typical Indian villager
with the power to overcome and confront the communal evils of the society at
the very place where it begins, at the very roots. Empowerment without this
quality education would be similar to pushing instruments of destruction right
into the hands of a devil. Empowering our typical Indian villager the way we
are doing now we promote marginalization and to a greater extent communalism. Hence
without proper understanding if our villagers are constitutionally empowered
due to the efforts towards decentralization we end up enhancing and giving a
berth to localism, ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.
