New Rural Institutions

It is well known that in the early years of LF rule in West Bengal, i e, between 1977 and 1983, the combination of land reforms and the new panchayat institutions produced a historic shift in the structures and practices of power in rural society. Until then, rural politics in most villages of West Bengal was dominated by large proprietors who used to be zamindars or tenure-holders in colonial times. The new structure almost entirely ousted the old landlord class from its political and social position in rural society. In those parts of West Bengal where there existed a strong movement of poor and landless peasants led by the Left parties, the transition came as the successful conclusion of a long and hard struggle. But not all districts were equally mobilised. Where the Left parties were weak until 1977, the land reforms programme and the formation of the panchayats produced a new sense of movement to change the old structures of power. Every village in West Bengal has its own story of the “old days” when zamindars and big men dominated rural life, when the poor s uffered from economic oppression and social humiliation, and how things had changed since the 1980s. The large historical story can be easily told, therefore, of a shift in rural power from the old landed classes to others. The problem is to describe the composition of the new power structure.

Most studies of the structure of landed property in West Bengal since the 1980s show that there are almost no large owners of agricultural land any more. Land is distributed in small plots among middle and small owners. It is also well known that the 1980s saw a considerable rise in agricultural output with multiple cropping made possible by the widespread use of groundwater irrigation, chemical fertilisers and new varieties of seeds. This made small farms economically viable while providing employment round the year to the rural landless. But this in itself does not tell us anything about the new power structure. To understand that, it is better to look at how power is actually exercised in rural West Bengal.

Every account speaks of the ubiquitous presence of the “party”. One knows that despite some general characteristics of democracy in India, each region and state has its own peculiar practices and idioms of democratic politics. In West Bengal, the key term is “party”. It is indeed the elementary institution of rural life in the state – not family, not kinship, not caste, not religion, not market, but party. It is the institution that mediates every single sphere of social activity, with few exceptions, if any. This is indeed the true significance of the shift from the old days. Every other social institution, such as the landlord’s house, the caste council, the religious assembly, sectarian foundations, schools, sporting clubs, traders’ associations, and so on, have been eliminated, marginalised or subordinated to the “party”. Rural life is literally inconceivable without the party. The authors of the ethnographic studies published here have referred to this phenomenon as “party society”.

When one hears “the party” in West Bengal, one is liable to think immediately of the CPI(M). But that would be a mistake. It

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is undoubtedly true that the universal mediating role of the party in virtually all social transactions was pioneered by the CPI(M) in the period after 1977. But, as numerous reports indicate, the role has been emulated by all the other parties, whether partners of the CPI(M) in the LF or parties of the opposition. In fact, there is now a modular form of party activity to which all parties aspire, dictated by the socially established role that a party and its functionaries are expected to perform in rural life. When more than one party functions in a village, they either compete to control particular social institutions and activities or set up rival institutions. It is often pointed out that the CPI(M), by virtue of a more efficient structure of discipline and command and a more systematic procedure of training of cadres, is usually more effective in penetrating and controlling every social institution in the villages where they dominate. But where they do not, other p arties seek to perform the same functions.

These functions include not only the political management of village-level governance, which local political leaders may be expected to carry out in all democratic societies, but much more. As the present studies confirm, the party and its local functionaries are the principal arbitrators in all social, family and personal disputes and the principal facilitators when individual villagers need help in matters of health, education, finances, employment or travel. Although it is not one of its statutory functions, every gram panchayat spends a considerable amount of time holding salishi or arbitration hearings on a variety of disputes involving property, marriage, social norms, morality, often with little regard for distinctions between the public and the private, and seeking in most cases to find a resolution that would be most acceptable to all contending parties.

In some ways, this reflects the absence of other social institutions such as landed patriarchs, caste councils or religious leaders who in the past might have performed such functions. It also reflects a social preference for avoiding the more formal machineries of the police and law courts in resolving such disputes. The latter are widely seen to be expensive, time-consuming, corrupt and insensitive to the specific demands of fairness in a particular case that only those intimately familiar with local histories and peculiarities could be expected to know. The widespread popularity of arbitration by panchayat bodies prompted a move in 2004 to put a stamp of quasi-legal recognition on such settlements, but staunch opposition by associations of lawyers forced the government to withdraw the proposal. Nevertheless, salishi by panchayat leaders, whether of the LF or others, continues to be widely practised.

New Style of Leadership

All of this indicates that the exercise of power in rural society through the institution of the party consists of a continuous and daily process of consensus making. At the minimum, this must mean keeping at least a majority of the people sufficiently satisfied to ensure their continued electoral support. But since electorates

EPW is grateful to Pranab Bardhan for help in putting together the papers in this special issue.

Managing Illegalities

There is one aspect of the political management of rural life that is rarely talked about in academic discourse, although it is a c ommonplace in everyday public discourse in West Bengal. That is the political management of illegalities. The sway of illegality in the daily lives of most people in rural society is astounding in its range and depth. From land records to barga rights to minimum wages, the official records do not show the real picture. This is not, however, a simple story of bureaucratic corruption. In most cases, it is a politically mediated result of attempts to find fair and consensual solutions to the intractable problems of p overty and inequality. Thus, landowning families who have effectively moved to non-agricultural occupations may be persuaded to allow others to cultivate their land without any formal transfer of title or tenurial rights. More people may be accommodated in a public works programme at less than minimum wage

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LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN RURAL WEST BENGAL

without the official records showing the discrepancy. The “below poverty line” lists are almost always inflated.

If one moves to non-agricultural activities, the illegalities are endless. Almost all husking mills in West Bengal are unlicensed. Most of the trade in agricultural commodities, in spite of laws and regulating institutions, is effectively unregulated. Most rural shops and roadside markets are regulated politically, not legally. The same goes for rural transport. In all such cases, we will find that the law is either too restrictive or too cumbersome or too expensive to be acceptable and, therefore, it is the local political leadership, belonging to one or the other “party”, which steps in to regulate the transactions. With the recent decline in profitability of small peasant agriculture and the growing importance of non-agricultural occupations in the village, the range of political regulation of the so-called informal sector of economic activities in rural society has increased phenomenally.

Moving to white collar occupations, the situation is even more astonishing. With the spread of higher education, the two most important white collar occupations in rural areas are teaching and government employment. Both are firmly under the political control of “the party”. As far as teaching is concerned, all recognised institutions from the primary to the higher stages are fully supported by government funds and recruitment is through official service commissions. These are known to be politically controlled. But more important is the fact that the profession of teaching includes the massive activity of private tuition which is legally unregulated and hence politically regulated. A recent example of the problems that may be caused thereby is the case of the unlicensed training institutes for primary schoolteachers. It has been explicitly recognised that the problem is political.

We can go on multiplying examples from unlicensed medical practitioners to unlicensed businesses. The problems have been compounded in recent years with the huge expansion of infrastructure funds at the disposal of panchayat bodies. This has increased the demands on the managerial abilities of local political leaders. Most gram panchayats now have an elected pradhan, and a pradhan chalak, i e, one who drives the pradhan. There is a new generation of local political leaders for whom the political management of benefit distribution, and hence the management of illegalities, has become a career. The question is: can the inherited structure of the Left political party adapt itself to the new requirements?

There is one more aspect of the political management of illegalities that has not drawn the attention of scholars. Managing illegalities necessarily means a certain negotiation with the structures of the law and the police over jurisdiction. Rural West Bengal has never seen the Weberian ideal where the state holds a monopoly over legitimate violence. Rather, the political mediators in local conflicts have always used violence, or the threat of violence, as a strategic resource to be deployed in the task of building consensus and keeping the peace. The success of this instrument depends on its effectiveness as a threat rather than its actual use and on its being kept localised and limited. This in turn depends on the moral credibility of the local party leadership in resolving conflicts in a fair and generally acceptable fashion. In recent times, this credibility has been waning.

The strains are palpable. A large sample survey carried out in 2006 showed that while most people in West Bengal thought of the panchayat structure as a fact of life that had come to stay, a surprisingly large number thought that most panchayat members were corrupt. A significant number felt that the activities now entrusted with the panchayats would be better carried out by government departments (Bhattacharya et al 2006). These findings do not indicate a lack of faith in local governmental institutions but rather a pervasive distrust in the moral authority of those who claim to mediate, on political grounds, the contending claims to livelihood, fairness and dignity. It is this popular distrust that signals the coming crisis in West Bengal.

Reference

Bhattacharya, Dwaipayan, Partha Chatterjee, Pranab Kumar Das, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Manabi Majumdar and Surajit Mukhopadhyay (2006): Strengthening Rural Decentralisation (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences).