by Mark Tully
The reforms in the panchayat system meant that decisions about development work – digging irrigation channels and tube-wells, building mud roads, planting trees and many other schemes – were now taken by the villagers themselves, or at least by the committee they had elected. That meant that the planning process had been reversed: instead of schemes coming down from bureaucrats on high, they now started from the bottom and went up to the bureaucrats for approval. The panchayats now also had powers to supervise the work and make sure it was actually completed. Under the previous system, the villagers had no check on officials who failed to implement schemes and pocketed the funds themselves. The block development officer approved of this in theory, but said there were problems.
‘Since this new scheme, the quantity of work done has improved but the quality has deteriorated. The difficulty is that the sarpanches [panchayat leaders] who head the committees want to get as much work done as possible so that they'll be re-elected. That means they often ignore our professional advice and take up work of doubtful benefit. For instance, they sometimes have small canals dug which will adversely affect the land after a few years because they are not properly planned. The worst case is tube-wells. They should not dry up for seven to ten years, but now the sarpanches say, “If I dig tube-wells 100 feet instead of 300 feet deep, I can get three for the price of one.” The trouble is, the tube-wells will dry up after three years.’
‘What about corruption?’ I asked.
‘Of course there is some corruption. That is inevitable, because the sarpanch can choose the contractor to do the work – he doesn't necessarily have to get it done by our departments. That means he is open to bribery by the contractors.’
‘But surely’, I asked, ‘you have powers to prevent this?’
‘In theory, yes. We can refuse to accept the sarpanch's word, which means that we don't disburse funds; but the trouble is that he can appeal over our heads and we don't get the support we should do from our superior officers. That's politics for you. Most sarpanches are members of the Marxist party. The party backs them, and so our superior officers feel threatened and tow the line.’
Block development officers are sometimes called ‘officers who block development’. They have an unenviable reputation for corruption, because so many of them are hand in glove with contractors. They tend to side with the dominant caste and so they do not implement government policy fairly. I was impressed by the frankness with which the Bengali block development officer spoke to me, and I was convinced that here at least I had met an honest and sincere official.
The panchayat reforms in Bengal have certainly reduced the powers of the block development officer, but they could just lead to another tyranny: the tyranny of the dominant caste. The block development officer was not unduly concerned about that. ‘In Bengal, we are lucky in one respect: we do not have dominant castes like the Jats in Haryana, or the Yadavs in parts of Bihar. They are farmers with their own land. Here, many of the farmers are still tenants and we don't have large holdings. I would be more worried about the possibility of the party workers grabbing the development process for their own advantage. The panchayats are undoubtedly being used by the Marxists to provide their base in the rural areas.’
The former finance minister, Ashok Mitra, had told me that it was the presence of the party in the countryside which prevented the panchayats from being captured by vested interests. I decided to test this, although I knew I could take only a very small sample which would not make my findings scientific.
Turning off the main road, I drove along the embankment of a canal. It had once been a potholed village road, suitable at best for bullock carts, but it had now been levelled and covered with red Bankura earth which prevented the monsoon from washing away the surface. There were houses all along both banks, most of them made of mud with tiled roofs. They were shaded by banyan trees, banana plantains and date- and coconut-palms. In places the canal widened into village ponds, covered with green algae, in which men in loincloths bathed and women washed and oiled their long, black hair. Rickety, bamboo footbridges arched over the canal – I was very thankful that I was not called upon to cross one. This ribbon development made it impossible to tell where one village stopped and the next one started, so after four miles I stopped the car and got out to walk. I set out along the embankment, followed like the Pied Piper of Hamelin by a train of children.
We soon reached a small tea shop, where I asked for the sarpanch. The villagers pointed down the road towards the only brick-built house in sight. It was obviously the home of the richest man in the village, so I assumed that he would be the sarpanch. In fact there was no sarpanch in that village, just a member of the panchayat which covered a cluster of these small villages. He lived not in the brick-built house but in a much smaller one made of mud. In the narrow courtyard, a tethered cow was eating chopped green fodder out of a round earthenware manger. A young boy was sent to call Sanjay Khan, the member of the panchayat, from his fields. Indian villagers are hospitable and curious, so I knew that he would meet me. Sure enough, the boy soon returned with a short, stocky man wearing just a lungi. He had been irrigating a field of potatoes, and his dark skin was spattered with mud. The panchayat member owned only a quarter of an acre of land and had recently leased another half-acre.
Sanjay Khan had become a communist in 1964 when just out of school but had been made a fully fledged party member only in 1980. He had gone to university but that had not led to a job, and so he had worked in factories as a casual labourer, at the same time tilling his very small holding. He had to provide for a joint family of fourteen. After being accepted as a pukka Marxist, things looked up and he was made a primary-school teacher in the village. In many parts of India a schoolteacher would not stoop to work on the land, but Sanjay Khan did not regard manual labour as demeaning. He pointed out some of the improvements that the panchayat had achieved – the village was electrified, the road was covered with that red Bankura earth and 500 people had been given loans to start some income-generating activity.
I asked whether the panchayat used private contractors.
‘Yes we do, because they will be loyal to us and work under our supervision. If you use government agencies, they work as and when they feel like it.’
‘But doesn't that mean that the members of the panchayat can make money out of the contractors?’ I asked.
Sanjay Khan pointed to his mud house and said, ‘You can see for yourself. Does it look as if I'm making money? Would I work in my own fields if I was stealing the village funds? Look for yourself. This is a small and congested village. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. How could I get re-elected if the village knew I was a thief?’
Sanjay Khan was firmly convinced that the new system was an improvement. ‘Under the old system, nobody was interested in doing anything for the panchayat. You had to go to the bureaucrats to get anything done. They would not communicate. They would make you hang around and wait. Now there is not much problem – we can get things done without being harassed by the bureaucrats.’
I was interested in the fact that Sanjay Khan was a primary-school teacher, because a senior civil servant in Calcutta had told me that the party cadres were being rewarded with jobs as schoolteachers and other government posts. Sanjay Khan did not see anything wrong in that.
‘I can tell you the position. Around here, about 60 per cent of the schoolteachers are Congress and 40 per cent Marxist. That shows that the Congress used to give jobs to their people, so why shouldn't we?’
The schoolteacher still studied Marxism – he showed me a history of the Bolshevik Party, a history of political theory in Russia and Germany in the nineteenth century and pamphlets by Marx and Lenin to prove it – but he maintained that no attempt was made to indoctrinate children in primary schools.
While Sanjay Khan was talking about Marxism, his mother was praying to the family deity. He laughed when I pointed out this contrast, and said, ‘The elder people are still re
ligious. I am not, although I must admit I do remember God when I am in danger.’
After driving a few more miles along the canal bank, I came to the house of Gopal Naik, the sarpanch of that group of villages. It was built of concrete and was comparatively spacious. He employed labourers to work his land, and taught in a secondary, not a primary, school. In fact he was altogether a cut above Sanjay Khan. Perhaps for that reason I trusted him less. He had become a communist when he was a student at Calcutta University in the sixties. He admitted that there had been some corrupt sarpanches in West Bengal but said that they had been dealt with by the local party committees. When I suggested that he had been elected as sarpanch because he was well educated and comparatively prosperous, he said, ‘I have only been sarpanch for one year. I have been a member of the party for many years. Why have I only just been elected if it's such an easy thing? My predecessor came from the Muslim community, although he was a Marxist. The Muslims have very little influence of their own here. He couldn't have been chosen without the support of the party, and they choose people they trust.’
The sarpanch did admit that some tube-wells had gone dry, but denied that it was due to bad planning. He confirmed that, in spite of the panchayat's Marxist members, it did employ private contractors. He did not accept that the new panchayat system helped the farmers but not the landless labourers. ‘The landless get these loans to start some business,’ he said. ‘Of course there have been cases of loans being squandered, but now we have set up loan-repayment camps and the panchayat acts as an intermediary between the borrower and the bank. We tell the landless that if they repay their loan they will get another one. We also start agitations to make sure that the labourers are paid the minimum wages.’
As I walked back to the car, a young man came up to me and said very quietly, ‘There are some people who are getting the party a bad name. I think our leaders are going to do something about them, otherwise workers like me will get disillusioned.’ He wouldn't give me any names.
On the way back, I stopped to talk to a family of labourers squatting outside a station. They had been working on the roads and were waiting for a train back to their village. The head of the family, Bhradeswar Singh, was frail and pigeon-chested, with spindly, bandy legs. A sparse straggling beard partly covered his confused and defeated face. I asked whether he had been given a loan to start some business of his own. He replied, ‘No, I asked for a loan to start a shop. I am now fifty-five and I can't go on working much longer. What will happen then? I will have to starve. That's why I asked for a loan, but I don't know why I couldn't get one. Many people of our caste have got loans, but not me.’
I suggested it might be because he was not a communist.
‘I don't know much about parties. I vote for the Marxists, but how can I do more than that? I don't have time to work for them.’
That was a sad conversation with which to end my visit to the beautiful Bengal countryside, but I was not unduly depressed. Even sceptical Calcutta journalists had told me that conditions in the countryside had improved under the Marxists, and the little I had seen convinced me too. Nevertheless, it was strange that their rural revolution should be based on the ancient Indian panchayat system. Mahatma Gandhi – no communist – had hoped that the panchayats would be the basis of the revival of village life which he saw as the key to a prosperous India.
Returning to Calcutta, it took me one hour to cross the Hooghly. I could feel the 60-year-old Dakshineshwar bridge tremble as the traffic crawled across it. The first post-independence bridge over the Hooghly was started seventeen years ago, but there is still a yawning gap in the middle of it. That is partly because of arguments over the design, but it also reflects the neglect this once great city has suffered since independence – a neglect that has grown worse since West Bengal chose to vote for the communists rather than the Congress Party which controls the central government's funds. Delhi has been given three new bridges since independence, and a fourth is much nearer completion than Calcutta's new bridge.
The roads of north Calcutta were almost as crowded as the Dakshineshwar bridge. North Calcutta is the area where once lived the wealthy zamindars – the landowner class created by the British at the end of the eighteenth century. Their palaces are now falling into ruins; the lanes leading to them are lined with slums. The families living in those slums are, however, better off than the homeless squatting under the Strand Road flyover in central Calcutta, beside the railway lines leading from Sealdah Station and anywhere else where the police are tolerant or have been bribed. British Calcutta had more than its fair share of slums and squalor, but after independence the city succumbed to the pressure of population – the million refugees who fled from the then East Pakistan, a burden any city in the world would have had difficulty in bearing. The poverty of the neighbouring states of Bihar and Orissa has kept up the pressure on the city. It should be said in Calcutta's defence that even Delhi, which has a prosperous hinterland and has received the most favourable treatment from the central government, has become a city of slums. They are hidden by the glamour of New Delhi, but they are there. The miracle of all the metropolitan Indian cities is that they have not yet suffered any major ecological disaster.
Geoffrey Moorhouse's Calcutta quotes the British town-planner Professor Colin Buchanan, writing after a visit to Calcutta more than twenty years ago: ‘This is one of the greatest urban concentrations in existence, rapidly approaching the point of breakdown in its economy, housing, sanitation, transport and the essential humanities of life. If the final breakdown were to take place it would be a disaster for mankind of a more sinister sort than any disaster of flood or famine.’ The disaster has not taken place yet – largely due to the courage of the poor of India, who have an immense capacity to bear suffering.
In fairness, it has to be said that, since Professor Buchanan's jeremiad, efforts have been made to improve living conditions in Calcutta and they have had some effect, but neither the Congress Party nor the Marxists appear to have any answer to the fundamental problems of the city. That is not altogether surprising when one sees the failure of prosperous Western countries to solve the problems of their cities. A Calcutta businessman made that point to me rather forcibly at a dinner party. He said, ‘When I go to London now and see the filth, the traffic jams, the crowds on the tube, the drunks sleeping in cardboard boxes and the graffiti, I am glad. When I see the buskers in the tube, I think, “Look, the white man is now begging from me.” You are going our way, and about time too. Now you can keep your pity for yourselves.’
That businessman was an immigrant Calcuttan who came originally from Bihar. Bengalis don't often get upset about criticism of Calcutta – they love the city for all its faults, because it is still a bastion of their culture. Many believe that is why they like the Marxists too: that they vote for them as Bengalis, not as communists. It is true to say that the Marxists have managed to penetrate only the Bengali community in the neighbouring states, but Manoranjan Roy, the veteran Marxist trade-union leader who graduated from terrorism to communism in jail in the twenties and thirties, flatly denied that his party was Bengali. ‘People only say that to sow confusion,’ he told me. ‘The trouble is that in Bihar and other parts of the Hindi-speaking area the feudals are still strong and we haven't been able to organize the peasantry.’
For ‘feudals' I would substitute ‘caste’. Caste is a very powerful factor in the backward and largely rural states of the Hindi belt, and caste and communism do not go together. But that does not explain the communists' failure in other big industrial cities, like Bombay and Ahmedabad There Manoranjan Roy had to admit himself defeated. ‘Those cities have long traditions of trade-unionism,’ he told me, ‘and I don't know why we have not been able to build more on that. Perhaps it's because Mahatma Gandhi got there first.’
Kerala, in the extreme south-west, is the only other major state in which the Marxists have a powerful presence. Like Bengal it has a strong identity of its own, and the Ker
ala Marxist Party has had similar difficulties in expanding into the neighbouring state. It has also had to make compromises – even at one stage forming an alliance with a Muslim religious party.
In spite of the compromises the Marxists have made in West Bengal and Kerala, they do have real achievements to their credit. T. J. Nossiter of the London School of Economics has written in his recent book Marxist State Governments in India, ‘Flawed the Communist Movement of India may well be but it has sustained its values far more successfully than any other movement or party in independent India.’ Nossiter does not entirely dismiss the possibility of the Marxists becoming partners in the government of India. But therein lies their dilemma. They have already seen how far they have been forced to stray from orthodox policies in order to survive as a political force in two states of India. They therefore fear that if they adulterate their doctrine too they will end up like almost all the other national opposition parties in India – little more than rootless resting places for politicians who have not been able to realize their personal ambitions in the Congress Party. But the Marxists cannot hope to defend their identity by sticking to Stalin forever: they must evolve a theory of history and an ideology which responds to the realities of the Indian, not the Soviet, situation.
7
THE DEORALA SATI
On 2 September 1987, Maal Singh, a 23-year-old man belonging to the Rajput caste living in Deorala village in Rajasthan, fell mysteriously ill. The next day his 18-year-old wife, Roop Kanwar, together with his father and brother, took him to the hospital in the town of Sikar, the administrative headquarters of the district. He was suffering from severe stomach pains and low blood pressure. The doctors said her husband was in no danger, so Roop Kanwar returned to the village that night, but Maal Singh died in the early hours of the morning. His father reached Deorala with the body of his son at ten o'clock in the morning.
