Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (9 page)

One of Devi’s chief responsibilities is identifying development projects for the state to fund. Of these, there is no shortage. The village has no running water. All the adults have basic cell phones, but since there’s no electricity, they must wait until they go into town to charge their phones and make calls. There’s a school, but the teachers live outside the village, and the difficulties crossing the rough forest terrain cause them to miss work as often as three times a week. One reason why development has been so slow is that Jharkhand is newly carved out of Bihar and held its first
panchayat
elections only in 2011. Now Devi is almost entirely responsible for ushering her village into the modern world. Two things stand in her way—the first being the reluctance of the state government to release funds to develop land in the middle of nowhere.

Although the Forest Rights Act of 2006 grants traditional forest dwellers the right to live in the forest, the government would like nothing more than to get rid of them. By depriving the villagers of basic necessities of life, officials hope to hound them out and preserve the natural habitat for protected wildlife. But the villagers are tribals who know no other way than to live off the land. Before the forest was protected, private mining companies employed the villagers, building them brick huts and supplying them electricity. Once the mines closed down and the law was enforced, the villagers were warned against cutting wood or making further encroachments. Eking out a subsistence living does not secure their future. In her fight for change, Devi spends several days a week in town “running from one government office to another,” her “head bowed and hands folded.” “They are determined to be unhelpful,” she says.

Devi’s second challenge is overcoming the inherent patriarchy of Indian culture, which has manifested itself in the
panchayat
system through the rise of the
sarpanch pati
. The term, which means “husband of the
sarpanch
,” refers to men who have their wives stand for election in reserved seats and then lead by proxy. It isn’t clear whether these women
are happy to cede power, or if they are made to do so under threat of violence or separation. Whatever it means, the prevalence of
sarpanch patis
recently led the Ministry of Panchayati Raj to recommend action against state officials who permit
panchayat
meetings to be conducted by the male relatives of women
sarpanches.
The taint has damaged the reputation of even those married women who lead independently. Devi often finds herself reminding people that her decisions are her own. Manoranjan Singh, an activist with the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, a nonprofit that works with mining communities in Jharkhand, agrees. “She’s the boss,” he says. “Not her husband.”

Patriarchy isn’t the only obstacle. Although urban India is largely divided on class lines, rural India—states like Jharkhand in particular—are deeply segregated by caste. Entire communities live, marry, and even choose their work on the basis of caste diktats. Lower-caste families have to live away from the upper castes; they can’t use the same well, they are discouraged from applying for the same jobs, and inter-caste marriage is unthinkable. For decades, such villages have been dominated by upper-caste
sarpanches
, but reserving seats for women has changed this, making it possible for low-caste women to win elections. The change has sometimes had a brutal fallout—women find themselves threatened with physical violence, falsely accused of corruption or embezzlement, and even driven to suicide.

Although Devi exercises caution in her dealings with men, and upper-caste men in particular, she is independent and enthusiastic about her job—testament to the claim by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj that women
sarpanches
have fulfilled their promise. According to the ministry, women
sarpanches
have been especially effective in raising issues that the all-male
panchayats
tended to ignore, including child marriage, female feticide, and infanticide, as well as increased access to schooling and day care.

In fact, as a result of their exposure to the
panchayat
, rural Indian women may be more inspired than urban women to join political life.
Studies show such participation has important effects on village women’s lives. As more women attend
panchayat
meetings, they access public spaces they would not have entered before. These interactions allow them to network, which leads to the formation of self-help groups and microcredit programs. Women are also more comfortable approaching female
panchayat
leaders for rights and services. These leaders are vested with real power, with access to funds. They may be able to have a road built or a fence erected, or press for more hand pumps—tangible changes that can transform living standards.

Politics at a higher level is, inevitably, far more complicated and the bargaining required to achieve even small goals can be tedious and disillusioning. At the city or state level, politics appears distant and beyond the influence of ordinary voters. But Devi, like every other
sarpanch
, lives among her constituents. They know where she lives and can knock on her door almost anytime. Most urban women don’t know the name of their legislator. If rural women are now starting to see local politics as a road to real change, urban women have exactly the opposite experience.

The success of the reservation has had a ripple effect. In 2011, it was increased from 33 percent to 50 percent, and several states have already implemented the measure. And this year, after much stalling, parliament is expected to take a vote on the Women’s Reservation Bill, regarding the role of women at the state and national levels.

Like the constitutional amendment that helped Devi win the
panchayat
election, this bill seeks to reserve one-third of all seats for women in the democratically elected lower house of parliament and the state legislative assemblies. It also provides that one-third of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes be reserved for women of these groups.

The need for such a bill may seem surprising given the number of women who have occupied the highest ranks of Indian politics. But many of these women benefited from their proximity to great power: Former
prime minister Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. And Sonia Gandhi, the president of India’s oldest party, is the widow of Indira Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, himself a prime minister. Perhaps their success, despite the built-in advantages they enjoyed, does encourage other women to enter politics. But given India’s tradition of dynastic politicians, and the widely held notion that without connections, money, or power a career in politics is a waste of time, those success stories merely confirm the stereotype that women get ahead by proximity to men, not on their merits.

In fact, India ranks a dismal 105th in the world in terms of women’s participation in politics. Women account for only 11 percent of the lower house of parliament. In the upper house, which is determined by presidential nomination and the votes of state legislators, they comprise less than 10 percent.

Nonetheless, the reservations have had tremendous impact. Powerful women make it easier for other women to aspire to power. Successful women are able to convince voters that they can fight on their behalf. And the attacks against them have only justified the need for reservations. Both sets of actions have raised the question of whether familiarity with taking charge should be instilled at an even earlier age.

One upshot is the
Bal
(or Children’s)
Panchayats
, which are mock
panchayats
conducted in rural schools. Members of the
Bal Panchayat
, both boys and girls, are elected by their schoolmates. They attend meetings of the (adult)
panchayat
and are encouraged to suggest development projects. At the least, the process familiarizes children with politics. At its best, it will create a generation of politically aware young women and men.

In 2012, I visited a
Bal Panchayat
in the northern state of Rajasthan. Here, far fewer women are literate and work professionally than men. In a small village outside Jaipur, where the villagers grow their own food on stamp-size parcels of lands, I met Pooja Gujjar, the eleven-year-old deputy
sarpanch
of her school’s
Bal Panchayat.
Pooja and other members
of the
Bal Panchayat
had successfully canvassed the adult
panchayat
for funds to build a kitchen for their school. Before that, their midday meal was cooked in the open, in fields sprayed liberally with pesticide. It wasn’t unusual to find bugs in the dal and dirt in their rice. The kitchen, as it turned out, was only the beginning.

“We want more classrooms,” Pooja told me firmly. “There are eight classes in this school, so we should have at least eight, not just two classrooms. And we need lights. And fans. It gets very hot in summer!”

Shekhar Gupta

Shekhar Gupta is the editor-in-chief of the
Indian Express.

It is easy—and for any Indian, quite natural—to argue with the very idea of reimagining India. To reimagine, you have to presume you have something that has already been imagined, a completed piece of work, philosophy, or idea. The trouble with that formulation is that, through the millennia, India, and the ideas upon which it is predicated, have evolved rather than been imagined.

At different junctures, many Indians have tried to mold India to fit their own imaginations: from Ashoka to Akbar, from Manu to Mayawati, from Gautama Buddha to Mahatma Gandhi, from Tughlaq to Jawaharlal Nehru, and from Kautilya to B. R. Ambedkar. And let’s not forget the Sufi geniuses of the Middle Ages who scripted our syncretism; or the latter-day visionaries like Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh; or even Ram Manohar Lohia, V. P. Singh, and Lal Krishna Advani. What the collective imagination of all these thinkers has given us is, at best, a work in progress.

But that there has been progress is undeniable. We Indians are hard to please, particularly when we look at the state of our own nation and society. To be fair to ourselves, we have done reasonably well so far. The evolution of our nation, society, and economy—or reimagination, if you so choose to call it—is progressing.

To step back in history again, Emperor Ashoka was the first to imagine a peaceful, equal-opportunity state where the ruler was bound by
Rajdharma
, the duty of rulers, as much as his subjects were by laws made
and enforced by him. Two millennia later, the Nehruvian idea of India emerged from that original thought. Ambedkar and his Constituent Assembly gave it a scripture—the liberal, federal, and secular Constitution, which endures. It is no surprise, then, that the most important symbols of our constitutional state, the three-lion emblem and the chakra wheel, are inherited from Ashoka.

In the sixties, it was almost impossible to imagine the India of today. The sixties, to borrow a phrase from renowned South Asian expert Selig Harrison, was India’s “most dangerous decade.” For me, that decade holds enduring fascination; no other period is as significant in our post-independence political and military history. India fought all of its crucial wars in the sixties: the 1961 liberation of Goa; the 1962 debacle against China in the high Himalayas; the indecisive but debilitating war of attrition against Pakistan in 1965; skirmishes in Kutch (against Pakistan, 1965) and Nathu La (in Sikkim, against China, 1967). The 1971 war that liberated Bangladesh also was an extension of conflicts originating in the sixties. The sixties was a time when tribal insurgencies held sway in two northeastern states, one briefly in Mizoram and another for much longer in Nagaland. These were the years of the distinctly separatist Akali and Dravida political movements in Punjab and Tamil Nadu, respectively. If, in the sixties, you were, like me, a young Indian schoolboy, you never would have dreamed that 1971 would see India’s last major war; that insurgencies and separatist movements would be subsumed by this wondrous evolution of Indian constitutionalism; that famines, hand-to-mouth survival, and communal riots would all simply fade away—long before you yourself reached sixty.

And how did this remarkable transformation come about? It was hardly because this was a decade of towering political leaders. One of the greatest, Nehru, declined and passed away. Another, Shastri, lasted fewer than two years. And the third, Indira Gandhi, was still finding her feet. But hundreds of millions of Indians were meanwhile molding India to their own diverse ideas—ideas that, improbably, converged. I got this wisdom from an interview with one of the grand old men of Indian politics, M. Karunanidhi, patriarch of one of Tamil Nadu’s dominant political
parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progress Federation).

“Weren’t you called a separatist in the sixties?” I asked him, with cameras rolling.

“No, no, I wasn’t
called
a separatist,” said the patriarch. “I
was
a separatist.”

“Then what changed, and when?”

“When the wars with China and Pakistan took place, we realized that we could only have sovereignty if we were a part of a much larger republic, or outsiders would enslave us.”

So here is a man who led one of the strongest and most popular ethnic separatist movements in India, who says he and his comrades gave up separatism when India was at its weakest, when it was fighting terrible wars and facing famine and political instability, and he could simply have walked out of the republic. Were people like him stupid? Or geniuses? Were they trying to reimagine their own concept of nationhood? Or did they, instead, decide to embrace what had already been imagined, and was emerging?

It is not my intention to review India’s political history decade by decade; the sixties are a good metaphor, an instructive reference point for understanding how things change in India, and why. Careful study of those years also teaches us that there always is great continuity in change.