Dirty Money Once Again

Panchayat elections in Rajasthan is a transparent indicator of the new political trend in India: cash-fixed grassroots democracy
Rahul Ghai Bikaner

The recently concluded Panchayat elections in Rajasthan have been a grotesque spectacle of unabashed display of wealth and dubious activity by political leaders masquerading as harbingers of wellbeing and justice at the grassroots. The two month roll out of local democracy for 32 districts covering 237 panchayat samities and 9,184 village panchayats was completed in three phases in a major state where the three-tier panchayati raj system was inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru on October 2, 1959, at Naugaur. The most important feature was the open display of vulgar money. Clearly, the dirty money trends set in the parliamentary and assembly elections are catching up on ground zero, despite the persistence of mass poverty, caste hierarchy and unemployment all around.

The attraction of fat profits through the NREGS funds has fuelled the ambition of many to file their nominations for sarpanch (panchayat head) in village gram panchayats. In what would have been the most intense multi-candidate election till date, many candidates have spent huge sums exceeding reportedly Rs 25 lakh per candidate, while most have spent around Rs 4/5 lakhs each. In most panchayats there were at least three to four candidates contesting for sarpanch. In Parwa panchayat in Nokha, there were 22 women candidates for the post of sarpanch; in another, there were as many as 18 candidates contesting among 1,800 voters.

A cursory glance at the profile of those contesting would reveal the deep wedges the political economy has created among brothers, mother and daughter-in-law, and other intimate family ties. Prosperous households had fielded two or three of their family members, contesting elections from different places. Even those living in towns were keen to contest the sarpanch elections. Considering that under NREGS, a whopping Rs 9,500 crore will be spent in the state in the current fiscal year, this excitement makes supreme business sense. The budgets of each panchayat would surely go up several times in the days to come.

Many of those contesting have been 'successful beneficiaries' in the 'development enterprise' of the last 15 years. They have acquired the trappings: land, farm houses, fleets of vehicles, among other objects of conspicuous consumption. Feudal pomp and show, and prosperity hence earned, is used rather lavishly to sponsor feasting for the pre-election wooing of voters. Sumptuous feasting for days on, lure of job cards, cash and cheque payments, free joy rides in fleets of vehicles gliding in the sand dunes, are some of the key features of a typical election campaign of a rich sarpanch candidate. Stark display of solidarity and kinship are invoked: caste, community, family genealogies reveal the realpolitik of the political culture here, and future governance taking shape in full public view.

The panchayat elections are times of heightened social activity that bring to the fore the travails of a nascent civil society coming to terms with the tyranny of tradition as well as winds of change espoused by the democratic polity that is beginning to take roots in the interiors of the desert state. From Bajju, an interior village in the Kolayat Panchayat Samiti in Bikaner, the road takes a right turn, upstream the Indira Gandhi canal, and glides across the undulating terrain of Pawarwala and Mankasar to take a further turn westwards. After travelling on a serpentine road for 15 km in and out of small sand dunes, we reach Bhaluri.