I address the question of authoritarian elements in Indian democracy by looking at the example of two uncontested gram panchayat elections in Karnataka. In both cases, ‘traditional’ leaders – the guru and the family of the gaudaru – pre-empted competitive elections by orchestrating a consensus slate of candidates. At first glance, their intervention appears to be the insertion of hierarchy, and traditional hierarchy at that, in a process which should be egalitarian and modern. But a closer look shows that these hierarchies were constrained and shaped by democracy in important ways. What looks like an authoritarian intervention may well have furthered democracy in interesting ways.

In May 2015, I visited a village in central Karnataka to do my usual fieldwork on the informal arbitration court called nyaaya peetha (the seat of justice) run by a Lingayat guru. I have been following several cases of inter-village conflicts brought into his court.

What I did not realize at the time was that the day we visited the place was a day before the gram panchayat election, and people at the matha (monastery) were not at all keen on sending me to the villages where the disputes were still going on. They told me that it was too dangerous for me to visit.

But despite their concerns about the possible drunkenness and violence fuelled by the gram panchayat election in other villages, their village seemed very peaceful and quiet. Over a cup of coffee at the village general shop, I asked a villager passing by, ‘why is it so calm here?’ He replied: ‘Because the guru did the selection (aike) so there is no disturbance (garaate) here.’ He said this with proud big smile on his face. ‘Are you happy with his selection?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the guru brought new people in, which is good.’

I have long known how much the people in this area respect the guru for the variety of his social work, especially conflict resolution through his nyaaya peetha. So the people of the village where his main matha is situated accepting the guru’s selection of the gram panchayat members could be considered to be understandable. However, in the actual selection process, the guru – despite being undoubtedly one of the most powerful religious leaders in the region – could not easily make an absolute decision. During a long interview with me, he explained the lengthy process of negotiations with a variety of power holders in the area.

 

The guru explained to me the criteria for his selection. First of all, he thought that there should not be old candidates and that ‘new faces should come’. The candidate should not currently be an office bearer (of an agricultural society or any other governmental and semi-governmental institution). If the spouse of the candidate has already held an office, then he or she should not stand for election. The candidate should be educated. And finally: the party affiliation should not be considered (the GP election in Karnataka is officially not party based but in reality parties are very much involved and people know the affiliation of every candidate).

He then held a meeting inviting all the people who were standing for election, ninety of them, and asked them to write down the names of the nine candidates whom they thought should be elected. Meanwhile, he convinced them that they should trust his decision and voluntarily withdraw their candidacy if she or he was not selected. After four hours of persuasion, all of them agreed. The guru said to me that if he did not invite them, people would start spreading a rumour that the guru had organized ‘a lottery’. He also said that if he did not convince them and went ahead and made the selection entirely on his own, then ‘he would just be a dictator’.

The guru simultaneously formed a committee of about a dozen people representing different caste and party interests and asked them to suggest names. The guru found their selection highly problematic because they included senior candidates (despite his first criterion for exclusion). Unhappy about the decision of the elders, he declared the meeting over. The elders were upset and told the guru that ‘he would receive a bad name’, to which the guru snapped back: ‘It is not me but you who will receive a bad name.’ After further heated discussion, while about two hundred people waited outside the room, the guru and a few local representatives from the BJP and the Congress (two main parties in Karnataka; the JDS another powerful party in the state is not active in the region), finalized the list.

The guru did not decide who the new GP members should be without any consultation and did not wish to do so either. He tried to be fair and even ‘democratic’ (for example by asking the candidates to select the most worthy amongst themselves). The candidates themselves were relatively easily convinced by the guru, but the elders bitterly resisted his advice. The role of the guru was thus to negotiate a complex arithmetic of castes and parties, whilst endeavouring to insert something new into the rather rigid configuration of local power holders.

 

While I was stuck in the luxurious but quiet guest house of the guru, a local college teacher, who had often acted as a research assistant for me in the past, invited me to his own village which was not far from the matha. He was the second son of the largest landowner who was considered to be a ‘traditional’ village leader, gaudaru, in the village which had a population of about 800.

 

I was wondering why he invited me to his village at this rather difficult time of the gram panchayat (GP) election. The reason soon became clear as his father explained, with authority, how he successfully organized the ‘auctioning’ of the GP seats and avoided unnecessary garaate (disturbance) in the village. There are three caste groups in the village, Saadaru Lingayat (the dominant landed caste, who recently gained OBC status), Nayakas (ST) and Madigas (SC). As there were three seats: one for the general category, one for ST, and one for SC, the auctioning was relatively easy. They started at Rs 50,000 and the general category went for 4.5 lakh, the ST one for 3.5 lakh, and the SC one for 2.6 lakh. The total money collected from this auction was to go towards a fund kept for the reconstruction of an old village temple. The proud village head (gaudaru) said: ‘If we went for the election, each candidate would have spent more than that; so it was good for everyone.’

Local newspapers reported many cases of the illegal ‘auctioning’ of GP seats very similar to the second case that I discussed in this article (e.g. The New Indian Express, 11 May 2015). In the reported auctioning cases in the GP election both in 2010 and 2015, the funds raised seemed to have been used in most cases for the construction or repairing of village temples. This is clearly a new trend that our village head also followed in 2015 as he said to me that he had received this idea from a neighbouring village.

 

To contextualize these two examples of uncontested gram panchayat elections in central Karnataka, it is interesting to see the changes that have occurred in the past decade in the ways in which ‘traditional’ authorities have influenced democratic political institutions. Kripa Ananthpur has conducted a detailed survey of the GP elections of 2000 and 2005 in 30 villages in Karnataka which uncovered the various ways in which customary village councils (CVCs) influenced the selection of GP candidates and opted for uncontested elections.¹

Ananthpur points to an important change in the nature of CVCs: The stereotype of the customary village councils as being a council of elderly men from a single landed dominant caste is no longer true. There is still a tendency to be ‘ageist’ but the CVC now included representatives of all the castes including SCs. They have adopted a democratic ethos and now quite often include GP members in their meetings.

Still, such interventions may not always be successful. Ananthpur points to a decline in uncontested GP elections in Karnataka between 2000 and 2005. In 2000, 26 per cent of all the GP seats in Karnataka were filled by ‘unanimous’ elections. In 2005, she notes that it was ‘significantly less’ although she does not provide the exact figure. According to newspaper reports, the number of uncontested seats in 2015 were not even one per cent.

The declining numbers of uncontested elections and apparent rise in instances of auctioning of GP seats possibly suggests that traditional leaders are losing their grip on competitive rural politics and can no longer select GP members by themselves. Moral issues, especially the construction of temples, which are regarded as a benefit to the whole village, have become one of the few tactics that village elders can still employ in order to circumvent the highly contested, money-powered but still ‘democratic’ GP election. ‘Traditional authority’ can thus only survive by taking on new forms. And even here, they are often unsuccessful. A young man, a friend of my former assistant, expressed his envy of the gaudaru’s solution, explaining that it would have been near impossible to have this sort of arrangement in his own village, which was much bigger, with many more castes.

Of course, the auctioning of the seats does not bring about any democratic change and asserts even more firmly the power of money. Avoiding disruption, drunkenness, and violence in the village that GP elections often invoke is, however, something village residents desperately wish for. And at least people could see that the money would be diverted for the common good.

 

The guru deciding the candidates for a GP election is an even more interesting example for our discussion. At first sight, this looks like a typical example of vertical mobilization, in which the supreme religious authority determines political representation in a very top-down manner. In actuality, however, what he desired was to ensure more ‘horizontal mobilization’ by bringing in younger candidates, who do not have any family or kinship ties, into the ranks of the existing political power holders. To assess how far he succeeded in his attempt requires further examination, but many villagers I talked to thought that he did a good job. They also recognized that the guru was forced to make some compromises.

As I have discussed elsewhere, the guru-renouncer is gaining new legitimacy in contemporary India.² The renouncer who went through social death by cutting off existing caste and kinship ties gains a transcending nature of what Louis Dumont called ‘an individual-outside-the-world’.³ His ‘kin-less-ness’ has given him an additional quality that politicians lack. While politicians, because they wish to divert resources to their dependents, inevitably become corrupted, renouncer-gurus, who do not have any kin and transcend the caste system, remain ‘incorruptible’.

 

The extent to which localized gurus, like the guru in this article, can maintain a critical distance from his own caste group is a matter for further discussion, but his perceived incorruptibility and transcendence beyond caste and kinship certainly makes him an ideal arbitrator. In the case of the GP election, he was the only one who could break ranks without compromising his moral authority.

Both cases reveal that people do not believe that elections alone would bring about a fair result and that political representation through voting would reflect their democratic aspirations. Instead, if it can be done, circumventing the electoral process in certain ways is considered to be moral, peaceful and more beneficial. To achieve more horizontal political mobilization or a radical political change, ironically demands more vertical intervention. Vertical mobilization through the customary structure of authority, on the other hand, cannot assume legitimacy without adopting a new form and new logic of morality.

 

Footnotes:

1. K. Ananthpur, ‘Dynamics of Local Governance in Karnataka’, Economic and Political Weekly, February 2007, pp. 667-673.

2. A. Ikegame, ‘The Governing Guru: Hindu Mathas in Liberalising India’, in J. Copeman and A. Ikegame (eds.), The Guru in South Asia. Routledge, London, 2012.

3. L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980, p. 185.