Are husbands the problem?

RACHEL BRULÉ, SIMON CHAUCHARD, ALYSSA HEINZE

ON the heels of reservations embedded in the 1993 Constitutional Amendment – the Panchayati Raj Act, a critical mass of women have entered local politics in India. While these gendered changes were rightly celebrated, they also quickly gave rise to a new term: sarpanch-pati (or pradhan-pati, depending on regions). The term implies that where women are de jure elected, their husbands de facto run the local state. Prime Minister Modi himself lamented this outcome, as he told a group of Panchayat representatives in 2015: ‘The law has given women rights in panchayats, they should also be given the opportunity to work.’1 Then-Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi suggested a slash-and-burn approach in response to the problem, with harsh penalties for husbands: ‘If a woman doesn’t exercise her rights as pradhan she should be removed. The ‘pradhan pati’ should be jailed and completely barred from any kinds of decision making.’2

Whether or not these statements have practical repercussions on the ground, this targeting of husbands already has legal repercussions in some states: in 2020, Rajasthan’s Panchayati Raj department, for instance, issued a new order dictating that where sarpanch patis are observed performing the duties of female sarpanches, the sarpanch will be removed from her elected post and ‘action [will be] taken’ against the husband.3

Such muscular governmental action may suggest that Sarpanch-patism – the tendency of male relatives to exercise power in lieu of duly elected female officials – constitutes the main hurdle to female-led government in rural India. Yet, drawing on our long-term study of these institutions in several hundred villages since 2018, we do not believe that the hurdles women face in exercising their legally mandated roles in elected government can be reduced to a problem of sarpanch-patism, nor that sarpanch-patism constitutes the central limitation to the ability of female local officials to implement better policies. Certainly, gendered hierarchies and patriarchal norms are pervasive in the daily interactions that constitute local politics. The 73rd amendment that mandated women’s political representation has catalyzed deep resistance and magnified patriarchal control – empowering sarpanch-patis in some families. But it has also nurtured cooperation and support in other ways that actually reconfigure families,4 thus complicating the narrative.

More importantly, while patriarchal gender norms within some households constrain the emergence of effective female leadership, it is really the institutional design of local government that elevates barriers to women in politics, or enables the reproduction of existing barriers. Political institutions – from the structure of local elections, to the composition of committees to the very rules of deliberation – guarantee women’s symbolic inclusion but also allow for substantive forms of structural inequality to proliferate. These inequalities affect women, but also elected officials with other characteristics, as they are not limited to intra-household dynamics. In that sense, the recurrent denunciation of sarpanch-patism by national elites obfuscates the multifaceted political negotiations taking place in gram panchayats to ensure that elected officials from all disadvantaged categories exercise the power they have legally acquired through elections.

This larger problem may be referred to as ‘proxy politics’ – that is, a perverse form of representative politics in which an elected official lacks either the will or the ability to perform her or his legally-required duties, leading another individual to perform them in that person’s place.

In what follows, we thus detail how the sarpanch-pati narrative, while sometimes justified, ignores this larger frame of reference and as such, frequently overlooks how the dynamics of political institutions (in particular, politics outside of the family) prevent elected women from gaining influence, before offering suggestions for policy and public action.

As we raised at the onset, our goal is not to deny the existence of sarpanch-patism. Sarpanch patis do exist and frequently – though not systematically – do affect the ability of women to exercise power. In this way, popular discourse – though hyperbolic at times – is not without empirical grounds.

One illuminating example is that of Meena, a first-time sarpanch in Akkalkot taluka, Solapur district, Maharashtra, that one of us met.5 At 65 years old and with no formal education, Meena6 had never considered a political career until her husband, a member of the village council for the past 15 years, suggested that she contest the election. He had planned to run for the village council president seat, he explained, but it had come under reservation for women. Thus, as a workaround, he reasoned that it made sense to influence outcomes in the village council through advancing his wife’s election.

Meena, in the final year of her 5-year tenure as council president, readily admitted that her husband ‘looks after everything’ relating to the council president role.7 Indeed, she explained, she was incapable of completing the administrative tasks required, by law, for the role of council president. This was not because of her lack of know-how or ambition – indeed, her experience managing her family’s
farm for decades had provided her entrepreneurial savviness, motivation, and independence. Instead, it was because she did not have sufficient networks in the village nor, shockingly, could she speak or write the local language.

Born on the Maharashtrian border of Karnataka, Meena moved to Maharashtra for her marriage, but
had not been taught the language of the state; in her day-to-day existence she spoke in her native language, Kannada. While her linguistic difficulties are rather idiosyncratic to this case, most women do face a social capital deficit, due to widespread social conventions which mandate women marry men from outside their natal village.

Even if stories like that of Meena are not uncommon, the presence of a sarpanch pati is not guaranteed when a given sarpanch seat is reserved for women. Indeed, there are many cases in which husbands or male family members do not interfere in the tasks of women sarpanches elected into reserved seats. The empirical evidence we collected in over 360 Maharashtrian villages since 20208 confirms both the existence of sarpanch-patis and the non-systematic nature of this phenomenon. In private interviews conducted with a mixed-gender team, 66% of the female sarpanches that our research team interviewed declared that they were the individual ‘making the most decisions related to the gram panchayat’ within their household (as a point of comparison, 87% of male sarpanches shared the same response).

Even if we take these self-reports with a grain of salt (a portion of these individuals may be exaggerating their role due to social desirability), it is in our view extremely unlikely that all respondents are falsely claiming independence. Besides, this pattern was later confirmed by gram sevaks (village secretaries) whom the research team interviewed. These local bureaucrats estimated that a similar proportion of elected officials may be proxies for other actors within their households: gram sevaks declared that the sarpanch in their village worked ‘completely independently’ from their relatives 62% of the time when the sarpanch was female, and 95% of the time when he was male. Yet, as we have already noted, the relative scarcity of sarpanch-patis does not prevent other forms of proxy politics.

Beyond the constraints women may face within the household, broad institutional constraints indeed limit the agency of elected female officials. In that sense, many of the obstacles that elected women face do not owe to regressive gender norms within the household but to design choices that allow social inequalities (gender, but also caste and class) to persist within the institution of local political councils (gram panchayats). Put simply, even if female sarpanches have relative agency within their own households, nothing guarantees that a local bureaucrat or an influential upa sarpanch (vice president), or even sometimes a ward panch, will allow elected women to exercise their power, since the current structure of institutions give these political officials, who are often elites benefiting from the status quo, significant leeway to do so.

The data from our survey confirm this intuition. As part of this study, we convened in each sampled village a group meeting between the three most influential members of the local government: the sarpanch, upa sarpanch (vice president), and gram sevak (village secretary, the highest-ranking village-level bureaucrat), as an approximation of regular, monthly meetings (masik sabha) over which the sarpanch should preside. We then attempted to measure the relative degree of voice and influence of each of these actors within the institution.

When we for instance asked the group for details about the sarpanch’s roles and responsibilities – a question we would expect sarpanches themselves to provide an answer to - female sarpanches were 14% less likely than male sarpanches to speak, even though their husbands were (by design) almost always absent from this gathering. Similarly, female sarpanches were significantly less likely to play a central role in a collective decision we asked each group to make about the village’s development priorities than their male counterparts, and more likely to be interrupted when they did.

Such gender gaps in levels of voice between elected officials within gram panchayats owe to substantial social inequalities between these officials and the other actors of the gram panchayat. While reservations provide a mechanism for institutional inclusion, they do not automatically erase the disadvantages of those who benefit from them. Reservations bring people from marginalized gender, class, and caste backgrounds into institutions where these inequalities are often magnified. In that regard, sarpanches elected through reservations are abruptly thrown into power negotiations with other members that have more political experience, administrative skills, formal education, and social capital, among other advantages.

Women sarpanches elected through reservations, even without interference from their husbands, must surmount numerous hurdles to exercise their voice and political agency. Importantly, the relative inability of political institutions to flatten inequalities extends beyond gender to caste and class: other attributes of sarpanches can and do indeed compound or ameliorate gender gaps.

The qualitative research one of us (Heinze) conducted throughout our project9 further highlights these unequal institutional power dynamics, and provides intuition on the mechanisms allowing them to persist.

For example, during a gram panchayat meeting observed in November 2018, a village secretary seated at the front of the room, with a golden placard labeled ‘gram sevak’ in front of him, announced the meeting’s agenda and led the entirety of the meeting. Meanwhile, the sarpanch arrived late, and remained silent for the remaining 45 minutes of the meeting. When she arrived, she leaned backwards in her chair, with her arms crossed and eyes directed toward the ground. In another panchayat, a similar dynamic was present, except this time, the upa sarpanch led the masik sabha (monthly meeting where allocation of state funds and other crucial governance matters are decided) as if he were the sarpanch.10 Frequently benefiting from higher class status and more political experience than female sarpanches elected through reservations, actors such as the gram sevak and the upa sarpanch often challenge the political authority of the elected sarpanch.

These challenges are often enabled by a relative absence of procedural rules within the institution. Because official acts are relatively abstract, vague or unclear, it is for instance not always obvious to participants how deliberation over the design, funding, and implementation of policy initiatives is meant to occur, or in what order actors should intervene. This leaves room for dominant members of village councils and bureaucrats (village secretaries) to subvert the theoretically-central role of the sarpanch.

Other times, elites within these institutions find loopholes to openly subvert formal rules in order to
exclude sarpanches elected through reservations. For example, one sarpanch described being systematically and intentionally excluded from her legal duties, to the point where her most basic legal prerogatives were lifted:11 ‘I wish I could offer you tea, but I don’t have access to those funds,’ she excused herself when [Heinze] met her, before explaining that she had never seen the gram panchayat check book, despite its management being the joint duty of the sarpanch and gram sevak. In fact, the upa sarpanch, a powerful Maratha landholder who had 25 years of political experience, had colluded with the gram sevak throughout her four years in office, she explained, in order to control the sarpanch duties – including holding and managing the check book. Further, the sarpanch lamented, ‘on Independence Day it’s [the upa sarpanch] who hoists the village flag’ thus publicly claiming credit for village leadership.

Such attempts by institutional actors of the gram panchayat to confiscate the sarpanch’s power are not uncommon either: almost 25% of the female sarpanches we interviewed flat out admitted that they were not the ‘main decision-maker within the village council’. However, when subsequently asked who the main decision-maker was, only 12% of these female sarpanches later declared that their spouse was the main decision-maker; by contrast 33% blamed the gram sevak, and another 35% declared that another panchayat member had acquired undue influence and employed it to become the key decision-maker.

Even more shockingly, where female and lower castes sarpanches are elected indirectly,12 institutional subversion is also common through imposed, informal ‘rotation’ systems. In such cases, members of the institution compel the elected sarpanch to resign prior to the end of their term, under the false pretense that other members need to be ‘given the chance’ to fill the role. For example, on 11 November 2019, during an interview with whom the panchayat samiti reported to be the female sarpanch of Jalwadi village, Heinze discovered that the woman she was interviewing was, in fact, no longer the sarpanch of the village. ‘I was the sarpanch,’ she explained. ‘But I gave my resignation, and now Sujata Gole is the sarpanch,’ she continued. ‘Then, after one and a half years, Sujata will resign, and Priya Deshmukh will get a chance. The upa sarpanch decided it like this, so we all get an opportunity [to be sarpanch].’13

Heinze observed this phenomenon across numerous gram panchayats in rural Maharashtra where indirect elections took place. Indeed, when reservation for women was ann-ounced for a seat, village councils reached informal agreements in order to ‘fix’ the resignation of women appointed indirectly to the sarpanch seat after a given period of time, ‘giving a chance’ to all the women in the council to be the sarpanch.

The implications of such arrangements are that the sarpanches who are forced to share their tenure are unable to benefit from potential learning effects of being in office for extended periods of time, and thus face additional barriers to accumulating political agency. More often than not, it was powerful council stakeholders – the gram sevak or upa sarpanch – who were cited as enforcers of such arrangements. Forced resignations were not completely uncommon either: they occurred in approximately 40% of the 163 villages that we surveyed which had held indirect elections for the sarpanch position, and varied as a function of gender and caste. This meant, for instance, that almost none (fewer than 5%) of the upper caste men elected indirectly had to leave their seat mid-way, when over 55% of Dalit women were forced to do so.

If the problem of proxy politics extends beyond sarpanch-patism, how can the situation of female elected officials be improved? While India is praised for its commitment to realize representative democracy, the current mechanism through which this outcome is to be achieved – reservations – is as impressive quantitatively as it is limited qualitatively: under the current system, many women are formally elected; few of them are however later provided with the requisite tools and broader infrastructure of allies to govern.

Change in favour of gender equal political power is thus only possible, we believe, if reservations allowing women to be included in these institutions are reinforced by measures to build institutional support for the political agency of women. Specifically, we argue that legislation is urgently required on three fronts: within the rules that structure local, democratic deliberation; within the bureaucracy that supports elected democratic officials; and within the state’s explicit efforts to support officials upon their assumption of elected office. We explain each path to institutional reform.

First, our research uncovers significant gender bias in a core mechanism of democracy: oral deliberation amongst public servants – including elected officials and appointed bureaucrats. While our investigations focus on more frequent, decisive monthly meetings (masik sabhas), this reflects similar biases found in democratic fora open to all citizens: gram sabhas.14

While there may be others, our research identifies at least one path to remedying women’s absence of voice: clarifying the rules of deliberation. Mandates on this front need not be heavy handed. Indeed, we find that a simple move from the status quo of unstructured deliberation to a request that all members of the masik sabha voice their preferences during a collective deliberation increased sarpanches’ influence on decision-making by at least 30% in our (ongoing) experimental work.

More careful specification of deliberative rules thus holds the potential to close a number of biases that the current framework of India’s deliberative institutions enables, if not exacerbates. More generally speaking, beyond rules of deliberation, the challenges we listed above would require codes of conduct for all gram panchayat interactions that are both more precise and more cognizant of structural gender or caste inequalities, if these challenges are to be overcome. And, even more importantly, these codes would necessitate credible enforcement mechanisms, in order to ensure that they are not circumvented by those with political and social power. This is a productive area for much further research.

Second, while systematic interventions exist to increase gender equality in India’s representative local democracy, little has so far been done to create a class of bureaucrats that would serve as proper allies of the newly elected sarpanches, whether they are female or lower caste.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that having a more diverse body of village secretaries may help solve some of the problems listed above. Female gram sevaks may, for instance, be better able to communicate and to be in touch with female sarpanches, as low levels of gender diversity within the bureaucracy may impede access for female elected public officials. Currently, a number of Indian states seek to address the dearth of female bureaucrats through implementing gender quotas in the recruitment of gram sevaks and other local functionaries. This may constitute a promising avenue. Given women’s lagging literacy (65.8% as compared to 82.4% for men nationally) and the stark gender gap in economic participation (32.6%), the second largest in the world according to the World Economic Forum (2021), a broader infrastructure for promoting women’s professional advancement is required to ensure a pipeline for effective female bureaucrats as well as politicians over the long term.

Beyond identity, local bureaucrats will need to be better trained and incentivized to assist elected officials, if political reservations are to become truly transformational. This may require a complete refoundation of recruitment, training, and long-term mentorship strategies for bureaucrats to act as allies, particularly for elected politicians from traditionally-underrepresented groups.

Third and finally, recent reservations for women in panchayats do not erase the impact of women’s long exclusion from elected representation. We know that the average length of time in politics for women is far shorter than for men. The Indian central government attempts to eliminate gender disadvantages in political experience through large-scale training programs for women, as do civil society organizations and state governments.15 Yet the success of traditional training programmes is limited at best, with many female representatives retaining little-to-none of the information imparted during
what are typically infrequent, hands-off sessions.16 Here, we suggest considering the participatory feminist workshops embedded within enduring female peer support groups, such as those developed by organizations such as SEWA, The Hunger Project and Jagori. Indeed, building a broader empowerment infrastructure that is embedded in local networks for female friendship has a proven record of success in India.17 Preliminary field research that we have conducted jointly with Bhumi Purohit (another author in this volume) suggests that connecting first-time female elected officials with more experienced female politicians, and hence creating female solidarity networks, may yield promising results.

We have worked to identify the gender dynamics of political deliberation by a micro-level investigation of gram panchayats and the monthly meetings when the practicalities of local governance are decided, the masik sabha, in rural Maharashtra. This focus colours our recommendations for public policy and practice which also focus on policy opportunities to improve governance in local politics. Of course, support for women’s representation in national elected government would also make a world of difference, as work by Clots-Figueras18 indicates. Overall, what we have learned from our research is that while sarpanch-patis do present significant challenges for women in office, to focus on these would be to ignore the more foundational problems implicit in the very structure of local political institutions, which aid and abet patriarchy in local panchayats as much as they do in the intimate landscape of the family.

Footnotes:

1. Times News Network, ‘PM Modi Seeks End to Proxy Rule, Says No More “Sarpanch Pati”,’ The Hindu, 25 April 2015; ‘End “Sarpanch Pati” Practice, Says Modi’, 12 April 2016.

2. Ranjan Sweta, ‘Maneka Wants “Pradhan Patis” in Jail’, GovernanceNow, 21 August 2014.

3. Times News Network, ‘When a Sarpanch Can Lose Her Job, Not His’, 6 June 2020.

4. Mary John, ‘Women in Power? Gender, Caste and the Politics of Local Urban Governance’, Economic & Political Weekly 42(39), 2007, pp. 3986-3993. Rachel Brulé, Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India. Cambridge University Press, 2020; Simon Chauchard, Why Representation Matters: The Meaning of Ethnic Quotas in Rural India. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

5. Prior to and during the development of our collaborative, joint project on sarpanch pati-ism, Alyssa Heinze conducted independent, qualitative fieldwork on the subject between June 2018 and January 2020 in rural Maharashtra funded by a Fulbright grant, as well as other independent grants. The qualitative narratives cited here are a result of this fieldwork, and a separate paper (Alyssa René Heinze (2021) ‘Beyond sarpanch pati: Institutional barriers to women sarpanchs’ voice’, Working Paper) discusses them in greater detail. This initial fieldwork, where Heinze received guidance from both Chauchard and Brulé, provided the foundation for the coauthors’ joint, large-scale empirical investigation of the question of sarpanch pati-ism.

6. All names have been changed to protect the identities of those interviewed. Interview by Alyssa Heinze on 12 January 2020 in Solapur district, Maharashtra.

7. ‘Te sagle baghtaat’ in Marathi.

8. Data collection is ongoing and this is a partial sample.

9. A separate paper (Alyssa René Heinze, ‘Beyond sarpanch pati: Institutional barriers to women sarpanchs’ voice’, Working Paper) fully details these qualitative insights.

10. Masik sabha observed by Alyssa Heinze on 13 November 2019 in Pune district, Maharashtra.

11. Interview by Alyssa Heinze on 19 March 2019 in Pune district, Maharashtra.

12. Direct elections are when sarpanches are elected directly by citizens of the village. Direct elections occur when the sarpanch is first elected to a ward seat, and then the ward members collectively vote on who will be the sarpanch (within the realm of possibility afforded by the reservation status of the sarpanch seat). Maharashtra has toggled back and forth between direct and indirect elections for the sarpanch seat for the past several years.

13. ‘Ashaa prakaare, pratyekaalaa sandhi milel’, in Marathi.

14. Paromita Sanyal and Vijayendra Rao, Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

15. Sreeparna Chakrabarty, ‘Training for Women to Break Free from Sarpanch Pati’, The New Indian Express, 8 November 2015.

16. Female politician trainings observed and interviews conducted by Alyssa Heinze in June-July, September 2018.

17. Erica Field, Seema Jayachandran, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol, ‘Friendship at Work: Can Peer Effects Catalyze Female Entrepreneurship?” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 8(2), 2016, pp. 125-53.

18. Irma Clots-Figueras, ‘Women in Politics: Evidence from the Indian States’, Journal of Public Economics 95(7-8), 2011.