Write short note: The impact of democratisation on the village community. (1984)
Democratisation reached the village as three concrete instruments: universal adult franchise, statutory panchayats, and reservation. Their effect was not to make the village egalitarian but to change the currency of power within it — from ritual rank and hereditary control of land to numbers, votes and access to the state. The result is a village community whose authority structure has been reorganised while its inequalities persist in new form.
Displacement of traditional authority
- The caste panchayat, which enforced endogamy, commensality and jajmani obligation, has been hollowed out by the statutory gram panchayat, which controls funds, works and schemes. Where caste panchayats survive — as khap-type bodies policing marriage — they now act against the law rather than as it.
- The 73rd Constitutional Amendment (1992) made panchayats mandatory, elected, five-yearly and reserved. India today has about 2.55 lakh gram panchayats.
- Jajmani deference has corroded. Monetisation, wage labour, migration and a market for artisan goods removed the material base; the vote removed the obligation to defer. What survives is largely the ritual segment.
Redistribution of power within the village
- M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste was already defined by numbers and land rather than purity; the franchise made numbers decisive. Numerically strong middle castes — Yadavs, Jats, Kurmis, Vokkaligas, Reddys — displaced ritually higher but numerically small Brahmins.
- André Béteille‘s Sripuram (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) captures the mechanism: caste, class and power moved from cumulative to dispersed, so that high ritual rank no longer guarantees local dominance.
- The gram sabha, the assembly of all adult villagers, gives Dalits and women a statutory forum that the old village assembly of elders never admitted them to, though attendance and quorum remain weak.
- A rural political class has emerged — sarpanches, block-level brokers, party workers — whose capital is connection to the state rather than land alone. Factionalism intensified because the prizes multiplied.
Reservation and assertion
- Seats and chairpersonships are reserved for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women. Roughly 1.4 million women are elected panchayat representatives, about 46% of the total; 21 states and 2 union territories reserve 50%.
- Substantive representation lags formal representation. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo (Econometrica, 2004), studying randomly reserved councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, found women leaders shifted investment towards goods women themselves prioritised, such as drinking water; Lori Beaman, Duflo, Rohini Pande and Petia Topalova (Science, 2012) found that exposure to women leaders raised adolescent girls’ aspirations and schooling.
- Against this, the sarpanch pati and equivalent proxies for Scheduled Caste chairpersons persist, and backlash is measurable: NCRB recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023, with a conviction rate near one-third.
Conclusion
Democratisation converted the village from a ritually ordered community into a political arena. It broke the monopoly of the traditional elite without dissolving hierarchy, and it produced a characteristic modern outcome: formal inclusion running ahead of substantive equality, with violence marking the gap between them. What B. R. Ambedkar denied the village — a place in a republic of equals — democratisation has begun to build inside it.