Originally published as part of Khabar Lahariya’s long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G“ ♦
The dominant volume of patriotism these days is loud: nationalism at the chest-thumping, bullet-whizzing, thali-clanging frequency of films, like Uri: The Surgical Strike, that make the anthem cued up in theatres before them sound harsh and hectoring. No less scripted but much more quietly compelling is the patriotism of the season finale of Panchayat, the Amazon Prime Video series, in which a mahila pradhan (woman panchayat leader) played by Neena Gupta unfurls the tricolour and haltingly sings Jana Gana Mana for the first time in her life.
The whole show is a throwback to a less macho form of patriotism, an appeal to the disenchanted and politically disengaged generation embodied by its protagonist Abhishek Tripathi, a reluctant civil servant. In the scene, tension arrives along with the district magistrate, who’s spotted a Republic Day ceremony banner with a large picture of the ‘pradhan pati’ (pradhan’s husband) on the road. “But the government hasn’t created any such post!” the DM admonishes a sheepish Raghubir Yadav, who plays Gupta’s husband and the functional pradhan. As Manju Devi, the real pradhan, rises to the occasion, the scene spurs us to imagine India as a diverse and yet unified country, one where women participate equally, not just as political props.
Over the course of covering panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh, Khabar Lahariya reporters have met more than a few Manju Devis, beneficiaries of the constitutional amendments in 1995 that introduced a minimum 33 percent reservation for women in panchayat leadership, on the gram (village), kshetra (block) and zilla (district) level. This includes a mahila pradhan literally named Manju Devi, in Bani Kodar, Barabanki, who told us without a trace of irony, ‘My brother-in-law has taken care of the post right from the beginning. If there’s any work to be done outside the home, he does it.’
While some states have up to 60 percent representation of women on the panchayat level, UP has the country’s highest number of mahila gram pradhans (over 25,800; nearly 44 percent), with an even higher share of leaders at the kshetra and zilla level (51 and 59 percent respectively). That’s much better than our current Lok Sabha, which boasts its highest count of women MPs ever—a whopping 14 percent—while the bill to remedy political under-representation languishes.
When it comes to gender equality in Indian politics, the grassroots level is a far more interesting place than the national stage. While panchayat elections are the final frontier for political parties, they are often the first political battlefield for women, at least in terms of sheer numbers on paper. The country’s image-makers know this; mahila pradhans are regularly trotted out for political meet-and-greets and award ceremonies. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a video conference with sarpanches from around the country on Panchayati Raj Diwas this April, there were as many mahila pradhans present as men.
And yet, the ‘pradhan pati’ is still ubiquitous, and mahila pradhans often dismissed as ‘rubber stamps’. Over our years of reporting in Chitrakoot, Banda, Ayodhya and other parts of UP, we’ve found that women can move beyond tokenistic representation to actual participation for various reasons and in myriad different ways. As reporters we’ve had to walk a tightrope between celebrating their victories (real and/or government-sponsored) while being aware of the kinship ties that animate much of India’s political landscape, and keeping our ears open for allegations of corruption, or political ambition that might compromise work in the community.
Low-Grade Election Fever
While on the one hand women are taking greater part in local governance, the importance of panchayat bodies is also becoming clearer. UP’s panchayat elections are due by late December, though authorities have reluctantly hinted that they might be delayed. While the official six-month prep work of revising voter lists and delimiting boundaries is yet to begin, people are already informally speculating about the chunaav (election). It would take more than a global pandemic to deter the country’s most populous state from one of its favourite subjects. There was even a bizarre recent attempt to polarize voters in Meerut by vandalizing a religious statue, allegedly in the name of a potential panchayat candidate.
The signs point to a fiercely politicized campaign, whenever it takes place. Most immediately, the pandemic has brought out the difference invested local governance can make in implementing public health measures. States with stronger decentralized power like Kerala have done much better in containing the spread of Covid-19 than those with weaker panchayat institutions. Modi himself stressed the importance of panchayats in combating the epidemic in his video conference.
At KL, we’ve seen first-hand how pradhans (or their husbands, sons, brothers and brothers-in-law) have occasionally stepped in to help quarantined migrants, or hungry families. Village, block and district panchayats are integral to providing rural employment through the MNREGS and getting rations and resources to those that need them. Even more often though, we’ve seen returning migrants forsaken by their local representatives, and labourers with restricted access to rations and pay-outs.
Even in the absence of a pandemic, political party apparatuses have become increasingly involved in gram panchayat elections, after making inroads at the zilla and kshetra level over the past few decades. Following Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s political debut in the state, the Congress party set up a committee last December to try and rebuild its negligible position there from the village up, after the BJP’s victories in the 2017 Assembly and 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
For its part, the BJP is eager to get back to its core competency in electioneering, with representatives announcing plans in May to “contest the three-tier Panchayat elections under the party banner” for the first time in UP, that is going beyond the zilla and kshetra level to nominate gram panchayat candidates for some 59,000-odd seats. Their strategy includes creating tens of thousands of Whatsapp groups, equipping district offices with video-conferencing, enlisting the services of Audio Bridge for conference calls, and recruiting ‘election warriors’. Parallel to this, the BJP has stepped up efforts to engage women politically, especially as voters, despite historically blocking an increase in reserved seats.
As we look forward to seeing more women entering the fray over the next year, hopefully on platforms of increased strength, it’s also worth looking back at the negotiating power of our own Manju Devis over the last several elections.
Progress and a woman’s place
KL first reported on panchayat elections in 2005, a decade after the reservations for women and SC/ST candidates. The reporters focused on women’s seats, but it wasn’t always easy to find candidates contesting independent of their male family members. In a typical incident in Chitrakoot’s Pahadi Block, a woman told us her husband used to run for office himself. ‘Now that the seat has been reserved for a woman, he won’t be able to contest, but ultimately he is going to do the work,’ she said. ‘I don’t know much about elections and politics. Please direct your questions towards my husband.’
By the last election, in 2015, the landscape had changed in multiple ways. After panchayats became responsible for disbursing large amounts of MNREGS cash, the number of candidates standing for election grew exponentially, as did the amount of money spent on campaigning and political influence peddling, at least on the block and district level.
The country was still awash in the ‘Modi wave’ of 2014, which set the tone for panchayat elections in terms of content and format. Candidates still canvassed neighbourhoods and postered walls, but they started going online to post on Facebook too. Every candidate we met parroted the same mantra of vikas, vikas, vikas (progress) as their platform. Sandwiched between a landmark Lok Sabha election and a state Assembly election, the panchayat posts were contested with a gusto we hadn’t seen before. Women campaigned during the day, moving from one house to another, and even at night with the help of mobile flashlights. There was more information and encouragement for women’s election campaigns as well. But though the political power centre and terms of engagement had shifted, pradhan patis still featured prominently in the reserved seats.
In Mahua, we were excited to learn that a woman named Munni Devi had won the Zilla Parishad elections. But when we went to interview her, we found Gorelal, her husband, picking up the election certificate. No one thought it the slightest bit strange that Munni Devi was nowhere to be seen, not for her papers, or for her photo-op with the electorate. ‘What work would a woman do here?’ he asked us, wearing his garland with pride. ‘I’m the one who does everything around here anyway.’
We also visited Bhikhapur village, in Purabazar Block, Ayodhya during the elections to meet the mahila pradhan there and a few of her opponents. The seated pradhan, Rekha Yadav, had not taken great advantage of her term to develop public speaking skills. She sat demurely by her husband Kaushal, half-answering when he prompted her, about various development projects. ‘You see, she’s a woman,’ he said. ‘Yes, in reality she is the pradhan. But I am her sevak [servant]. Fixing problems for her is my duty.’
‘Aakhir, ladies hain,’ – ‘After all, she’s a woman,’ was the tired excuse we heard over and over. Neither of Rekha’s opponents offered much more initiative. Candidate Chhaya Chaturvedi looked nervous as her husband explained their platform of progress—for the whole town, but especially for women. Women’s safety, he said confidently, would be a major concern. Meanwhile, Chandavati Jaiswal sat statuesque beside her son Raja, who made all the vague promises for her, Why was she running? “I firmly believe someone from the Jaiswal family should be pradhan,” Raja said.
Another Zilla Parishad winner, Geeta Singh of Niralanagar in Faizabad was slightly less elusive, though no one in her constituency seemed to know where she lived. When we finally tracked her down, she told us we’d better wait for her husband to return, as he handles ‘media types.’ ‘I only know that I won,’ she told us. ‘I never went anywhere to campaign.’ She eventually warmed up to us a little. ‘The people have voted me into office so I will serve them,’ she said. ‘But no one has communicated their needs to me…’ She was shushed by her mother-in-law, while her daughter looked on, amused.
A team effort
In Panchayat, the district magistrate tells the villagers that the role of the pradhan pati is to ‘support’ his wife if she needs help, but otherwise to get out of her way. In the show, Manju Devi is hardly downtrodden; though uneducated, she’s an upper-caste woman who rules her domestic roost. In our reporting, we’ve occasionally seen hints of this kind of power dynamic, where the mahila pradhan starts off as a figurehead, but turns out to also be the strong woman behind the pradhan pati’s public face, sometimes with her own negotiating power. We’ve met women in various stages of negotiating their public mobility and involvement.
In 2015, in Barabanki’s Kothi village, Mushir introduced us to his wife Mahjavi, the pradhan, as he lauded the “reservation” for women and explained their initiatives in the community. Her family was politically connected in her hometown, so she was also drawn to community service. After he left the room, we tried to ask her in greater detail about her duties. “We both do the work,” she said. “But he does it more than me – he can really connect with people.” But she was nowhere to be seen a year later, when we interviewed Kothi’s villagers about signs that Mushir had gotten painted on the walls about Swachh Bharat, vikas and women’s safety.
Meanwhile, Madhavi Devi in Haidergarh’s Dayaram Ka Purwa seemed more proactive on one level, telling us she’d had the support of her mother and sisters to become pradhan. While she sounded as passionate about educating women as the next politician, when we asked her how she spent her time as an elected official, she said she was quite busy with housework and attempted to attend meetings when she got the time.
Things were slightly more encouraging at the district level in Karwi, Chitrakoot. ‘I always wanted to contest Panchayat elections,’ said Javitri Devi, a Dalit candidate. ‘We were all sitting at home and eating when the news came that the seat in our ward was reserved for a woman. I joked to my husband that he should put me up for it. And my wish came true!’ Her husband is politically active, like others in his family, but she readily took up the reins of her own campaign.
Priyanka Patel was in a similar situation as her husband has an official post in the town of Tindwari. Her campaign floated along on his reputation. We observed a woman pulling her aside while canvassing, and telling her she shouldn’t speak her husband’s name so freely. Priyanka wasn’t fazed. ‘You’re right, I shouldn’t. What can I do, people know only his name!’ But winning an election was as much her own project, to be recognised on her own terms. ‘I’ve never been one to sit at home. I’ve done all kinds of courses—computers, beautician, sewing; I worked with an NGO.’ She would step up to this too. ‘I will do my own work, and I’m not going to take permission from my husband, even if I need to struggle and fight a little at home. If my husband has brought me into the ring, he should be ready to let me play too. And only if he does it in public, will he listen at home too.’
In Mahoba, Anshu Shivhare faced a slightly different challenge, with her politically-connected husband out of town and embroiled in the Vyapam scam. She was determined to retain her position in Kabrai’s district panchayat, and was looking beyond that to the 2017 Vidhan Sabha fight. When she won elections previously ‘I didn’t even know how to run meetings—I would go with my husband and learn,’ she said. There have been calls for criminal punishment of pradhan patis over the years (Maneka Gandhi said they should all be jailed), but Anshu’s experience complicates the picture.
It also speaks to the takeover of panchayati raj institutions by political parties with the resources to fund election campaigns. ‘Slowly, I began overseeing the zilla panchayat, while he looked after the politics,’ Anshu told us. ‘There are so many people to meet all the time, weddings to attend every day. If you don’t appear for these occasions, or miss a few, it has serious implications. He’d manage this, and I’d just do namaste to the leaders. Since last year, when he has been away, I’ve handled this part of the job as well. You do what you have to.’
All the single ladies
In this scenario it’s a minor miracle for a young woman unattached to a man to fight a campaign or get elected, but it does happen. Across the spectrum, we’ve seen younger men and women getting involved in local governance in recent years. With employment looming for many young people in the Hindi belt, politics, even rural politics, is being seen as a way to get a leg up. Just as Panchayat’s Abhishek Tripathi studies at night while fulfilling his bureaucratic duties during the day, one of the most interesting gram pradhans we’ve met since the last election did the same. Priyanka became sarpanch of Sarhat village, in Chitrakoot’s Manikpur block, at age 23. Studying for her continuing education for an hour each night, Priyanka saw the pradhan position as both performing a service to her community and a stepping stone for her future.
Priyanka had surprised us by saying that she had no plans for marriage at the moment. ‘See marriage becomes the end of everything for the woman,’ she explained. ‘Nobody wants the woman to even step foot outside the house once she’s married. Everyone says there are too many problems out there. Stay inside and do the housework.’
She juggled domestic work with her official duties, waking up early to pack lunches for her younger brothers and send them off to school. In the afternoon, she worked at the panchayat office. After cooking dinner, she dealt with various local issues like domestic abuse problems, land-grab quarrels and planning development projects. ‘Getting toilets constructed. Ensuring housing and colonies for all. Regulating the ration cards system,’ she rattled off.
As we walked around Sarhat with Priyanka, people came out to greet her, excited about the ‘23-year-old girl’ who had become pradhan. With apparent pride, she took us to the drains, brick roads, water tanks and ponds she’s started working on. One of the biggest problems here is water, she said, foreshadowing our next meeting with her a few months later, when she was struggling to retain the village’s support in the face of persistent shortages.
Contending with caste
For some single candidates however, the post of pradhan is an uphill battle against criticism right from the election campaign. Sushila Devi, a single, 29-year-old Dalit woman, had the odds stacked against her when she ran for the caste-reserved seat in Kolmajra village, Mau, Chitrakoot. With an MA and a B.Ed., the teacher seemed more qualified for the work than most candidates. Still, people ripped down her campaign posters, trampled and spit on them. ‘After all this I didn’t think I could win the elections,’ she told us. ‘But I didn’t leave the fight. After 20 years we had an SC seat in this area, so I stood up. No one in my family had contested elections before.’
When we met her again last year she told us that the challenges had continued through her tenure. ‘I’ve even filed cases against people trying to tarnish my image,’ she said. ‘Because how much can I tolerate? If I do continue to tolerate it, this kind of behaviour is perpetuated against women and girls in society.’
It’s not just men from general castes, Sushila said. ‘Even members of my own community spread news of the smallest of my mistakes because I’m unmarried. They say she has no brother, nor any other strong male figure. That I must be weak.’
‘I’m not saying don’t criticise, if my work is not good, please do – but if there’s a pradhan in another town from a forward caste who makes a mistake, why not go after him too?’ She has little time for unfounded criticism. ‘I reply with my work,’ she says, and this includes having around 400 toilets and 40 houses built, getting a road made, organising water during the hottest months of the drought-prone region, and nurturing her dream to run for a district post next.
The idea feels audacious, when you consider the experience of another Dalit pradhan, Sumitra Shrivas of Mahui village in Banda, who told us that during her first gram panchayat meeting, she wasn’t even allowed to sit on a chair. ‘They said, you are a Harijan caste woman, so sit on the floor like the other Harijans. When they noticed that I was good at my job, they let me start doing more, let me start sitting on a chair.’ Sumitra gradually became accepted, even though ‘the members of high castes still have a problem with me. They say the masala is too little in this, she puts too much of that…’
She related an episode when she had had RCC poured in a Brahmin neighbourhood. ‘These people formed a committee and took Rs. 25 lakh despite the estimate of the work being Rs. 1.4 lakhs,’ she said. ‘They blamed this on me, and said I wasn’t even getting the work done properly. I faced a lot of opposition. Eventually a government official came and cleared my name through an investigation.’ Undaunted, Sumitra plans to run for elections again.
Between the rubber-stamp and pedestal
One of the most hotly debated issues at an early KL edit meeting was over how to write about a corrupt mahila pradhan. The reporters finally decided that they had to expose the pradhan’s abuse of public funds, but with an eye to gender-sensitivity. The story came out, but it touched on the difficult position occupied by women working in a male-dominated environment. Corruption needed to be uncovered, but we also needed to understand what kinds of leverage women have when forming nascent political identities.
As we’d seen over the years, leverage could include political affiliation, family ties, or bargaining power within the home. Empowering women needed to be more than simply replicating the power structures used by men. It had to acknowledge where women were coming from. So, for example, we don’t leap to judgement when we come across the fairly common phenomenon of women running for seats vacated by recently deceased male relatives in a panchayat by-election.
We could look on with mild scepticism as Divya Tripathi, the pradhan of Semaria Jagannath in Chitrakoot, won the state’s Rani Laxmibai award for her work in building toilets, knowing that her family is politically connected within the BJP. But though she’s wealthy and upper-caste, though her husband photo-bombs every public appearance, it is still somewhat thrilling to hear her talk over him about covering drains and constructing toilets.
In the larger scheme of things, the increased visibility of women on the local political stage has made a difference. Even in the early years of mahila pradhans, NGOs noted positive changes such as the prioritising of development work, increased institution-building (schools, in particular), the regularisation of panchayat office hours, and generally increased transparency.
Women are bringing original, even if somewhat questionable, ideas to the table. Divya was especially proud of her work in the area of drug abuse, starting with an initiative that involved children hunger-striking to protest drug abuse in their families. ‘This was successful, so I asked women to support me. We took out a rally. They were upset at their husbands coming home drunk. Women have to take a front seat,’ she said.
‘I think women are doing what men have been unable to do,’ her husband Santosh offered. ‘We should support women instead of oppressing them and taking away their freedom. Pradhan pati is a power, but many of them abuse it, they make women stay at the stove.’
We’ve noticed that support from families makes a difference in participation, as does the involvement of support groups that foster networks of women in politics. In an interview with UN Women, the secretary for the Ministry of Panchayati Raj pointed to measures aimed at encouraging women further: the construction of panchayat ghars and offices equipped with women-friendly toilets, teams of computer and financially literate assistants in panchayats and greater awareness.
The upcoming panchayat elections will also be the first after 4G connectivity made major inroads into rural India, changing the way campaigns are run. The argument that women should stay inside the house is harder to uphold when they can access the wider world from their mobile screens. Women have a place at the table of local politics. They’ll be helping themselves to bigger servings too. As Sushila observed in Kolmajra, not everything changes overnight, laying groundwork takes time. ‘Girls should study hard and educate themselves. Their families must support them as much as possible. So when the time comes and brings opportunities, they can take advantage of them.’