Speech of Honourable Minister Mani Shankar Aiyer at the Champions of Democracy and Participation Workshop in Lewes , UK in June 2007

Prof. Gaventa, mayor, councillors here, ladies and gentlemen,

It is really a privilege to be here, because I long wanted to be able to gather people from different parts of the world to discuss local government and while I have had opportunities every now and then to have India and one or two other countries at the same table, this is I think is the first opportunity I have had of being able to address a spectrum that is truly international, stretching all the way from Latin America, through Africa and Europe into Asia and right upto China. This truly is an unusual and a most welcome event for me and thank you very much John for having given me this opportunity.

Local government in India is both very new and very old. It is very old in the sense that when Macaulay was contemplating the nature of Indian society, he talked of how the east continued to survive. That is largely because while we did have centralised government in India, every now and then when we weren’t collapsing into chaos, it was only because local communities had organised themselves that, irrespective of the big politics taking place at the centre of governance which might be one of the petty princely states or might be at the seat of empire, that we had centralised government. We first had an empire that comprised most of what is today India and infact most of Pakistan, and some of Afghanistan, back in the 3rd century BC. Again in the 8th century AD, and once again under the Mughals, from about the 16th century to the 18th century when the British arrived and took over the mantle from the Mughals. So we frequently had central government in India which is substantial and in other times the kingdoms were centralised in the way in which they ran their own affairs. But the people at the grassroots were able to govern themselves irrespective of what was happening elsewhere, because they organised themselves into what is traditionally been called in India Panchayats. A Panchayat literally means a council of five persons. So five persons were not elected so much as chosen by consensus, usually on the basis that they were the oldest and assumed to be the wisest, to run the affairs of the community and deriving from this very ancient five thousand year old concept of five or six local dignitaries running the affairs of the community, but in a consensual manner and based upon a rule of law that was traditional, was based on customs and usages rather than a codified law, but still an objective law which had to be applied fairy and justly to the affairs of the community. When we were coming to independence, Mahatma Gandhi insisted on colourfully describing the six hundred thousand villages in India as self-governing village republics. And that our democracy should be based essentially on these self governing village republics to whom he applied the ancient Indian term that has a resonance in Indian terms which is the Panchayats, the council of five wise peoples and all of you are familiar with the expression Raj because the British rather enjoyed the expression and liked to call themselves the British Raj.

So my designation as the minister of Panchayati Raj is the Raj of these village communities. Therefore, there is an ancient lineage to the expression that we use. But it has been adapted beyond recognition to the needs of the 21st century. Gandhi insisted that our Constitution should be based upon elected village republics and that perhaps in turn the elected republics could elect the state assemblies and the state assemblies in turn could elect the Parliament and thus we would have, as he saw it, a relatively corruption free and muscle-free system of governance where the elected representative would be responsible to an identified and fairly small community who would be able to keep him in check, through a system of what is now called social audit. He believe that as democracy rose to a high level, inevitably corruption and the use of illegal methods and the muscle power of the local bully and the money power of the local landlord, would come to play and therefore the state assemblies would be less efficient bodies, the Parliament would be less efficient if they were directly elected by the people and then perhaps therefore democracy should begin at the grassroots and then thereafter become indirect in nature. And the rather curious fact is that the only Gandhian the subcontinent has known is General Ayub khan, the first dictator of Pakistan, who started the system of basic democracy where there were fair and free elections to the local bodies, but thereafter there is a form of kow tow until we reach the president of Pakistan. So I bow to President Ayub Khan for the return to democracy.

Gandhi was assassinated on the 30th of January 1948. And along with him was assassinated local government in India. In consequence of which when the first draft of the Constitution was circulated to the members of the constituent assembly on the 10th of May 1948, a horrified president of our constituent assembly whom destiny had fingererd to be the only President of the Republic of India who actually had two terms as president, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, wrote to the Law minister Dr. Ambedkar, to say that Mahatma Gandhi wanted our Constitution to be based on the Panchayats and even the word Panchayat does not appear in the draft constitution that is being circulated. The reason for this was connected with a deep and underlying ideological demand between the Gandhians on the one hand and the non-Gandhians on the other, where Gandhi wanted the village to be the basic unit of governance and the single most important element of the governance structure. Ambedkar belonged to a community that used to be called (it is illegal to use that word) –the untouchable community- and he was a brilliant man. He disliked Gandhi in many ways, he opposed him in many ways and he believed that the Congress party which had won us our freedom was infact a party of the oppressors. But he was selected because of his sheer brilliance to be the Law Minister and the maker of our Constitution. He held that villages were cesspools of corruption and oppression and it was an extremely romantic idea on the part of Gandhi to believe that village communities were where the governance should begin, that governance in fact needed to begin from a much higher level in order to ensure that the inherent injustice of the village community was rectified by intervention from above. That is why he did not want to even use the word Panchayat anywhere in this Constitution. A vast majority of the members of the constituent assembly did infact agree with him. But there was one gentleman who by a strange irony was to fight the elections, the first general elections of 1952, from the constituency which I have the honor to represent, who insisted that the word Panchayat must be brought into our Constitution and so moved an amendment which was adopted rather grudgingly by Mr. Ambedkar and then by the Constituent Assembly which provided for these local government institutions to be referred to in a part of our Constitution which is called the directive principles of state policy. The directive principles of state policy is a section of the Constitution which expresses good intentions. But it is not legally enforceable, and therefore local government was not enforceable through the court law, it was merely a general direction of good governance, given to the governments that would follow once the election process was put into operation and therefore from 1947, when we became independent and 1950, when we proclaimed our Constitution all the way through till 1992 December, we tried to promote Panchayati Raj in India without constitutional backing and the results were very mixed. Long before even the Constitution’s draft had been prepared, the biggest state in the Indian Union, it was then called the United Provinces, passed its legislations for Panchayati Raj. To most members of the legislative constitutional assembly it seems self evident, in a huge country like India that it wouldn’t be possible to run the country without institutions of local governance at the village level. Therefore, there was not much argument on this point and it was not seen as being required that there should be constitutional sanction for what was a fairly self-evident proposition –and it should be left to the state governments to determine the particular form of local governance which should be most suited to that state.

However, as soon as the first five year plan which is from 1951 to 1956, was brought under implementation, it occurred to one of the modernisers of India, Jawahar Lal Nehru, who was the Prime Minister and who didn’t have much time for the romantic notions of Gandhi to realise that far from being a romantic motion, there simply was no way in which we could reach development to the grassroots unless we make our democracy not merely a representative democracy, but much more importantly, a participatory democracy. He had a very dynamic, enlightened minister called S.K. Dey, who started a system of community development where communities were organised to participate in the development process and take upon themselves the responsibility for the growth and the welfare of the local community. And the rather large bureaucracy got inducted at that time to run these community development blocks and that is how the all-pervasive institution of the Block Development Officer or the BDO came into existence, which is the enemy that all our sons are fighting. But as a result of the creation of community development awareness, some element of community participation, an attempt atleast to maintain traditions of elected local bodies which existed in parts of India, then took the decision that he should set up a committee under an enlightened leader called Balwant Rai Mehta to prepare a study report on the need for elected local governance for promotional development. This is itself was a pretty revolutionary idea because the Panchayats traditionally had not been concerned with development. The Panchayat traditionally was concerned with justice, and it is a system of delivering justice at the grassroots level and the justice was of course based upon not so much as codified laws arrived through democratic process as in the 20th and 21st centuries but rather upon custom and usage and what was generally assumed to be within the knowledge of people living in the community as being the right way to behave. It would be a very effective form of justice, even if it were to be a stagnant form of justice rather than a dynamic form of justice. Of course a system of justice that reflected the inherent inequalities of the social system and the cultural system that accompany the social system. Nevertheless, it was a form of not quite rough and ready justice of the Wild West kind but justice that was seen and accepted by most members of any given community to be justice.

Nehru wanted to change that into making these institutions of grassroots justice into institutions of grassroots development. But to make them institutions of grassroots development through a democratic process and thus it was that participatory democracy was to lead to participatory development. The Belwant Rai Mehta study group report was published in 1957 which was the terminal year of the first five year plan. And with great fanfare, about the time I became a college student, it spread to all over the country. It is assumed that nothing was further to be done, because in the 1957 elections as in the 1952 elections, the Congress party to which I belong won not only an overwhelming majority in the centre, in the Parliament in Delhi but also in all the state assemblies except in the state of Kerala where the Communists won the first time ever in history. Communists had won through free and fair democratic elections, and Nehru, somewhat undemocratically, dismissed that government but that will take me, that story will take me well beyond the theme of my lecture this evening.

However, because he was such a dominant figure in our politics and his rule existed purely by the consent of the people and all our state governments belonged to the same political order, it was very easy to issue an order in Delhi and see to it that at least nominally it was implemented in all the states. So between 1957 when the study group report came out and 1959 when Nehru traveled to a village in Rajasthan and lit a lamp there to signal the beginning of the modern form of Panchayati Raj, and from then onto 1964, when he died, there was no problem at all about spreading and practicing Panchayati Raj around the country. But between his death in 1964 and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assent to power in October 1984, that is a period of 20 years, there was such a sharp deterioration in the practice of democratic local government that we had to take a notorious example, the municipality of Bhagalpur in Bihar which had been without an elected council for 18 continuous years. We had a very comical situation in the capital itself, in Delhi, where a classmate of mine had been elected the chief executive councillor but he hadn’t a council with him and had no powers at all and all that he had to show by way of being mayor of Delhi was that he had a large red light on top of his car and he would drive around the city hopping that somebody would recognise him and unfortunately for me, I was his classmate so he kept turning up at my doorstep, telling me that he had no work to do and this is the situation in the heart of the country.

When Rajiv became the Prime Minister, he became Prime Minister because the party chose him as leader after Mrs. Gandhi, his mother, was assassinated and then he fought an election less than two months later which he won an overwhelming three quarters majority for his party in Parliament and on becoming the elected Prime Minister on the 5th of January 1985, he delivered his first televised address as an elected Prime Minister of India. And I happened to listen in on that and was completely bowled over because no less than 5 times in a speech that could not have lasted more than 7 minutes, he repeatedly said that the major requirement of the people of our country was “ a responsible administration”. And he said that because he was the first and possibly the last non politician to become the Prime Minister of India. He had been a citizen who was somewhat embarrassed by his own parentage and therefore, tried as far as it was possible for him to be an ordinary citizen that used to get his own driving license, to collect his own ration card, to buy his own railway tickets. And he discovered how unresponsive our administration was and how people would go literally from window to window looking for redress to the most simple problems and certainly to secure entitlements which were there by right and which were there by law, which could only be delivered by a bureaucracy which was responsible to the people. This stress on responsible administration was in many ways, the beginning of my own political life because I was so impressed with this young man stressing the importance of a responsible administration that I began to warm my way into his office.

He at that time thought there was a managerial solution to this problem of a responsible administration. He was in particular impressed with one District Magistrate in the town of Ahmed Nagar, who had devised two innovations with his administration. One was that he opened a single window at which all petitions could be delivered and from which responses to these petitions could be received, so that the average citizen didn’t have to go from desk to desk wondering where to submit his grievance and then return to go from desk to desk to discover where there might or might not be a response waiting for him

And secondly, the institution for a grievance redressal day where the district Magistrate would sit in the open and have all his petty officials around him and anybody could turn up at this grievance special day once a week. I think in this particular case, it was a Wednesday. All of the administration would be present at one spot and there and then answers would be given and justice in a sense dispensed. And Rajiv thought that this was replicable and was therefore, at that stage seeking a managerial solution to the systemic problem. But he discovered soon enough that when the particular district Magistrate was transferred, his successor was not interested in continuing this system and having been transferred, the original system was not carried over to the next post and in fact it was a personal whim rather than a systemic answer to the problem and it was at that stage that he started looking for a systemic solution to this systemic problem. Now as I said I come back to the question of the district Magistrate because in the course of searching for this answer, he hit upon the root of the problem. And the root of the problem was in the institution of the district Magistrate so I will have to go back to explain that bit to you

When the British found themselves with an empire on their hands and with little experience beyond that of a somewhat small and distant island to administer, they fell back upon the Mughal precedent and adapted it and decided that in every district of India, there are approximately 600 districts in India, there should be a representative of the central government who would be the fountainhead of all authority inside the district and that below there would be a pyramid cal structure of bureaucracy where there’d be a large number of officials but all of them would eventually report to this focal point and the focal point would be the authority representing all the departments of the central government, indeed the Viceroy himself, and go one step further, to her majesty, the queen and the empress of India. Then this one individual at the top of the administration in the district which contained approximately a million souls would be the fountainhead, the last word, the authority. And this system of administration was Britain’s proudest legacy to independent India.

They called it the steel frame on which the British empire had been built and they were particularly grateful to Prime Minister Nehru, who said that he would keep the steel frame intact and Wincent Charchil was so impressed with this particular decision on the part of Prime Minister Nehru that he described him as a man without fear and without revenge in his heart and therefore a noble person. There was really both of these involved in it because it was those who manned the steel frame who had been responsible previously for 100 years of putting into prison or exiling to distant lands or even putting to death those who were struggling for the freedom of Inida. And almost every single Minister of the Government of India in 1947 was a jailbird and they had been put in jail by those who were manning the steel structure so most of the members of the new independent government wanted to get rid of the steel frame lock, stock and barrel and Nehru stood up for them and said nothing doing. We need these people and they are going to minister the country.

But as a result of maintaining the steel frame, 45 years into India’s independence which was 40 years of independence which is when Rajiv Gandhi became the Prime Minister, we had a system of administration that was deliberately distant from the people. Infact its great virtue was its distance from the people. The British, like Dr. Ambedkar, felt that Indian society was so inherently unjust, it was so hierarchical and oppressive, tyrannical in its caste system that if you didn’t have a decent man with an Oxford education running the institution impartially and not being part and parcel the social hierarchy, it will not be possible to fairly and justly administer these and all this comes out beautifully in a book by Philip Mason called “The Guardians” with the platonic ideal of a dictator and they accepted that the district magistrate was a dictator but one who was benevolent and who had the interest of the people at heart and who had no interest of his own and therefore, would impartially ensure that justice was delivered to everybody and this was the system that we inherited, and to ensure further that this alien element who would be at the head of the administration supported by an army of alien elements would never become part of the social hierarchy. There was a system of transfers where two or three years into a posting at an administrative office in the districts later the officer would be transferred so that he would not get polluted by the local social hierarchy. So being from the outside and being subject to transfer were the two critical characteristics of this colonial form of administration and it had worked marvelously.

The British empire simply could not have lasted without this very carefully thought out system of administration because the main job of the district magistrate was twofold. One was to maintain law and order and it helped to have the stick in an alien hand and the other was revenue collection and that is it. Colonial administration was concerened with ensuring peace, tranquility, some form of justice, law and order on the one hand and keeping the government going by ensuring that revenues were collected from the people and would reach Delhi and from Delhi to London and things would be well in the empire. If one reads “The Guardians” by Philip Mason, one finds that the development consisted largely of these district magistrates getting into their horses at 6 am after chota hazri which meant the little breakfast, and ride through the fields, in the meanwhile checking what the crops were like and then as a matter of past time they might dig a well or provide some irrigation canals.

They were the ones who were running the political system. And there was more than one editorial writer, who said that this boy is naïve, he has never been in politics and what he is doing is he is cutting the branch of the tree in which he himself is sitting for it is these power brokers who sustained the Congress party for 100 years and were the backbone of the system. And he doesn’t understand that by denouncing them, he is denouncing the Congress party and therefore, denouncing his own legitimacy. But Rajiv persisted and he said that the power brokers were not what they were because they were evil people or that they represented evil interests but because with our non-representative democracy or inadequately representative democracy, there simply was no other way of running the system unless we were to bring in through a process of elections, a system of local government below the state level which would enable us to fill the vacuum now being filled by power brokers. And this was at the origin of his idea that we should incorporate into our system this 3 tier system of rural democratic local government. But there was nothing new about this idea because we had started it in different states, many years earlier in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra of the wast coast. It had been growing since even before independence in the largest province of the United Provinces, it has been growing since the first piece of legislation of the independent state government which was Panchayati Raj and it had spread all over the country during the last few years of Jawaharlal Nehru’s life.

So then he said how is it that democracy in Delhi and state capitals has survived to make us the world’s largest democracy but has withered on the while as far as local government is concerned? And the conclusion he came to was that we saved democracy in Delhi and state capitals by incorporating detailed provisions for them in our Constitution. What we needed to do was to provide equally detailed arrangements in our Constitution for democratic local self-governance and only after that could we ensure that democratic local self-governance has become part and parcel of the Indian polity. And after one of the most intensive processes of consultation that I think any democratic elected Prime Minister has ever undertaken anywhere in the world, where he met with every single one of our 600 district magistrates and widely remarked to me that isn’t it interesting that all the bright ones are in favour of democratic local self government and the idiots are in favour of continuing to rule on their own. And then a number of different parliamentary and party interventions until eventually on the 15th of May 1989 he rose on the floor of the house to move the 64th Constitutional Amendment Bill.

The last active consultation before moving the bill was to call in the Chief Ministers of the Congress party and one of them who is infact in the running to become President of India, was one of the candidates. I don’t think he stands much of a chance, anyway he is a candidate, and to him it was all very well for Gandhi to talk about local self-governance for rural India. But already he said this was in 1989 about a quarter of our population has become urban and over the next 25 or 30 years, perhaps half of our population will become urban, so why are you limiting democratic local self-governance to rural India, surely you should extend it also to urban India. And Rajiv immediately accepted the wisdom of this suggestion. Unfortunately, the 64th Amendment Bill was already prepared and we were about to introduce it in Parliament so he said that within two months he’d prepare the urban counterpart of this which is the 65th Amendment Bill and where the 64th was introduced in May 1989, the 65th was introduced in July 1989 and they moved forward separately but together on these parallel tracks for rural and urban local self governance and it was certainly his intention to bring the two together eventually. But when we went to the upper house where 2/3rd majority was required as in the lower house, by a shortfall of five we failed to get the bill passed. And in the elections held next month, Rajiv Gandhi was badly defeated and Congress party was thrown out of office and we went into a period of fair political turmoil through 1990 and into 1991 where we had two successive short lived governments but while the very ones who were opposed to the Bills, had formed the government, the importance of having these bills was so great that instead of simply repealing the whole initiative, they tinkered with this

And in 1991 May, elections were held once again in Parliament and looked as if the Congress party might come right back to power when coming to campaign for me in my South Indian Constituency in Tamil Nadu at 9.20 am on 22nd of May, the previous night on the 21st May he arrived in the town of Sriperumbudur and there he was assassinated, 11 hrs before he was due in my constituency. And so we won the election but we went into Parliament without the leadership of the man who conceived this entire system partly because what he said actually make such eminent sense, we were able to carry these two constitutional amendments, which are the longest and most detailed, into law by December 1992 and they now figure as Part 9 of Panchayats and Part 9A of Municipalities in our Constitution. So we’ve had constitutional Panchayati Raj in India for the last 14 years. What we have achieved I think is that we have succeeded in establishing institutions of local self-governance almost everywhere in the country.

We have a total of approximately 250,000 local bodies in rural India at the village level, the intermediate level which is usually the block that came from the community development scheme and the district level. And in urban India, in many parts of India, what we have are Gram Panchayats which is for those areas which are in the transition from rural to the urban areas and then municipalities and then metropolitan corporations. So there’s a total of 250,000 institutions of local self-government. Add to these 250,000 institutions of local self-government, we have elected 3.2 million representatives. There are more elected representatives in India than there are regions in Norway, almost as many as there are New Zealanders in New Zealand. But perhaps more remarkable than even this figure of 3.2 million elected representatives is that as many as 1.2 million are women. There are more elected women representatives in India than in the rest of the world put together. It is a degree of political and social empowerment of a much discriminated-against gender that is quite remarkable for a country that is as hidebound in its traditions as India is.

At the time that Rajiv was proposing this rather revolutionary move, there were many Congressmen, very senior ones who said to him that we would not be able to find this large a number of women candidates to occupy the posts that we were necessarily reserving for women that was 1/3rd of all positions and 1/3rd of all posts, that is 1/3rd of all the chairpersonships of these bodies is necessarily reserved for women. And the actual percentage of elected women in India is closer to 40% than the reservation figure of 33%. So it will appear that at least 7% or so of the figure almost varies on a daily basis because we have so many different states which keep having elections in one state or the other. So we need to keep rewriting the figure, the last authoritative figure got was in November last year which was 38% but that is probably changed by now. So let me take it as approximately 40%. Approximately 40% of all our elected representatives are women

And in the state of Bihar, which is generally, somewhat unfairly, regarded as socially the most backward state of the Indian union, the new Chief Minister, that was the man who got elected last year, has changed the rules to say 50% seats will be reserved for women and the actual number of women elected is 55% of the total. And in the state of Karnataka where we have done some studies, we find that at the village level that is the lowest tier of the system, some 47%, 44 to 47% of the elected representatives are women and this is largely because we also have reservations for the two segments of our society who were so severely discriminated against as to lead Dr. Ambedkar, the untouchable founder of our Constitution, to describe our villages as cesspools of exploitation and oppression. These used to be called the untouchable citizen. It is a word that we are not allowed to use anymore. It is illegal to use the word infact so they are called the scheduled castes, we have listed them in one of the schedules to the Constitution. We also have a number of tribes in India and there are also schedules for them. And it has been decided that in proportion to the population of scheduled castes or scheduled tribes in any given Panchayat area, that proportion of the seats shall be reserved for them so if 20% of a population of a village is scheduled caste, then 20% of the seats in the Panchayat are reserved for the scheduled castes.

But more interestingly, 1/3rd of the seats reserved for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes is reserved for scheduled caste women, scheduled tribe women and in Karnataka where 44 to 47% of the village representatives are women, the primary contributors are the scheduled tribe women who in free and fair elections have been elected to the extent of 65% of the seats reserved for the scheduled tribes and the scheduled caste women occupy 54% of the seats reserved for the scheduled castes. So these people who suffered double discrimination and it is not just the discrimination of yesterday, millennial, for thousands of years they have been oppressed in Indian society. They suffer from the discrimination of being scheduled caste or untouchables and on top of that of being women untouchables.

And yet in a state not noted for social advancement, Karnataka, we find that 65% of the scheduled tribes seats are won by women, 54% of the scheduled castes seats are won by women and in the most backward state, Bihar, 55% of elected representatives are women as against 50% reservations. So this degree of political and social empowerment achieved in what is after all a wink history, 15 years compared to 5000 years of institutionalised discrimination, is, I think, an achievement without parallel anywhere in the world or at anytime in history. And we therefore, do need to undertake a scientific study of how women are faring in Panchayati Raj. I just commissioned such a study and I hope we will have the results with us by the 24th of April next year which is the day we celebrate as Panchayati Raj day. Because that is the day on which after Parliament had passed the legislation, it was gazetted in the Government of India’s gazette, so we moved in that direction.

I’ve been signalled that I should stop. But if you just give me a few more minutes, I want to explain what is wrong with our system. Because I have only been able to share the successes so far. Panchayati Raj has now been made ineluctable. There’s simply no way in which state legislation or a political sleight of hand can undermine the system, it is ineluctable. It also irremovable because I don’t think there will ever be a 2/3rd majority in Parliament to repeal parts 9 and 9A in the Constitution. And it is also irreversible because while there will be some sliding back, there cannot be a fundamental sliding back. In this process, we created a great deal of hostility in the state assembly to the Panchayats because they see these institutions as alternative seats of power. Therefore, there is a constant struggle between legislative assembly members and the Panchayats as to where the central gravity of power in rural or urban area should lie. I think the battle is really won bar the shouting because on the one hand you have 4500 MLAs and on the other you have 3.2 million elected representatives and while in the first decade or so the MLAs have been the ones who’ve decided who will stand on behalf of the party in local body elections, increasingly I am surely going to see countervailing power from the grassroots determining who will become the MLA and when that happens, we will truly succeed in getting democracy at the grassroots in India. The problems, however, arise from the fact that the same Constitution which has created these ineluctable institutions of local government has also placed the subject of local self-government firmly in what we call the state list. There are three – again in the Constitution’s schedule, one of which says that these are the subjects in the union list and therefore exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Union government like defence, communications, currency, foreign policy etc.. Then there are the subjects in the state lists that include local self government and the third list is called the concurrent list where central legislation prevails over the current legislation. But it is almost impossible to place the subject of local self government on to the concurrent list and therefore we have to depend upon the state governments specifically state legislatures and very recalcitrant legislatures to actually undertake the processes of endowing the Panchayati Raj institutions and the municipalities with the three Fs – the functions, the finances and the functionaries required to have effective local self governance. And so when I became Minister about three years ago, almost to the day, I first convened seven round table conferences of my Panchayati Raj colleagues from around the country and in 150 days, we met seven times to discuss 18 identified dimensions of Panchayati Raj and came up with a roadmap that contained approximately 150 action points. And this we deemed to be the national road map arrived at voluntarily and consensus respecting the constitutional order. And then I have been travelling to every state and every Union Territory of our country and concluding at the end of my Panchayati Raj tours, an agreement with the Chief Minister of that state on what should be the state- central road map for accelerating the process of devolution. And so far I have signed 21 such joint statements there are not many more left, and I hope it would finish by the next 3-4 months. We have been able in this process also to start insisting for the most backward districts of India, economically backward districts of India, 250 of the 600 to secure a large grant from the central government which we disbursed but only to those districts which produced a democratically prepared district plan which start in the village, include the intermediate level, go on to the district level, then take the plans that have been prepared for the urban bodies and bring these altogether in a district plan prepared by an elected district planning committee.

And it’s only in those districts that are able to show us a lately valid district plan, properly prepared according to the Constitution, that we start disbursing these additional sums of money to the districts concerned. And we believe that if we get the most backward districts to have district planning then in the following days we would also have it in the more advanced districts. And there we may manage to actually have grassroots development through grassroots democracy, but we haven’t arrived there as yet. There are a lot of lacunae, there are issues relating to free and fair elections, there are issues relating to formal audit, there are issues relating to social audit, there are issues relating to the relationship between the elected authority and the bureaucracy which has been crowned by WestMinster in the West to be superior to the elected authority. And all these we have to overcome, it is a long, long process. I once asked Rajiv Gandhi, how long he thought it would take for the system to be really embedded in our polity and he said 25 years. I was a bit taken aback at 25 years. And looking towards the Soviet Union he said, that was a revolution which shook the world in 10 days and see how quickly it is collapsing. He said, let’s take our time. It will take 25 years to establish the system fully and properly in our country. But then it will last forever and forever and forever.

We are at the mid point now and therefore I comfort myself as I despair, as frequently I do, of getting real Panchayati Raj in our country that my boss and mentor gave me 25 years to do and I still got 11 years left. I think in the next 11 years, we will be able to succeed. But now we are at the stage where we need a great deal of international cooperation partially in financial terms which we are seeking from the UNDP and the World Bank and possibly from one or two other donors. For some reason our Ministry of Finance is very shy about letting the world know that we are poor, our people know that they are poor but our government does not know that we are poor. So they are shy about asking for money but they are not so shy about the exchanges of experiences and I think experience is what is invaluable, available around all the tables here as also in the international community at large. I have been talking to my neighbour here about the possibility of really moving on Indo-British cooperation where the linguistic problem will, I think, be solved by the fact that there’s quite a large number of South Asians who have been elected as councillors in Britain. And may be we get some of them to come across to India and enlighten us how democracy has worked here.

We have cooperative arrangements going locally with Pakistan and I am glad to say that this is the first country with whom we are really making the grade. And I am taking a delegation of 50 activists across to Lahore in the beginning of July and we are getting to listen to several hundreds of them later. We have been working very closely with Sri Lanka where the ethnic problem between the Tamils and Sinhalas is, I think, capable of solution only through local government. And that appears to be the view of the President of Sri Lanka. The Maldives is a series of Islands, so they have a Minister of atoll development and they are about to rename it as the Ministry of Local Government because that is what they are going to provide to each of the atolls and there too we are cooperating closely with them. The last Bangladesh government before it fell somewhat ignominiously, their leader Begam Khalida had come to India and she asked me whether I’d make a visit there, sit together and see how things are going. So at home we were working together and we like to spread this out and there is an initiative called IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) in this regard, that is underway. We are going to Afghanistan shortly because there too it seems to be the ultimate solution. We have been working very closely with Scandinavians and particularly with the Norwegians.

And I think really the big answer lies in the developed democracies. In the developed democracies, democracy began at the grassroots and took a 1000 years or more to reach the topmost branches. In the Wild West for example, because there was no other law and order, the Sheriff was elected and so was the dog catcher. But in these developed democracies, it took a very very long time for democracy to become full scope and full fledged. Thus, for example, in the United Kingdom, the Catholics did not have vote till 1832 and then there was a property qualification till 1867 and women didn’t get the vote till the elections of 1930. In France, they didn’t get the vote to the elections of 1945; in the United States they did not get the vote till 1920. And all this is about a 150 years after the commencement of the industrial revolution and in the United States of course they went for the pursuit of happiness for everyone except the Red Indians and the blacks. The Red Indians were deprived of their lands and massacred in one of the most grim genocides that humanity has ever witnessed. And one of the signatories of the declaration of independence was a slave owner. And also the father of several half-slave children, Thomas Jefferson. Therefore, the idea of democracy was one that grew very slowly and almost in tandem with the development of their economies. So much so that in the United States where Abraham Lincoln had issued the proclamation of the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, it was not till 101 years later in 1964 that President Lyndon Johnson was able to get his civil rights bill through. So it’s taken a long time for things to develop from the bottom to the top in the developed democracy. But in India we went for full scope democracy from day one, we now have 14 general elections. We have affirmative action in terms of reserved seats for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in Parliament, in our assemblies. We have universal adult franchise including voting rights for women from day one but it is democracy that started in the highest branches and then it is slowly going down to the grassroots, so in the developed democracies the tradition of local democratic self government is much more deeply rooted than is the case in India. It is down at the grassroots that we need to have the interchange of experience and knowledge and I invite all of you as members of the establishment in one way or the other in your respective countries to see whether we would like to join hands with us in India, and in the first instance to strengthen local democracy in India. And if there’s something we can do reciprocally, we will be more than happy to do it.

Thank you John for this opportunity.