Where panchayat is lord and master

The maid who is the de facto nurse for our mother-in-law - she is 80-plus, and her memory is failing - suddenly put us in a jam. She announced she was going off to her home in a mid-Bengal district for an extended weekend, quite contrary to the year-round leave schedule we had worked out for her. According to that, different branches of the family would take turns to look after the ageing person when the maid was gone.

When we remonstrated with her, saying that she could hardly spring such a surprise on us, she sounded equally surprised and asked: don't you know there are these panchayat elections? The logic was surely she couldn't lose the right to vote, and the days it took to travel and do so couldn't possibly be treated as leave.

Just when we were breathing a bit easy after making quick arrangements for the old lady to stay with one branch of the family, problem number two cropped up. The young man who worked in a nearby office and was a glorified Jeeves and night-resource person (what if there was a sudden medical emergency?) rolled into one, and went home on weekends, surprised us with his own announcement. This would be an extended weekend for him too - as, you guessed it, the panchayat elections were on.

A whole lot of new arrangements had to be made to virtually lock up the house for several days. But just when the wife and I thought we had in place all the details, the maid who cooks for us failed to turn up. This time we didn't even ask. It was the panchayat polls, we guessed, which required not just a day to cast the vote but a day more to let the local transport recover - thrown out of gear as buses were requisitioned to ferry polling staff.

When the big day dawned, I scarcely looked at the morning papers to read all about the pre-poll mood, for by now I was an authority on the psychological build-up. But one last yet unveiled fascinating element was in store. The usually bustling Gariahat fish market, where stall owners jostled at different decibel levels for your attention and custom, sounded strangely quiet; half the stalls were empty. What happened, I asked and was informed cryptically: gone home for the panchayat polls.

It is by now commonplace in India for any kind of polling day to be something special, when a lot of regular activities cease and, in a kind of minor festive spirit, families and neighbourhoods troop to the nearby polling booths to vote and feel important. But as I realised this time, after my first close encounter with the panchayat polls (hitherto they were something that happened far away in the villages), they are even more special in the lives of rural people.

Rural communities, even when many in them journey to nearby towns for livelihood, are perforce more closely knit with sharply converging concerns. And voting for one or the other panchayat candidate had important consequences. The nurse-maid said she couldn't possibly not go and vote because she needed the panchayat's help with a plot of land. The cook-maid, on the other hand, was worried whether she and her neighbours would be allowed to vote by the new local toughs who could not be sure which way they would vote.

The panchayat is very different from a city municipality, though both are local government. During my younger days in Kolkata, I was quite vague about even who the local corporator was. The Calcutta Corporation, as it was then called, was a long-term disaster and that was it. Today, if panchayat elections are able to partly close down even the fish market, then they must mean something in Bengali lives. So much has changed in the quarter-century when I was away. 

In highly politically attuned West Bengal, the panchayat today is shaped by the community and helps shape it. Elections are not just a part of their lives but are an arbiter in what shape their lives will take. I was able to physically perceive the status of the panchayat during a visit to remote parts of the Sundarbans, where the land is partitioned between village and tiger reserve and every rivulet is a wide river ready to meet the sea. Sometimes, the most prominent pucca building in an area would be the panchayat office. It is not just an integral part of rural lives; it is the core, like the kacheri in district towns earlier, around which life is ordered.

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