Democratic Decentralization and Rural Leadership in India: The Rajasthan Experiment

Abstract

The experiment in democratic decentralization in its institutional form of panchayati raj is still in its infancy, having been introduced less than five years ago in most parts of India. It is rather early to expect that panchayati raj should have, by now, succeeded in effecting the emergence of a new type of rural leadership, or even to have had an enduring impact at the rural level. The emergence of a new pattern of leadership even in a developed democracy is a long drawn out process; this is even more the case in a developing society such as India. The quest for new leadership is the quest for a revolution in man, who does not stand in isolation but who is subject to a number of influences, both historical and contemporary. Thus the problem of new leadership is essentially a problem of social change. An additional complication is the fact that the new leader is at once the cause and the consequence of social change. It is this interdependence which makes both the pace of social change and the process of the emergence of new leadership at times distressingly slow. This is all the more so because social change in itself is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It is at once inward and outward, inward on the psychological plane and outward on the social plane. Social change in a community is a process of inward response and adaptation-response to fresh stimuli emerging out of a live, dynamic and developing society, and adaptation to new ideas, both in terms of thought structure and thought processes, and to new trends in mode of life and behavior. These new ideas and trends in mode of life and behavior are the cumulative results of a process of change in society in various of its aspects-socio-economic, political, even religious and ethical to some extent and, above all, intellectual and aspirational. The essence of social change lies in molding (and sometimes even casting anew) man's ideas and mode of life in response to this process of multi-dimensional change, amounting in fact to a reoriented and perhaps even altogether new, value-pattern in society. The emergence of leadership is part of the process of reorientation in which the leader plays a dual role: first, of embodying the spirit of social change in himself and, then, of serving as a catalytic agent in society.