Abstract
This paper investigates governance reform which aims to ‘move the state’ closer to people, arguing that greater attention needs to be paid to two questions: how does political decentralisation affect the ways in which authority is exercised? And what spaces does it leave open for poor people’s agency? It focuses on West Bengal, an Indian innovator of decentralisation through panchayati raj (‘rule by local councils’) in the late 1970s, investigating the everyday practices through which rural political space was being managed through in-depth qualitative evidence gathered from two panchayats towards the end of the Left Front government’s long rule (1977–2011). This work indicates the ways in which patronage, coercion and surveillance were melded by those exercising political power in the Bengali countryside, and the limited political opportunities which these practices left open to the poor. The ostensibly democratic structures of panchayati raj thus coexisted with the informal exercise of power and the rep...
Highlights
The irst task of our paper is to trace out the history through which participatory governance institutions have evolved in West Bengal, and the ways in which they have embedded open competition and state-backed welfare programmes as integral parts of local political space in the Bengali countryside
We see ‘top-down’ projects of governance reform as not merely meeting resistance when they seek to restrict the scope of informal practices and institutions, but as inadvertently new creating spaces in which informal authority is produced in dynamic forms
Clientelism and ideas of decentralised or participatory governance justify themselves in the same normative terms: that there should be a closer and more personal relationship between clients/citizens and power holders, and that public policy should be open to local negotiation and adaptation (BénitGbafou, 2011, 458)
Summary
Managing political space: authority, marginalised people’s agency and governance in West Bengal. The story of how the Left Front lost that moral authority at state level is told elsewhere (chatterjee, 2009; Bag, 2011; Bhattacharyya, 2016): our concern here is rather with the ways in which panchayat rule has changed local relationships between the state, political leaders and poor and marginalised groups in rural Bengal The irst of these has been to increase the ‘institutional surface area’ (Heller, 2009) of the state: most rural dwellers are within a few kilometres’ walk of their gram panchayat oice, and their own elected ward members and the ‘invited spaces’ of participation in elections and village open meetings should be found even closer to their homes. We outline three modes through which they exercised power: the establishment of patronage networks, the assertion of authority with its associated threat of violence, and the surveillance and management of the ‘public sphere’
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