THE origins of Rajiv Gandhi’s decisive contribution to the establishment of constitutionally-sanctioned Panchayati Raj may be traced to his first broadcast to the nation after winning the elections of December 1984. Repeatedly, Rajiv Gandhi returned in that speech (5 January 1985) to the theme of a “responsive administration”, a preoccupation which found reflection in the inclusion of the concept in the new 20-point programme which he announced on Independence Day 1986.

At the time, Rajiv Gandhi appears to have regarded administrative reform as largely a managerial matter. He was much impressed by what a young collector had done in Ahmednagar to impart a human face to administration. He seems to have thought that the finetuning of such innovative managerial techniques, combind with training administrators to sensitize them to the felt needs of the people, might result in an administration which responded to the people rather than remain wrapped in its own cocoon of perceptions and priorities.

Primarily with a view to ascertaining what administrators themselves believed to be the right managerial techniques to make administration people-oriented. Rajiv Gandhi embarked on a programme of face- to- face interaction with District Magistrates drawn from every district of the country. It started dawning on him at the very first of these encounters, in December 1987, that the best of our administrators felt handicapped most by the absence at the grassroots of a machinery for determining the will of the people.

Administration in a democratic country was being carried on without effectively consulting the people or their elected representatives on the issues that most immediately impacted on the peope. Even the best of administrators had to go by what they thought the people wanted instead of basing himself on a well-articulated programme; of priorities set by the peope themselves.

This helped Rajiv Gandhi fit in his mind the different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of people in democracy and development which had evidently been preoccupying him at least since his advent into the country’s political life.

As a newly elected MP, he had spent months on end driving to every nook and corner of his constituency, sipping tea in wayside dhabas and chatting with constituents on village chaupals. These conversations made clear to him the vast chasm separating the people from the administrative system that was allegedly designed to serve them. Four decades into Freedom, the steel frame was as much in place as when the British, who devised it, were ruling the country. Was this, perhaps, the reason that the people felt almost as distanced, even alienated, from their own democratically elected Government, be it at the Centre or the states, as in colonial times?

Rajiv Gandhi’s experiences as a constituency MP were only reinforced by what he saw; of the political culture spawned by the absence of representative government at the grassroots. It was a political culture famously decried by him at the centenary session of the Congress (December1985) where he tore into the “brokers of power”. Clearly, if a vast chasm separated the elected representatives from the people, the chasm would have to be filled by those who made a profession of interceding with the authorities on behaf of those without access to authority, These were the power brokers, who may have succeeded in making the administration responsive to some but onlybecause the administration responsive to some but only because the administration was so cut off from the many.

By the time Rajiv Gandhi had completed his second Workshop with the District Magistrates (February1988), his mind was more or less made up that the problems of a non-responsive administration, which concerned him as the head of the country’s system of governance, were intimately linked to the problem of marginalizing and, hopefully, eventually eliminating the power brokers, which was a priority item in his political agenda. It was the non-representative character of the power system at the grass- roots that had necessitated the power-brokers. If power at the grassroots were to be exercised by the people’s representatives, the empowerment of the people would itself eliminate the imperative for the brokers of power. It followed that the search for a responsive administration should begin not with the managerial solutions being sought hitherto but by a systemic revolution that would vest power in the hands of the people.

One has only to read Rajiv Gandhi’s address to the All-India Panchayat Parishad in september 1986 (close to a year before his Workshops with District Magistrates and close to a year after his centenary speech) to see how clearly he had thought through the system of Panchayati raj which he would have wished to see flourish in the country. Yet, that speech does not disclose any specific appreciation of the link between Panchayati Raj as a system of governance and the evolution of a responsive administration or the marginalization of the powerbrokers. That link became clear to him only at and through the workshops. It transformed the Workshops from what might otherwise have been an interesting experiment into a truly seminal breakthrough.

Focussing, then, on Panc- hayati Raj as the systemic answer to the systemic deficiencies in our system of governance, Rajiv Gandhi, at no time, attempted to lay any claim to originality in conceiving or elaborating the concept of Panchayati Raj. On the contrary, what intrigued him was the failure of Panchayati Raj to take root in Independent India despite its having been the fundamental prescription of the greatest Indian of the 20th Century, Mahatma Gandhi, and the priority political objective of the second greatest Indian of the 20th century, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Why had democracy at the grassroots so palpably failed when, equally palpably, democracy at the centre and in the states had taken such deep roots that India could justifiably lay claim to being the world’s largest democracy?

By the time he came to the third workshop (April 1988), Rajiv Gandhi had come to the conclusion that the answer to that conundrum lay in our constitution. Democracy had flourished at Delhi and in the State capitals because the constitution made detailed provisions for the institution and protection of democracy at these levels. However, the same constitution treated local government in a most perfunctory manner, confining all mention of the subject to a mere three lines-and that too not in any obligatory or mandatory part of the constitution but in the non-binding chapter on the Directive Principles of State Policy.

The entire responsibility for Panchayati Raj having been vested in the political will of the states, it was the tug and pull of political compulsions in State capitals that had determined the fate of Panchayati Raj, not any prescriptive provision of our Constitution. In conse- quence, most States had played ducks and drakes with self-governance at the grassroots, rendering it a plaything of narrow political exigencies instead of making it the forum for the determination of the people’s will. The solution lay in making Panchayati Raj as much a Constitutional obligation as democracy in Parliament or the State Assemblies.

Rajiv Gandhi quickly discoverd that his quest for such a systemic revolution was a rather lonely quest. Few of the senior administrators he initially consulted shared his perception of the imperative of root-and-branch reform. Few of his political colleagues shared his enthusiasm for the programme. In State capitals, there was positive hostility to what was correctly seen as a move that would rob State ministers and State legislators of many of their powers. And the opposition, by and large, condemned the Workshops as an unacceptable transgression on State’s rights and his Panchayati Raj plans as an insincere political gimmick designed to distract the nation’s attention from Bofors and other matters.

Rajiv Gandhi, therefore, mounted a major compaign to build a nation-wide consensus on what he increasingly came to see as the single most important platform of the domestic agenda for taking India into the 21st Century as a nation worthy of its traditional place in the vanguard of human civilization.

Since the Workshops were being run by the Ministry of Personnel a sub-committee of the Consultative Committee attached to that Ministry was established under the chairmanship of Shri P.K. Thungon, a longstanding MP from Arunanchal Pradesh. The Report of that sub-committee then became the basis on which to carry the compaign further afield. A Working Group of the Congress Parliamentary Party was constituted to elicit back-bench reaction to the programme. The theme was taken up in public speeches and party forums. Meanwhile, some of the more positively inclined members of the Planning Commission were dra-fted informally into fleshing out the concept. The Concil of Ministers was sensitized into an appreciation of the sinificance of the endeavour underway.

It was, thus, not till the last days of December 1988, all of one year after the first Workshop and close on nine months after he made his mind clear at the Third Workshop, that Rajiv Gandhi felt the coast to be sufficiently clear to ask the Department of Rural Development (then a part of the Ministry of Agriculture) to begin the exercise of drafting the Constitution Amendment. Simultaneously, he made sure the exercise was not reduced to bureaucratic or legal technicalities by putting the same officials who were doing the drafting incharge of organising what was undoubtedly the most profound attempt ever at ascertaining the perceptions of the people on any single issue through face-to-face interaction between the Head of Government and the general run of people’s repe-sentatives. It is estimated that, in all, some 25,000 Panchayat representatives, drawn from every region of the country, and including representives of the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and wo- men, met, heard and had their voice heard by the Prime Minister in a series of Conferences held in different parts of the country. The contry was woken up to the significance of the systemic revolution being launched.

Within the ruling stab-lishment. there were two different trends to counter. On the one hand were those who wanted to adopt the minimalist approach of urging State governments to launch a fresh initiative but not having the Centre itself too embroiled in the details. On the other, there were those who favoured a constitutional Amendment but wanted this to be as brief as possible, confined essentially to the question of ensuring that elections to the Panchayats were held on schedule. At the other end of the spectrum were a few who wanted the Central Governemnt to go well beyond Constitutional stage-setting and, in effect, draft the country’s municipal law on local government.