A motley group of villagers are engaged in a quiet consultative meeting. Each one of them speaks his or her mind on the issue at hand: which millets to take up for this season; the challenges they will confront in planting a new crop; if and how the millets would benefit them. They speak freely and frankly, and without any agitation in their voices, even when they differ on some points with others. After the day’s proceedings, consensus is sealed and decision taken. This is a recent incident in the tiny, nondescript village of Bijapur, inhabited by Gond tribals, in the north of Gadchiroli district, one of the most economically backward districts in Maharashtra.
Miles away from Bijapur, in an equally backward and often cut-off region of Melghat, a hilly and forested part of Amravati district in the same state, poor and uneducated Korku tribals of Sosokheda village are brooding over their problems. At the gram sabha, one by one, they speak of their problems and discuss possible and potential solutions — administrative, technical, and social. Again, it is a dialogue, not confrontation.
Move to Enabavi, a non-tribal village in Telangana’s erstwhile district of Warangal which became one of the first fully-organic villages of the country. Here too, decisions are not taken by a majority vote but through a long consultative process which M.K. Gandhi would see as a working model of consensual democracy. Differences are honoured; contrarian views and opinions respected with humility.
These are but a few samples of the functional forms of consensual democracy at the grassroots; there are thousands of such villages, even small towns, where people participate and engage with their issues, and do not leave it to the elected few to evolve solutions to their complex problems. Remarkably, while most of rural India wilts in the face of a deepening economic distress, these villages stand up to the test of time and deal with their problems collectively, with all their wisdom.
This writer has observed the workings and functioning of these and many such villages across India with a sense of adulation, as they portray a refreshing contrast to the dysfunctionality of our country’s higher Houses of elected representatives where, for over a decade now, dialogue seems to be an anathema. Even the media, supposed to be platforms for dialogue and different points of view, do not reflect the maturity that the tiny and dispersed pool of such villages demonstrate in dealing with the poly-crises they confront. They are economically lagging, but evolved in their behaviour.
A veteran advocate of the consensual form of democracy, Devaji Tofa, from Mendha Lekha — the place where the slogan, “Mawa Nate, Mawa Raj” (my rule in my village) first echoed loudly — told this writer once: “there could be delays in our decision-making, because it takes time to forge a consensus, but once a decision is taken by all of us, it clears a robust path for a better future. We are in it or out of it together.”
Some of these villages have people belonging to different faiths, castes, and classes, and yet they have found a way in collective decision-making and problem-solving. They function mostly without the backing of the Indian State. If at all, the State complicates their existence with an endless list of impractical and often autocratic rules.
B.R. Ambedkar and Gandhi’s dream of a functional form of consensual democracy is dead in the Houses of elected representatives. One helplessly watches the pointless proceedings of the legislatures, the abdication of basic responsibilities by those in power, autocratic governance at every level, the lack of answers on questions of national importance and so on. But in scattered villages, even small towns, in the nook and corner of this vast and diverse land, that thought is still alive as seeds waiting to germinate.