The Constitution and the (absent) City

Enough has been said about the absence of an elected Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike in the midst of Bengaluru’s floods. What is also remarkable is that at the same time, two other major metropolitan areas of India -- Delhi and Mumbai -- also do not have an elected municipal body in place at the time. Chennai was without an elected municipal corporation for six years, until March 2022. This is not exceptional -- urban local bodies across the country keep going for significant periods without elected representation.

On the other hand, state and national elections happen like clockwork. There have been very few exceptional situations where a state has been under President’s Rule for years on end, and that is mostly due to large-scale insurgent violence. The brief two-year period when national elections were suspended, the Emergency of 1975-77, is seen as a traumatic period in India’s democracy. So, why a difference between state and national elections and municipal elections?

Part of this can be traced to the Constitution itself. Prior to 1993, when the 74th Amendment was introduced into the Constitution, there was no mention of cities or municipal government in any substantial way in it. Save for giving the states the power to pass laws relating to panchayats and local bodies, and a non-binding directive principle to strengthen rural self-government, the Constitution was almost entirely silent on the topic. One also hardly finds any discussion in the Constituent Assembly as to how cities should be governed and what role city governments should play in independent India.

This is surprising for two reasons: first, constitutions did have provisions relating to local government even back in the 1940s, one notable example being the post-War Constitution of Japan, which India’s Constitution-makers were familiar with. Second, some of the leading members of the Constituent Assembly had started their political careers in city government. Sardar Vallabhai Patel, for instance, was mayor of Ahmedabad for four years. R K Sidhwa was mayor of Karachi for a year and made reference to it in a speech in the Assembly, but only to illustrate a point relating to the post of President.

The Gandhian Constitution drawn by Shriman Narayan Agarwal goes to the other extreme and has elaborate provisions relating to village, taluka and district panchayats, their composition, functions and powers. It also provides for Municipal Councils and what powers they would have.

There’s a deeper, more fundamental difference between the Constitution of India and Agarwal’s Gandhian constitution. While the Indian Constitution has the nation and therefore the Union Government as its focus, the Gandhian constitution has the village, and therefore the panchayat, as its focus. This is not just a matter of different approaches to drafting but very different ideologies -- the Gandhian vision for a future India was a decentralised republic of villages, whereas the Nehru-Ambedkar one was of a strong central government that would bring India into the modern world. Gandhi’s romantic idea of what an Indian village was lost out to Ambedkar’s starker description of it as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness, caste and communalism”.

However, the lack of any focus on local self-government in the Constitution meant that efforts to strengthen grassroots democracy by empowering village and urban governments faltered. While some states (such as Karnataka, under the guidance of Panchayati Raj Minister Abdul Nazir Sab) did undertake strong initiatives to improve local governance, it was only in the late 80s that serious thought was given to empowering panchayats and urban local bodies. Even then, the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution, which put in place provisions related to panchayats and city governments, were hugely flawed and have done little to really strengthen grassroots democracy in India.

Why is it necessary to have strong panchayats and urban local bodies? For the vast majority of Indians, the local government is the only government they know. It is closest to them, caters to their immediate needs, and is probably far more representative of their community than any state or national government. Even urban dwellers must realise that they can tweet to the Prime Minister of India all they want but the boats to rescue them from a rain-flooded city will come from the BBMP.