Panchayat funds are not for the ruling parties alone

Editorial, EOI, 17 March 2024:  The prescription of BJP M.P. of Darjeeling Raju Bista that panchayat funds will be held back if panchayats run by the opposition parties in the hills are denied projects has some merit. 

Panchayats are democratic bodies at the grassroot level formed under a constitutional provision to bring about rural development. 

The denial of projects to panchayats on political grounds is a negation of the Constitution. Unfortunately, this is not a malady that is restricted to the panchayat bodies in the hills alone; it pervades panchayat bodies across the length and breadth of West Bengal and through different tiers of the panchayat system. 

If the zilla parishad is run by party A and a panchayat samiti is run by party B, then the zilla parishad denies projects to the panchayat samiti run by party B and instead allocates funds to panchayat samitis run by party A. 

In the same vein, if the panchayat samiti run by party B includes under its jurisdiction a gram panchayat run by party A, the panchayat samiti concerned denies projects and funds to that gram panchayat. In the process, development suffers at the grassroot level.

The complaint of Raju Bista must have been directed in this case against the Trinamool Congress and its ally the Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha which is the ruling dispensation in the hills. It would be unfortunate indeed if the accusation of the Darjeeling M.P.; for in the plains of West Bengal, during the rule of the Left Front, panchayats run by the Trinamool Congress had often been the victims of the same kind of discriminatory practices of the CPI (M). 

In fact, the communist party, while championing the cause of the poor, used to distinguish between poor people belonging to the fold of the CPI (M) and those outside the fold of the party. This was one of the main reasons for the downfall of the 34-year rule of the CPI(M) in West Bengal. 

The deprived sections of the poor people in the villages had been quick to rally under the banner of Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee when she provided one. The Trinamool, now the ruling party in West Bengal, should learn from this and refrain from victimizing sections of the rural people on political grounds. 

In hindsight, the experiment that Chief Minister of Sikkim Prem Singh Tamang has carried out in the last panchayat election in Sikkim of holding a partyless rural poll has much merit. In a panchayat system where political parties do not figure, the scope for such discrimination on political grounds is eliminated automatically. 

The last panchayat election in Sikkim where all the candidates contested as independents was understandably a peaceful one, while the last panchayat election in West Bengal was marked by unprecedented violence. With the increase in flow of funds to the panchayat system, the stakes of political parties in taking control of panchayat bodies have increased. 

One may recall them back in 1978 when the panchayat election was held in West Bengal under the rule of the first Left Front government, former Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal Prafulla Chandra Sen had espoused the cause of party less democracy. Nobody had paid heed to him, but today the panchayat bodies in West Bengal are breeding grounds of partisan politics