Nehru talked of panchayats as if they were bureaucracies, imagining them as elected civil servants rather than political leaders

He wanted “real power to be in the hands of the people” but also that “they must be trained in governance”

Jawaharlal Nehru restlessly sought to provide Indian democracy with a firm and unshakeable base. The Constitution supplied the framework, Parliament and State legislatures stood as the superstructure, and adult suffrage ensured the possibility of universal participation. 

But this edifice lacked an institutional foundation in the villages. Should the top falter, the base would subside. That deficiency would be made up by the village council or panchayat. Electoral democracy would be triple layered — the panchayat at the bottom, the State legislature above it, and Parliament at the apex. But Nehru did not seem to be able to decide whether the panchayat was a political body or a bureaucratic committee.

He sometimes spoke of panchayats as if they were to be political leaders in their domain, but the Constitution had not provided for them and he did not move to correct that omission. He imagined them representing the nation in the manner that Parliament and State legislatures did. In 1951, he expressed the hope that panchayats in Madhya Bharat “can rise above parochial feelings and think of larger issues and the service of the country.”

The Sixth Schedule of the Constitution did provide for autonomous districts and regions which he considered “a very wise provision”. They had been formed in the Northeast and he expected them to do well when they could raise finances through taxation. This was the Soviet pattern, with its political hierarchy going from the Union through the Union Republics (the equivalent of Indian States) to the Autonomous Republics; but panchayats were clearly not comparable to even the last of these.

Nehru claimed to “want real power to be in the hands of the people in villages and districts and states” but that “they must first understand and be trained in the principles of governance and then play an active role in governing the country.” The properly political entities like the District Councils did not seem to need instruction, but the panchayats evidently did.

However, training suggests bureaucracy, not political leadership. Nehru, in many ways, talked of panchayats as if they were bureaucracies: he would delegate power to them, he was decentralising through them, certain administrative duties were to be transferred to them, and they were to “help” because the government “cannot do everything”. In effect, he imagined them as elected civil servants rather than as political leaders like himself. Like centralising states since the 16th century elsewhere in the world, Nehru was providing for an elected village and municipal bureaucracy to complement the bureaucracy of state which could not enter into the minutiae of local life.

Consistently enough, he was eloquent about the panchayat doubling up as a local planning committee, the analogue of the Planning Committees in the States and of the Planning Commission in Delhi. It was the best informed on local conditions and priorities and presumably, therefore, more effective than experts sent down from the capitals. But he regarded them as sources of information rather than as planners in any meaningful sense of the term, even at a subordinate level. He acknowledged that planning proceeded vertically from above, and he regretted that as a result planners knew little of local and everyday needs, about wells, tanks, roads, bridges, schools, dispensaries and so on. The remedy lay in involving the panchayats at this humble level and urging them even to organise voluntary labour for development; he assigned them administrative tasks like conducting crop competitions to raise productivity, and described these initiatives as democratic and “revolutionary”. He informed them that they were “participants in administration”, “shareholders in the task of administration”, and much more along that order.