Modi Government Banks On Panchayats To Remake Politics – But The System Is Broken

Hamza Mir has Rs 22 lakh in an official bank account for the development of his halqa panchayat. A halqa is a cluster of villages represented by a sarpanch. Mir is the sarpanch of a halqa in the militancy-hit area of Tral in South Kashmir’s Pulwama district. But there is no way he can spend the money in the official panchayat account.

“I have got all the approvals and completed the necessary formalities,” said Mir. “I would have started working from tomorrow itself, but I can’t.”
The reason is that he is afraid to even go home.

Mir is one of the local representatives elected in the nine-phase panchayat polls held in Jammu and Kashmir last year. For the last 11 months, the 68-year-old has been living in a Srinagar hotel rented by the state government to accommodate panches and sarpanches who fear militant attacks. In all these months, Mir, who is affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party, has only made a few day visits to his area. Spending a night there is not an option.

These hostilities have only hardened after August 5, when the Centre scrapped the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 and split the state into two Union Territories. While the Valley simmers with anger against the Centre’s unilateral decision and the subsequent curbs on civil liberties, local representatives have been thrust into an uneasy spotlight. The Centre proposes to use them in its project to remake politics in Kashmir by reaching out directly to the grassroots.

But will the project find takers in the Kashmir Valley? Nearly a year after they were elected, panches and sarpanches here say they were “deceived” by the government, that it has failed to deliver on the promise of “empowering” them.