Comparing Brokers in India: Informal Networks and Access to Public Services in Bihar and Gujarat

ABSTRACT

Faced with unresponsive and intimidating state institutions, citizens often need to rely on brokers to obtain state benefits. This article compares the ways in which brokers help people gain access to public services in two Indian states. Using ethnographic fieldwork in both states, we compare Bihar and Gujarat to argue that the evolution of the informal networks through which citizens gain access to public services constitutes an important dimension of democratisation processes. In both Gujarat and Bihar such brokerage networks have fragmented considerably over the last 40 years, while also becoming less marked by social hierarchies. This change has taken place despite a differing role and strength of political parties in the two states. The fragmentation and levelling of brokerage networks have enabled citizens to put more pressure on state institutions and power holders. This process of “informal democratisation” suggests that the comparative study of brokerage networks constitutes a promising and largely unexplored avenue to interpret the challenges facing governance and local democracy in India.

KEY WORDS:

• public service provision
• governance
• informality
• democratisation
• India

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 conference of the British Association of Asian Studies. We are particularly grateful for supportive comments from Gerry van Klinken and Mark Schneider.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In that sense the “political brokers” that are the object of this study differ from “market brokers” who offer their brokering services to entrepreneurs.

2. While some of the above-mentioned literature on brokers and clientelism uses different terms – such as “patron–client networks,” “patronage networks” or “informal networks” – these terms often refer to the same phenomenon of networks of various kinds of intermediaries facilitating state–citizen interaction – to which we refer here as brokerage networks.

3. Kurmi chetna manch and Nishad Vikas Sangh are caste associations of, respectively, the Kurmi and Nishad castes. Because of their collective mobilising ability, many of the bigger and numerically stronger caste associations are courted by political parties and candidates before every election.

4. The government of Bihar classified a sub-set of the scheduled castes in the state as Mahadalits in 2007.

5. Krishna also notes, as we do here, that these new leaders are more responsive compared to the old notables. He largely attributes this, however, to the spread of education and information, as a result of which “Leaders, young or old, can no longer easily deceive a significant percentage of villagers” (Krishna 2007, 156). The framework we develop in this article suggests a different explanation: both the fragmentation as well as this “levelling” of brokerage networks provides brokers with incentives to remain attentive to the wishes and demands of their clients – otherwise they run a considerable risk of seeing these clients turn to competing brokers.

6. This spread of Hindu-nationalist workers by incorporating local leaders into their patronage networks also provides an explanation for the manner in which an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 spread through Gujarat (see Berenschot 2011).

Additional information

Funding

Sarthak Bagchi’s research was supported by an Erasmus Mundus and a EECURI-LSE grant.