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ABSTRACT
The “typical” municipal councillor in India is usually portrayed in the literature as a political entrepreneur in a clientelistic relationship with voters, providing privileged access to the state in return for electoral support. This article arose out of a lack of familiarity with this portrait and the municipal councillors (known locally as Parshads) of Dehradun. Ethnographic research and the co-construction of in-depth profiles with women Parshads revealed key differences in the ways that they get things done, the types of work they do and the ways that voters make demands. The term naukrani, meaning servant, is proposed to capture these dimensions of their everyday work, and to draw attention to the way Parshads are positioned in relation to an increasingly assertive electorate. It is argued that this positioning of naukrani is revelatory of a particular democratic logic in Dehradun and emergent political subjectivities, particularly among the middle class. By examining naukrani as an imposed positioning, rather than a strategic political identity, the limitations of politicians’ self-authorship are suggested. A focus on women Parshads hints at the gendered nature of this positioning and the implicit masculine bias in conventional understandings of political actors’ role in urban governance.
Acknowledgements
This research had ethics approval from the UNSW Human Research Ethics Committee: HC12647. The fieldwork was conducted with the assistance of the Panchayati Rule and Gender Awareness Training Institute (PRAGATI), Dehradun. I am very grateful for their support and friendship. I wrote this article while on a sabbatical research fellowship at the Asian Research Institute (ARI). Thank you to all at ARI for providing such a stimulating environment in which to work, and for the feedback provided on my seminar paper. I am grateful for the useful suggestions of anonymous reviewers. Most importantly, my sincere gratitude to the inspiring Parshads of Dehradun who gave their time and shared their knowledge for this project.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. “Since none of [the Parshads I] focus on [are male] heads, henceforth we refer to [fe]male actors” (Price and Ruud Citation2010, xxiv, n. 7). This paraphrasing, where I have added words in brackets, serves to highlight the marginalisation of women in the literature on Indian politics, who are often, as in here, dismissed in a footnote.
2. The bias towards the BJP was a product of their greater success in recruiting and electing women ward members, with 22 out of 29 women Parshads in Dehradun belonging to the party (5 Congress, 1 independent, 1 BSP). To avoid threatening the confidentiality of some ward members, the party of a Parshad is only indicated where this is relevant.
3. The extent to which clientelism is good or bad for the poor is debatable. While it is through partial treatment that people on the margins gain access to state resources, the poor may sacrifice strategic and collective political action for short-term access to critical resources (Berenschot Citation2014; Piliavsky Citation2014).
4. The commonalities across ethnographic accounts is seemingly broken when it comes to the Himalayan states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. This article presents a portrait of politicians more familiar to those presented in Fischer (Citation2016) and Jeffrey and Dyson (2017). Whether this is due to the particular political histories and geological formations of the state is a question worth considering in future research.
5. Voters is the term used by Parshads to refer to residents in their wards.
6. The acronym RSCW-1T refers to Reserved seat for Scheduled Caste Women-First term.
7. At the time of fieldwork, only five out of 70 MLAs in Uttarakhand were women, none of whom held localities in Dehradun Nagar Nigam.
8. The greater tendency for the poor to vote is a widespread phenomenon across India (see Carswell and de Neve Citation2014). For recent anecdotal evidence from Dehradun, see The Pioneer, January 22, 2017).
9. This is explored in Jakimow (Citation2017) where the reasons and compulsions as to why Parshads accede to the “unreasonable” demands of constituents, highlighting the role of affect and emotion, are examined.
10. We did not co-construct any in-depth profiles with men, and so my observations in this regard are tentative, but I suggest an important area of future research.