Power and Influence in India
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Power and Influence in India

Pamela Price, Arild Engelsen Ruud, Pamela Price, Arild Engelsen Ruud

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Power and Influence in India

Pamela Price, Arild Engelsen Ruud, Pamela Price, Arild Engelsen Ruud

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About This Book

Taking cognisance of the lack of studies on leadership in modern India, this book explores how leadership is practiced in the Indian context, examining this across varied domains — from rural settings and urban neighbourhoods to political parties and state governments.

The importance of individual leaders in the projection of politics in South Asia is evident from how political parties, mobilisation of movements and the media all focus on carefully constructed personalities. Besides, the politically ambitious have considerable room for manoeuvre in the institutional setup of the Indian subcontinent. This book focuses on actors making their political career and/or aspiring for leadership roles, even as it also foregrounds the range of choices open to them in particular contexts. The articles in this volume explore the variety of strategies used by politically engaged actors in trying to acquire (or keep) power — symbolic action, rhetorical usage, moral conviction, building of alliances — illustrating, in the process, both the opportunities and constraints experienced by them.

In taking a qualitative approach and tracking both political styles and transactions, this book provides insights into the nature of democracy and the functioning of electoral politics in the subcontinent.

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Year
2012
ISBN
9781136197987
Edition
1
1
Creating Followers, Gaining Patrons: Leadership Strategies in a Tamil Nadu Village
Björn Alm
In this article I discuss how politically ambitious people in the village of Ekkaraiyur went about building support for themselves.1 The temporal context of the discussion is 1988–90, when I did anthropological fieldwork in the village.
My research focused on the emergence of a new type of leader, associated with the erosion of earlier village loyalties, and the censure of these leaders as corrupt. This article builds on this general theme, enriching it through a focus on the strategies politically ambitious people have used. In particular, I shall discuss how Karuppuvan, an informal leader of DMK youth in the village, built a support base for himself.2
I have chosen to focus on Karuppuvan because he lacked any formalised political position. That is, he did not hold any elected positions within the parliamentary and panchayat systems, and, although he was a member of DMK, he did not hold any officially recognised position within the party. In this sense, Karuppuvan was on his own. Whatever political clout he could assert, he had to create for himself. The realisation of his ambitions depended on his abilities to successfully put such strategies in motion that created networks of followers and patrons.
I intend my discussion of Karuppuvan to provide some material on what can be termed ‘the grass-roots level’. However, the activities, aims and ambitions, as well as the means of Karuppuvan were not merely set within a larger political context. I think that they were also mirrored at successive levels of Tamil Nadu politics.
The Setting
The village of Ekkaraiyur is centrally located in the Dindigul valley, which has been an important route of communication between the central and southern parts of Tamil Nadu since early times. Transport and communications are easy as several main roads and one railway track traverse the valley, linking a handful of small towns that serve as centres of trade and communication for the surrounding countryside with the bigger cities to the north and the south. The town of Dindigul, located at the northern end of the valley, was an important regional centre in the late 1980s, with markets, schools, small industries, and a fairly handsome population of about 200,000.
The large irrigation works of Ekkaraiyur water a wide expanse of wetland paddy fields in the otherwise predominantly dry Dindigul valley. With its 5,000 or so inhabitants, Ekkaraiyur accounted for a sizeable portion of the 20–25,000 people who lived in this part of the valley in 1989. Only the nearby small town of Yarkottai was more populous. Until the end of the 19th century, Yarkottai was little more than a collection of small villages. At that time, the construction of a road from the Palni Hills amalgamated the villages into a small town, which became a local centre for commerce. A new road was similarly the maker of the village of Velpatti, located near Ekkaraiyur. Velpatti consisted of little more than wasteland until the middle of the 20th century, when a new road from Coimbatore and Palni turned Velpatti into a local centre of communications and commerce. Ekkaraiyur, Yarkottai and Velpatti were all favourably located with respect to irrigation works. The latter two, however, had the added advantage of being located along busy roads. Even if the growth of these two did not depopulate Ekkaraiyur, it was pushed towards a local periphery. However, Ekkaraiyur was no ‘backwater village’.
The fertility of Ekkaraiyur’s wetland supported a relatively large population and a more complex social structure than other villages in the valley. Some traits, notably the presence of a relatively large group of Brahmin landowners, gave Ekkaraiyur something of the character more typical of the Brahmin-dominated villages of the Kaveri river delta (BĂ©teille 1971, 1974; Gough 1981, 1989). However, Ekkaraiyur was not a Brahmin-dominated village. There were many large, medium and small landowners of other castes, as well as a many landless villagers. In addition, the legacy of migration to the village, particularly during the last couple of hundred years, had given a particular shape to the village — its population saw itself as consisting of a large number of differing groups in terms of caste, language and religion.3
Although considered an agriculturally favoured village, few families in Ekkaraiyur were able to support themselves entirely from agriculture, whether they were landowning or not. Many families consequently had some members in non-agricultural professions, in or outside the village. These ranged from manual labour on hill plantations and city building sites, to industrial jobs, technical professions, military service and white-collar jobs.
Several white-collar jobs could be found in the village as the state was an active and constant companion in ordinary people’s lives in Ekkaraiyur at the end of the 1980s (cf. Fuller and BĂ©nĂ©ĂŻ 2001). Numerous state institutions were located in the village or nearby. Ekkaraiyur had a state-run school, a public library, a post office, a small hospital, and a veterinary clinic. A government department supervised the management of Ekkaraiyur’s major temples. A branch office of the nationalised Canara Bank was located in the village. There were two ‘Fair Price’ shops, which were part of a state system of distribution. Most of the buses that served Ekkaraiyur belonged to a state-owned company. A police station and several branch offices of various state enterprises, such as the agricultural department and the electricity board, were located at nearby Velpatti and Yarkottai. At a rough estimate, a couple of hundred people in Ekkaraiyur were employed by the state in one form or another.
Moreover, Ekkaraiyur was part of several state administrative and political structures. Administratively, the village belonged to Dindigul district,4 headed by a collector in Dindigul, and represented in Ekkaraiyur by a village administrative officer (VAO). The village was also part of a development block, which was a basic unit for a regional administration that had been set up to bring about rural change (Misra 1983: 292–96). A number of extension workers, led by two block development officers, were located at its headquarters in Velpatti. Politically, Ekkaraiyur formed part of two constituencies. It formed the major part of a constituency for the Legislative Assembly in Madras, and a lesser part of a constituency for the Lok Sabha. Moreover, some aspects of local self-government were entrusted to a village panchayat, which in turn was part of a panchayat union. The administrative and political structures were expected to reinforce each other. At the local level, for example, panchayat leaders were expected to co-ordinate their aims and activities with those of the development block.
Presenting Karuppuvan
Karuppuvan befriended me when I lived in Ekkaraiyur. We used to discuss politics in the evenings, sitting in a tea stall, in the Style King Tailors’ shop across the street from my home or on my front porch. Our discussions ranged from the personal and local, to the abstract and global.
Karuppuvan was in his late twenties. He was of small, almost puny build, and walked with a shuffling gait. At times, his grin seemed excessively sly. Karuppuvan was married and had one child, a son aged five, and the family lived in his father’s house, together with his brothers and their families.
Karuppuvan was a Kallar by caste. This is a fairly low-ranking caste by orthodox Tamil standards, even labelled as a ‘criminal caste’ by the British in their time, on account of the Kallars’ alleged inclination for robbery and freebooting (Dumont [1957] 1986: 26–30). Kallars, of various subcastes, were fairly numerous in the area. In Ekkaraiyur, most of them belonged to the Isanadu group, as did Karuppuvan, which indicated their historical origin in a region to the south of the Kaveri delta.
Karuppuvan belonged to an Ekkaraiyur family of small farmers. They owned a small amount of land, but had mostly been tenants to larger landowners. Karuppuvan, however, was no farmer. He had some secondary education and had worked as a clerk on hill estates and in various lawyers’ offices in nearby towns. In Ekkaraiyur, when I knew him, Karuppuvan had no specific occupation. He looked upon himself as being a local politician, acted as a broker and was considered by some young men as their leader.
Karuppuvan held no officially recognised political position in the village, but his ambition was to establish himself as an influential local leader. In Alm (2006), I argue that a new type of leader had emerged in Ekkaraiyur by the end of the 1980s. My argument primarily focuses on two elements in the drawn out and complex shift in local leadership. One is the dissolution of former relationships of interdependence within the village. Central to this was tenants’ forcible take over of land from landowners, the emergence of new types of tenancy agreements and contracts for labour recruitment. The other element is the increasing importance of the state and political parties as references for local leadership. In conjunction, these elements worked to undermine an earlier mode of leadership that was based on the control of land. Patronage characterised earlier as well as new types of local leaders, but the content of patronage seemed to me to be different. Instead of using access to land as a means for patronage, as the earlier type of leader did, the new type of leader strove to harness various statedistributed resources for patronage. In agreement with Mitra’s study of leaders in Gujarat and Orissa (1992), and with AndrĂ© BĂ©teille’s study of a Tanjore village (1971), I characterise the new local leadership as a more open, fluid and socially heterogeneous category than it had been earlier. In Ekkaraiyur that meant that leaders were neither necessarily large landowners nor of high caste as village leaders of earlier days often appear to have been. To this can be added that some of them were quite young.
Karuppuvan fitted this category well, except that he can be described as an aspiring local leader, rather than an established one.
Perumal, Karuppuvan’s Patron
In Alm (2006) I note that leaders in Ekkaraiyur operated in a context of competition and alliances. Competing with each other in influence over local followers, a successful leader required contacts with the administration and alliances with more powerful leaders, resulting in hierarchical networks in which positions of patrons and clients are occupied at various levels. These networks have been alternatively described with the related concepts of ‘machine style politics’ (de Witt 1993) and ‘the institutional big-man’ (Mines and Gourishankar 1990).
Being part of one such hierarchical network, Karuppuvan considered himself the follower of Perumal. Perumal was at the time a member of the Legislative Assembly in Madras for the Ekkaraiyur constituency (Perumal was popularly known as the ‘MLA’ in Ekkaraiyur). In his mid-thirties, Perumal was not so much older than Karuppuvan, and he was a member of the DMK party, as was Karuppuvan.
Perumal was elected MLA in the state elections of 1989. His election, as well as DMK’s overall victory in Tamil Nadu, was helped along the way by the fact that the ADMK party,5 the principal antagonist of the DMK, had by then split into three different parties. Bitter infighting between them prevented many of the ADMK candidates from being serious contenders in the state elections.
Karuppuvan had been active in Perumal’s election campaign. His activities ranged widely, including speaking at public functions, decorating the walls of the houses with party tags and emblems, organising manifestations, canvassing support, and, most important, keeping an eye on other candidates’ electioneering in order to come up with suitable counter-measures. This could include preventing opponents from buying votes, or upholding the schedule for public broadcasting as laid down by the police. Alternatively, it could mean organising the buying of votes on behalf of Perumal, or subverting the opponents’ use of their allotted time-slots for broadcasting.
Karuppuvan claimed a very close relationship to the newly elected MLA. He also claimed that their relationship had been close even before Perumal’s election. Thus, Karuppuvan occasionally referred to himself in public as ‘Perumal’s local secretary’, although he held no such position. He also made a point of the fact that he was always invited courteously into the MLA’s home in a nearby town, while other people from Ekkaraiyur had to wait outside until they were received. Karuppuvan not only visited Perumal regularly at home, he also frequently accompanied Perumal on local tours, as well as on trips to Madras on party business, as when, for example, they went to Madras to celebrate the birthday of the chief minister. Moreover, Perumal was married to a woman from Ekkaraiyur to whom Karuppuvan was related. Karuppuvan therefore claimed bonds of kinship with Perumal.
The importance of Karuppuvan’s relationship with Perumal was illustrated when the manager of the local branch office of Canara Bank came to look for Karuppuvan at the Style King Tailors’ shop, where we were sitting one evening. The manager had a favour to ask. He confided in Karuppuvan that the bank was having trouble fulfilling its target for savings (a fact that Karuppuvan already knew). Stressing the possible negative consequences of this for the viability of the branch office in Ekkaraiyur, he asked if Karuppuvan could arrange for new deposits to be made. It was not mentioned that a target failure could negatively affect the bank manager’s own professional career, but this was well understood. He suggested that Karuppuvan could solicit a deposit from Perumal. Although he had no great love for the bank manager, Karuppuvan promised to do his best.
Karuppuvan’s best was good enough for the bank manager. Some time afterwards Karuppuvan told me that he had managed to arranged for a very large sum of money to be deposited as ‘savings’ in the bank. According to Karuppuvan, he convinced Perumal together with another DMK party-man to make up the sum. Perumal’s share was Rs 200,000, and the money was transferred from other bank accounts to the Ekkaraiyur branch office, which in this way achieved its target.
There were several motives behind Karuppuvan’s readiness to help, despite his distrust of the bank manager. First, he was flattered by being approached by the bank manager. The request was in fact a confirmation of Karuppuvan’s local importance. It singled out Karuppuvan as a person with access to influence and resources through his relationship with Perumal. Second, Karuppuvan was motivated by a desire to put the bank manager in his debt. Having done the bank manager a favour, he could expect to be repaid in some way, Karuppuvan reasoned. The repayment Karuppuvan had in mind concerned a loan the bank had refused. It was a convoluted story, about which I only knew what Karuppuvan choose to tell me. The gist was, however, that Karuppuvan had made a proposal to a government agency to start a soap factory in Ekkaraiyur. The agency had agreed and consequently recommended Karuppuvan to the bank in Ekkaraiyur for a loan of Rs 35,000. The bank manager, however, had refused to lend the money, arguing that the soap factory would be an assured loss.
Karuppuvan had already unsuccessfully tried ways to overcome the bank manager’s reluctance. Through a friend, who was friendly with an employee of the bank, he had offered the manager a bribe of Rs 3,000. When the bribe was refused, he petitioned the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, at the time Mr Karunanidhi of the DMK party, to intervene with both the agency that had recommended the loan and bank that had refused it. The petition was forwarded to the chief minister by Perumal when he and Karuppuvan were in Madras to celebrate the chief minister’s birthday.
At the time when the bank manager asked Karuppuvan to arrange for deposits in the bank, Karuppuvan had not yet seen any effects of the petition. However, now having done the bank manager a favour, things could work out anyhow, Karuppuvan told me. Without having explicitly been promised so, he expected the bank manager to repay his debt by approving the loan. Moreover, Karuppuvan told me that from now on he expected that the bank manager would favour people Karuppuvan himself recommended for loans.
Karuppuvan’s F...

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