The Mechanism Of Panchayati Raj Of Democratic India And The Mechanism Of Villagers’ Committees Of Socialist China: A Comparative View
Kant Kumar, Assistant Professor (Contractual), Department of Foreign Languages, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, U.P., India
ABSTRACT
The institutionalisation of panchayat raj mechanism in India and villagers’ committee mechanism in China has added greater momentum to the decentralisation process. In India, the Panchayat raj mechanism has extended the democratic process at local village level. In China, Villagers’ committee mechanism is considered a pioneer in implementation and application of democratic process. It is the only governance mechanism in china, in which people are directly involved in selection/election of leaders at local level. The Institution of ‘Panchayati Raj’ and ‘Villagers’ Committee’ are the grass-root level governance mechanisms of India and China respectively. The policies implementation at local level are strikingly different in these two countries, due to different socio-political arrangements in general. India’s village level government mechanism is highly influenced with liberal policies of democracy and it has been designed to enforce liberal form of democracy at grassroots level, while China’s village level governance mechanism is designed to reinforce the communist party influenced mechanism of ruling, in which party cadres are prioritised and sometime party cadres are implanted as a candidate in village level election with a purpose to consolidate the party power and maintain the one-party nature of the State.
This article extensively argues about the political arrangements and mechanism of India and China to better understand the village level governance mechanism of two politically contrasting counties.
Keywords: Panchayati Raj, Villagers’ Committee, China’s local governance, Panchayat, India’s Local governance
