Book Spotlight: MR Sharan | Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar’s Villages

The book is called Last Among Equals, Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar's Villages. The book tells the story of decentralization and local governance in Bihar through the narrative arc of one central character, Sanjay Sahni, who is an anti-corruption activist who started off on the streets of Delhi as an electrician and by complete chance discovers corruption in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. It's a welfare program, and decides to return to his village and mobilize people and fight corruption and so through the arc of him returning to the village, mobilizing women, I kind of try and tell the story, the larger story of decentralization in Bihar.

Motivation for the book

So actually the book came out of my pre-PhD and PhD work. I did a PhD at the Harvard Kennedy School and a lot of my work was on Bihar. I had met Sanjay Sahni, the activist I just spoke of, on a train pretty randomly when I was a research associate working on a project in Patna before the PhD and we got chatting and he convinced me to show up in his village and once I went to the village and I saw all these amazing women, mainly women, who are all kind of low-caste workers who he had mobilized to collectively come together and get the local state to bend, I was completely taken in and I have been working with him and with the organization for a long while now.

When I was doing the fieldwork, I used to kind of send emails to family and friends and I realized that what I was describing was basically something that people had not really seen and especially people outside the development economics field research circles, they found all of this completely novel and I realized that I always had a story. So whenever I went to the field, even during the PhD, I took elaborate field notes and as some of you may know, the PhD in economics does not really allow you a much leeway to tell stories and so all the stories that could not go into econ papers made it into the book and that is the book. 

Themes explored

You can think of the book as ways of documenting how to reduce the concentration in power and the gap between the state and the citizens. Now the book basically documents five ways. One is what I just started talking to you about which is the anti-corruption activism which is completely bottom-up, hundreds and thousands of women and men from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds coming together to collectively get more power at the local levels. But then I also talk about some of these other things through the book.

One is to kind of have reservations and panchayats for schedule caste, schedule tribes and women. Another way is kind of devolving funds to panchayats, state level funds and national level funds but also within panchayats there are these characters called ward members in Bihar. Each ward is really tiny.

It is about 250 households and each ward has an elected representative. Remember this is Bihar. So 250 households is like a stone's throw and all 250 households are within that one stone's throw radius. And so these very local representatives, I talk about them, their incentives, how the power was devolved to them. So that is another way in which you can kind of devolve power. The other way that I talk about is towards the end of the book I talk about Sanjay Sahni's own election campaign.

He contests as an independent. It is a failed election campaign and to many observers it was doomed from the start but here was this kind of person who had spent almost a decade working for his people, decided to contest as an MLA. But that is another way you can kind of distribute power. So the book basically tries and talks about how do you reduce concentration and power and so those are the broad themes. 

Misconceptions challenged

There are several misconceptions. I think the first thing that comes to my mind almost immediately is that people in agriculture or casual labor or women without resources are beneficiary subjects who are kind of dormant and do not have or are incapable of exercising voice. That entire narrative arc is completely untrue. Things do not happen to them. They live very rich lives.

They are extraordinary humans and one of the people I really enjoy both writing about other than Sanjay Sahni in the book is a woman called Mandeshri Devi who is a 60 year old low caste woman who chanced upon Sanjay Sahni because he was walking around in the village with a loudspeaker and a bunch of papers and she is very much now a leader in the movement herself and anyone who has met her will say she is just as smart as you or me or anybody who is a scientist or an economist or a politician and you know the big misconception I really want to kind of tell you is that the distance between us and them is just one of opportunity and with time we can actually all kind of come together and build something big.  

Why the book matters today

I think it matters a lot especially in today's context because if you have been reading the economic news over the last few years or so one of the things that people talk about frequently post the pandemic is a K-shaped recovery or K-shaped growth which means that the top 10% are seeing tremendous rise in incomes, the stock market is booming, maybe there is a correction coming we do not know but for the vast majority of Indians life continues to be a struggle. People have to learn to make ends meet and they are not doing that, not learn to make ends meet but people have to be allowed to make ends meet and they are not doing that and so this book is chronicling the lives of the other 90% or at least the bottom of that 90% and is telling you both that there is a lot of state based apathy that results in who they are but there is also a lot of joy and hope and solidarity even at those levels and people lead extraordinarily rich lives and it is useful to kind of both partake in the reading of the book allows you to kind of get a glimpse into what it is to be human at some level and I think that is one of the big reasons to read the book.

Takeaways for readers

The reader's takeaway I guess is there is no one single takeaway if I can put it that way there are three or four if I had to come look at it from a pure policy perspective I would say one big takeaway is you need to decentralize power as much as possible. The more power is concentrated amongst the people the better it is so this is not just voting but even local leaders, local elected representatives right now a lot of them spend a lot of time basically traveling to the district or the block headquarters or talking to the MLAs and the MPs trying to get funds, functions, functionaries being allocated to their villages and this concentration of power actually is not a good thing and that is one thing that I really want readers to take away. I also want readers to take away the fact that even in the darkest of times people can find hope and joy and laughter and finally I also want people to take away the fact that one way of really genuinely bringing about change whether it is pollution in Delhi or any other societal problems we have is for people to come together and take a stand and confront entrenched power structures and I hope that the book kind of tells you that the possibilities of doing something like that even though Sanjay Sahni's own election campaign ends in a loss it still tells you that you have to try and the more you try the further you will go.