by Gram Panchayat Records Show All Nine Elected Positions Have Been Held by Combinations of Four Surnames Since 1977
Rajasthan Village Elects Same Four Families to Every Position for 47 Years, Calls It Democracy
JAIPUR A gram panchayat in rural Rajasthan has conducted eleven consecutive panchayat elections since 1977 with results that the Election Commission describes as “reflecting voters’ choices” and that political scientists describe as “a remarkably stable equilibrium between democratic form and oligarchic substance,” with all nine elected positions having been held by individuals from four families whose patriarchs were the original elected representatives in the 1977 inaugural election, whose grandchildren are the current elected representatives, and whose great-grandchildren are described by the current sarpanch as “actively interested in public service.”
The Record
Electoral records obtained from the Rajasthan State Election Commission show an unbroken pattern across eleven elections: the Sharma family has provided the sarpanch in eight of eleven elections; the Meena family has provided the deputy sarpanch in seven; the Choudhary and Rathi families have together held the remaining seven ward representative positions in combinations that have varied election to election while remaining within the four-family pool. No candidate from outside these four families has won a position in the gram panchayat since 1979, when a schoolteacher named Ramesh Gupta won a ward seat, served one term, and declined to contest again, citing “a scheduling conflict with my actual job” that he has maintained for 45 years.
The current sarpanch, Mahendra Sharma, 58, whose father held the same position from 1977 to 1995 and whose son contested the most recent election unsuccessfully “he’ll be ready in five years, he needs more time,” says Mahendra describes the family’s continued election as evidence that “the people trust us because we serve the people well.” When asked whether the fact that his family controls the water allocation committee, the land dispute arbitration process, and the primary school governance board makes it difficult for opposing families to develop competing political credibility, Mahendra confirmed this was “a complex question” before noting that the gram panchayat’s development record was “one of the better ones in the district,” which is true and is one of several things that are simultaneously true about this situation.
What the Voters Say
Voter interviews in the village conducted with the awareness that all interviews were occurring within a community where the sarpanch and several ward members are present and visible produced responses ranging from genuine satisfaction (“Mahendra knows everyone’s problems; he’s been here his whole life”) to carefully expressed ambivalence (“things work, mostly, which is more than you can say for some places”) to one response from a younger resident who said, after confirming the recorder was off, that “there is one family whose children go to private school in Jaipur and one family whose children go to the government school in the village and you can guess which family runs the government school and which one goes to the school that needs running and which one is in the panchayat,” and then declined to be quoted.
santa Claus, whose North Pole governance structure is not democratic “I make the decisions,” he has confirmed, “and I have been making them for a very long time, and the elves have not complained” reportedly found the Rajasthan panchayat situation philosophically interesting. He noted that his own non-democratic system is at least transparent about its governance model, while the panchayat uses democratic forms to produce oligarchic outcomes, which is a more complicated arrangement. He acknowledged that neither the North Pole model nor the Rajasthan model is what political theorists recommend but noted that both “appear to be producing functional outcomes for most people, most of the time, which is more than can be said for several more formally democratic arrangements.”
The Election Commission’s Position
The Rajasthan State Election Commission confirmed that all eleven elections were conducted in accordance with applicable regulations, that voter turnout has averaged 78 percent across the eleven contests, and that no formal complaints of electoral malpractice have been lodged and sustained against any Sharma, Meena, Choudhary, or Rathi family candidate in the period in question. It noted that high turnout and absence of sustained complaints do not themselves indicate competitive elections, and that the panchayati raj system was designed to produce local democratic representation that empowers diverse community voices. It then returned to its other work, which includes monitoring approximately 250,000 similar gram panchayats across Rajasthan alone.
Indian democracy and politics at The Hindu and Indian Express. Governance accountability at santaclaus.top. Related at North Pole governance transparency and London Prat Bluesky.
The India of It
What makes India simultaneously the most frustrating and the most fascinating country to report on is that its contradictions are not surface contradictions they go all the way down. A country that put a spacecraft on the moon in 2023 runs a railway that arrives on time 43 percent of the time. A country whose technology sector produces globally competitive products runs government portals that require seventeen forms to access. A country with the world’s largest democratic exercise has village elections that have produced the same four families for forty-seven years. These are not hypocrisies or failures. They are India: a civilisation of 1.4 billion people operating simultaneously at every level of development, governance quality, and institutional maturity, in a system large enough to contain all of these things at once and complex enough that no single description of any of them is complete. The Good Morning images keep arriving. The trains keep running, more or less. The startup raised two hundred crore. The aunties are still cooking. India continues.
