Disband the DDCs

Apart from the constitutional downgrade and legislative disempowerment, the functional outreach of the J&K legislature has also been circumscribed by the creation of a new and unique layer of people’s representatives; the District Development Councils (DDCs) elected on universal adult suffrage.

The direct elections to the DDCs are violative of the spirit of the institutional structure of Indian parliamentary democracy wherein citizens directly elect representatives to only three tiers of governance provided for in the Constitution – Parliament, Legislative Assemblies and the Panchayats/ULBs.

The DDCs are not even statutory bodies, having been created by amending the J&K Panchayati Raj Act, 1989 through an executive fiat. Yet now being a directly elected body, as an institution, these collectively lower the sanctity and impede the efficacy of the legislative assembly.

The first elections to the DDCs were conducted by the State Election Commission in 2020 over eight phases to directly elect fourteen members from the territorial constituencies in a district. With the legislative assembly now in place, the MLAs whose constituencies lie within the district become ex-officio members of the DDC. So will the Chairpersons of all the Block Development Councils of the district. All members have equal voting rights, so an MLA is treated at par with the Member of the DDC or perhaps the other way around. In key matters, like the approval of the capex plan, the MLA doesn’t even have a say. This itself sets the stage for an antagonistic relationship between the elected representatives.

No wonder when Omar Abdullah chaired a developmental review of Ganderbal district, the Chairman of the DDC boycotted the meeting. The bureaucracy, with one-too-many masters, is also playing truant. In Jammu the absence of officers led the Chairman and Members of the DDCs not conducting their own meeting.

The implications go beyond administrative disorder. By directly electing members each to twenty DDCs, the existing architecture of legislative democracy in J&K has effectively been redesigned. The DDCs are now virtually “district assemblies” which are neither provided for in the Constitution of India nor is the direct mode of election stipulated. Yet the DDC have been put atop the third tier of governance.

Prior to constituting the DDCs in 2020, in 2019, the District Development Boards in all the districts were abolished and Block Development Councils and District Planning and Development Boards constituted in all the blocks and districts under the provisions of J&K Panchayati Raj Act, l989. These bodies, which exist across the country, are developmental in their role, functions and finances. These can be considered as the apex body for developmental administration in a district. In other states too, the members to district boards are elected by a council of sarpanches representing the panchayats. This indirect election of district board members by the sarpanches, provides the only institutionalised link and authority between the democratic decentralisation and developmental administration. But this critical link has now been bypassed in the new framework in J&K.

Instead, the DDCs add a governance layer, if not a quasi-legislative one. The direct elections to the DDC are problematic for a variety of reasons.  First, it violates a basic tenet of democracy, that of, “one person one vote”. The cardinal principle of delimiting the parliamentary or legislative constituencies is that anyone living in any part of the country will have the same weightage in electing representatives. Even in the case of panchayats, the area is divided in such manner that the ratio between the population of each panchayat constituency and the number of seats allotted to is the same to the extent practicable.

On the contrary, no matter, how large or small a district is in terms of its geography or demography, it has the same number of elected representatives in the DDC. So, for instance, with a population over 12 lakhs, Srinagar district has 14 representatives, so does Kishtwar with a population of less than 2.5 lakhs. In terms of area, nearly 9,000 sq kms of Doda and barely 250 sq kms of Ganderbal are at par. Nowhere in the country is there such a wide variation in the per capita representative power.

Second, the direct elections to the DDC undermine the primacy of the sub-national legislative assembly (UT at present or state in future) as the representative of the people. To the extent that it does so, these elected DDC s will disempower the core of the second tier of the federal system. Every state in India, and indeed every subnational government in the world, has a constitutional position, a legislative competence, a developmental role and an administrative authority. In Kashmir, the distinctions are fast losing their meaning.

Sitting in the crosshairs of bureaucratic decentralization and democratic decentralization, the DDC can find it easy to jettison any initiatives that have legislative approval. It will also accentuate the geographical divide within J&K. The situation will be chaotic if not anarchic.

Backed by the democratic authority of having been elected directly by the people, the DDCs, individually and collectively, have the potential to become an institution parallel to the state assembly. It should not be difficult to see how these twenty “district assemblies” with 280 bush-league MLAs, will provide the institutional structure to nullify or negate the state assembly on key political issues, as also the development strategy. It is a system that has been designed to undermine the legislative assembly of the state.

Also, there is an obvious realpolitik purpose which the formation of directly elected DDCs will serve. This new system, given its positioning and powers, will over time change the political discourse, from special status restoration and even statehood towards local developmental issues and quotidian matters. In other words, manageable demands.

From a federal perspective, which hinges upon the balance of powers levels of governance, a framework of disempowerment is being created in the garb of decentralisation. At another level, by centralisation of the regulatory control, the states/UTs are being squeezed from the top.  The second layers of governance is thus in a pincer; the Union squeezing it from the top and local bodies nibbling at their heels.

Far from being proto-democratic bodies which will strengthen the grassroots democracy, it is atomisation of electoral-representative democracy. This new system will cut both into development and its delivery by the local self-government whose remit and mandate has been compromised.

Taking a bird’s eye view, the superimposition of another governance layer is blurring the lines between democratic decentralisation and administrative decentralisation. This will make the system and its structure so complex, with its unending criss-crossed layers and layers of administrative demarcations, that no one will be unable to deliver development even with the best of intentions.