Village Democracy, Mendha Style

A nondescript Maria Gond village in Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district can offer a lesson to urbanites on how to run a functioning democracy

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MAVA NATE Mava Raj” (our government in our village) is the slogan Sarvodaya workers raised at a 1988 meeting in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district, to educate people about village democracy. After the slogan-shouting, an old, “illiterate” Maria Gond adivasi, clad in a loin-cloth, stunned the Sarvodaya workers by asking, “You people say that in our villages, it is our government. Then whose governments are the ones in Delhi and Bombay?” The workers had no answer and the old man then told them, “The governments in Delhi and Bombay are ours because we elect them. But in our villages, we do not have a government. We are the government.”