Political Pressures and Bureaucratic Consequences: Vignettes of Janmabhoomi Implementation in Andhra Pradesh
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023017698254 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Political Pressures and Bureaucratic
Consequences: Vignettes of
Janmabhoomi Implementation in
Andhra Pradesh
Kiran Konkipudi1
Suraj Jacob2
Abstract
Drawing on vignettes from fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, the article explores how political pressures
shape bureaucratic practices around the government’s flagship Janmabhoomi programme. It argues
that competitive state politics manifests in clientelist–populist voter mobilization leading to two-level
political pressures—state politicians pressure higher bureaucracy which in turn pressures the lower
bureaucracy tasked with implementation, and local politicians allied with the governing party put direct
pressures on lower bureaucracy for favouritism. Lower level bureaucrats cope with these impossible
pressures by subverting official procedures, so that actual practices hardly match the rational Weberian
construction in official documents. The article’s contribution lies in linking the ‘political game’ and the
‘bureaucratic game’ in a grounded empirical context.
Keywords
Andhra politics, Janmabhoomi, clientelism, populism, street-level bureaucracy
In recent years, the sites of policy implementation in India have produced nuanced empirical work as well
as theorizing—for instance, Gupta (2012) from the perspective of anthropology of the state and Aiyar
and Bhattacharya (2016) from the perspective of street-level bureaucracy. However, scholars of politics
and public administration have long pointed out that bureaucratic practices and policy implementation
are inherently political and need to be located within larger frameworks of politics and political economy,
of power and the state. As Abrams (1988 [1977], p. 63) famously noted, ‘there is a hidden reality of
politics, a backstage institutionalisation of political power behind the onstage agencies of government;
that power effectively resists discovery; and that it may plausibly be identied as “the state”’. Building
on this tradition, we present vignettes of internal decision-making in the district and mandal revenue
bureaucracy of Andhra Pradesh state and locate these vignettes within a larger narrative of power, politics
1 Independent Researcher, Delhi, India.
2 Mukhya Sanchalak, Vidya Bhawan, Udaipur, India and Visiting Faculty, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India.
Corresponding author:
Suraj Jacob, Vidya Bhawan Society, Mohan Sinha Mehta Marg, Udaipur – 313001, India.
E-mail: suraj.jacob@gmail.com
Studies in Indian Politics
5(1) 1–17
© 2017 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023017698254
http://inp.sagepub.com
2 Studies in Indian Politics 5(1)
and administration. In doing so, we hope to throw more light on the working of administrative processes
and their imbrication in political processes.
Our vignettes show the enormous pressures that lower bureaucrats face in the context of policy
implementation. We argue that such pressures emanate from the logic of electoral politics, enveloping
state-level and local-level politicians. Figure 1 presents a preview of the argument. In the competitive
politics that Andhra Pradesh has experienced for the last quarter-century, the governing party (Telugu
Desam Party, TDP) uses a mix of populism and clientelism for electoral mobilization. An important
instrument for this is its agship programme, Janmabhoomi, a broad platform of development activities
with a clear political character. The electoral imperative for the governing party, manifested as clien-
telist–populist voter linkage, generates two sets of pressures on administration. One is top-level political
pressure from state-level leaders and particularly the Chief Minister, applied to higher level bureaucrats
to deliver on politically sensitive programmes, such as Janmabhoomi. This pressure is then passed on by
them to those who actually implement these programmes, the lower bureaucracy. Simultaneously, local
leaders allied with the governing party apply pressure directly on the lower bureaucracy; their ability to
do so is derived from the same clientelist–populist electoral logic. The lower bureaucracy, burdened by
these two simultaneous pressures—from higher level bureaucrats and local politicians—is placed in a
tight, even impossible, situation. These dual pressures shape implementation possibilities, so that actual
bureaucratic practices are a far cry from idealized Weberian procedures. Several components of this argu-
ment are familiar in the literature. For instance, studying irrigation in Karnataka’s Tungabhadra project,
Mollinga (2003, Chapter 10) traces how richer farmers pressure local Irrigation Department bureaucrats
directly as well as using their roles in clientelist networks with politicians to pressure them indirectly.
Our contribution is in making the connections—from electoral imperative to clientelist–populist voter
linkages to two-level political pressures on administration, leading to subversion of internal bureaucratic
decision-making—explicit in a grounded empirical context.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. The next section surveys related literature on the
state, bureaucracy and politics, followed by a section introducing Andhra politics and the Janmabhoomi
programme. We then present eld vignettes of relations between higher level and lower bureaucracy,
which show the pressures borne by the latter. The following three sections construct an explanation for
Figure 1. Overview of Argument
Source: Authors’ observations.
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