The Nastiest Elections In India: Not The Parliament Or Assembly, But Panchayat Polls

Unlike previous seasons, Panchayat’s season 4 did not have a huge build-up to it. But like previous seasons, this one too contained all the ingredients that add to the show's appeal.

Arguably the best thing about Panchayat is that unlike other Indian series based in a rural setting, Panchayat doesn't indulge in poverty porn or let ugliness suck out its soul.

Instead, the series revolves around the bittersweet humour and lives of largely believable characters, village-level cooperation, and some bureaucratic compromises.

It offered a wonderful sneak-peek into how India—that is Bharat—looks like from a perspective of unthreatening realism. It showed village life from a peripheral lens of an urban middle class—a class more often than not missing its ‘sweet village life’ of childhood while shopping for polished groceries in a supermarket.

But this changes in season 4 of the show.

Season 4 and the Raw Underbelly of Rural Power

The same class of people also remember—but don’t always recall—what the dangerous side of that Bharat looks like. That side is filled with petty fights, scandals, innuendoes, defaming neighbours, and murky and ego-driven conflicts.

These conflicts remain in hibernation for weeks, months, years, and sometimes decades, waiting for an opportune moment.

More often than not, it is the local election that gives the stakeholders the opportunity to take revenge. This dynamic is captured well in a previous season of Panchayat, when the character of Banrakas or Bhushan warns the Sachiv and Pradhan about the impending elections.

In the heartlands of the Indian media spectrum, there is a famous saying: “Commenting on the Prime Minister is the safest; speaking about the Chief Minister carries some risk; criticising an MLA can be dangerous; but writing about the village head is almost equivalent to suicide.”

Season 4 of Panchayat will indeed be remembered for depicting the ugliness and acrimony of panchayat-level elections in a relatable manner.

If one has to understand what panchayat-level politics looks like, there is no better tool than to judge it by the availability of avenues for freedom of expression.

This writer spoke to reporters and YouTubers working in rural areas for their views. One of them, based in Bihar, had this to say about why they had to be careful before highlighting an issue in a village close to its panchayat elections: “We have offers from prospective rival candidates to highlight the poor infrastructure in villages and earn lakhs. The offer is lucrative, but on the other hand, the incumbent has both money and muscle at his disposal".

“The only respite we have is when the Mukhiya is quite decent—say, someone who left his decent government or private job to come and serve the village. These people are generally not as dangerous".

On threats to reporters from challengers to the incumbent he said: "The actual danger comes from those who have lived in the village and gradually built their aura in local circles and now want to become Mukhiya (village heads),” he added.

In villages, these heads are not just titular figures, but by virtue of sheer local authority, they have powers ranging from stopping government water coming to their inimical neighbour’s home to subtly blacklisting a famous local contractor if he doesn’t provide enough donation to his campaigns.

This ecosystem of power contains a whirlwind of emotions, caste rivalry, local enmity, feudalistic control, and not to forget, an opportunity to set oneself up for MLA elections in future.

A Game of Revenge and Reputation

A closer look at Panchayat elections reveals some aspects common across time and large parts of the country.

Firstly, policy issues are good only on election parchas. The usual trope of roads, schools, and hospitals is present on each candidate’s pamphlet, which are eventually torn down by rival party members and vice versa.

Secondly, the role of ideology is less relevant here, which is actually appreciable looking at the way student elections have turned out in big universities.

But there is one aspect on which Panchayat elections trump even the ones for state Assemblies and Parliament. Hostility between rival camps.

For residents of the village, the stakes are highest in the Panchayat election. Losing isn’t just defeat—it’s social death.

And this is what makes the nastiness of Panchayat elections so much more intolerable than parliamentary or assembly polls. The avenues for socially moving on from it are almost absent. In many cases, incumbent village heads who lose choose to settle in cities—avoiding the stigma.

Candidates who fought hard but lost in state or national elections still have options like working their way up from party offices, launching think tanks to advance their ideology, or awaiting nominations to the Legislative Council or Rajya Sabha for another shot at power.

When an MLA loses his elections, he still has backup in the name of party networks, local press, and the distance, literal and metaphorical, that he enjoys from hundreds of villages and thousands of voters in his own constituency.

On the contrary, in Panchayat politics, a political afterlife is rare and is often an unintended byproduct of life choices made over the next five years after an electoral defeat.

A losing Pradhan becomes almost irrelevant overnight. The children wishing him “pranam chacha” stop doing so the next morning. He no longer gets the most comfortable chair of the house by neighbours. The central position at the roundtable during evening meetings near the village temple or market is no longer available. The affluent social circle created over the last half-decade suddenly disappears in favour of the rival candidate. The income source suddenly disappears, forcing lifestyle changes in the family.

When a Mukhiya loses, he stands a good chance of losing influence, access to the police thana, and even faces threats of economic and personal security. This is not hyperbole. The Bihar government recently authorised arms licences for Mukhiyas, acknowledging that the threat to their lives is real and systemic.

In the case of village heads, the shame of loss is carried for years, more so, because of how proximate the voter is. Unlike MP and MLA elections, voters are not totally strangers—instead they are one’s neighbours, cousins, friends, nephews and nieces. In this close world, revenge is not just a possibility—it is a plan.

This is the consequence of the sheer locality of elections.

Gossip and slander, smoke and mirrors

It is in this limited universe where everyone knows everyone else that gossip becomes a serious tool of politics. Information is deliberately planted and there is no social pressure or moral quandary for anyone. Panchayat’s latest season shows how such gossip ultimately leads to violence—both physical and emotional.

The show treats gossip not as background chit-chat, but as the main weapon. The TVF team has shown how lies travel faster than facts, silence is treated as complicity and guilt, and the reputations of even pregnant women are on a knife’s edge in a world where rivals wait for a strategic moment to seize an advantage in narrative.

Sticking to its realistic trope, the show does not introduce an outsider as a villain. Instead, it shows how a woman named Kranti Devi—who has all the reasons to be positive and thankful to the world—decides to engage in character assassination of a pregnant lady. Kranti Devi’s arc is local, intimate, and depressingly believable.

Interestingly, the show does not directly tell us that she is wrong. Instead, it is shown as a consequence of the desperate ambitions of Kranti Devi and her husband to replace the Pradhan of the village. Her moral arc unravels under the weight of her own anxieties.

The same holds true for her husband Bhushan or Banrakas. The man who did not think for a second before taking on the most powerful people in the village for a troublesome journey would bang his own head into the wall to neutralise the sympathy transfer towards his rival.

In the world of Bhushans, MLAs, Pradhans, and Sachivs—where the Station House Officer is de facto lower judiciary, FIRs are not legal instruments. Instead, the passionate and apt legal response against a violent act also becomes part of a wider game to control narrative and destroy status.

Such events unfold in real life in India's villages under little to no security, and little media spotlight.

The Quiet Brutality of Rural Politics

Panchayat elections in states like West Bengal, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have long been fraught with incidents of intimidation, booth capturing, fake voting, proxy voting, forceful voting, theft of ballot boxes, violence, and tragic loss of life.

The latest such memory is that of the 2023 Panchayat election violence in Mamata Banerjee-ruled West Bengal.

Violence began on 8 June and continued through voting on 9 July and the subsequent counting of votes, killing at least 48 and injuring more than 400 individuals over five bloody weeks.

The major chunk of these clashes came on the main polling day alone, when at least 19 people lost their lives and dozens were injured amid widespread reports of ballot box looting, bomb attacks, arson, and even ballot papers being set ablaze or dumped in water bodies.

Districts like Murshidabad, North Dinajpur, Cooch Behar, Malda, South 24 Parganas, Nadia, and East Burdwan reported major fatalities, with Murshidabad suffering the highest toll.

The expected response from the Election Commission of India was ordering detailed reports and mapping sensitive areas. These post-facto measures fell short of explaining how the deployment of 800 companies of central forces failed in its mandate.

Despite its gravity, this level of violence is normal for West Bengal—a state whose political convention demands that domination has to be absolute. The 2003 Panchayat elections are believed to be the bloodiest in its history, where 76 people lost their lives. Similarly, in the 2018 elections, 60,000 security personnel could not stop the death of 12 individuals.

The 2023 election, however, stood out for the duration, intensity, and sheer persistence of violence over five straight weeks in an era where technological sophistication could have avoided it.

In nearby Bihar, the situation has been similar. The state has faced a perpetual cycle of distrust and violence between 1970 and 2005, and it touched levels which others fail to replicate.

For instance, between 1990 and 2004, 641 people were killed in nine election cycles, out of which a staggering 196 persons succumbed during the 2001 Panchayat elections alone. The election was held after a 23-year hiatus. The 1978 Panchayat elections—precursor to the 2001 elections—saw 500 deaths.

Nearby Uttar Pradesh has faced similar violence at the hands of hooligans nourished by regional parties for their electoral gains. Even to this date, Panchayat elections in UP witness more than usual weapons sales, violent confrontations, and passion crimes.

The Emotional and Social Toll on the Village

The latest version of Phulera depicts these aspects, but lessens their intensity. The deadly fights between workers of both sides of the aisle are depicted through a credit-taking fight for cleaning toilets of the village school. Similarly, data theft has been depicted by Banrakas’ team having already deployed itself at a place where the sitting village head had announced his arrival through a Facebook post.

Treating envy as the key catalyst in village politics, the deputy Sachiv’s land purchase has been brilliantly depicted as a ticking bomb. He and his wife are termed dishonest, greedy, and manipulative by their rivals. Jealousy turns to suspicion, then to whisper campaigns, then to outright character assassination.

Other than bearing the unfortunate social consequence of Vikas’s land purchase, Prahlad, the deputy Pradhan, has another trauma to contend with and move ahead. On top of it, the grieving father of a national hero now 'hijacked' for his cause by the local parliamentarian. Prahlad’s trauma no longer has the dignity of being borne alone by a stoic father. He is now forced to advertise it to the world for the sake of the MP's advantage.

In Season 4, Phulera’s internal disputes have moved from quirky conflicts over marriage arrangements to revengeful confrontations. The sentiments of a father whose only son sacrificed himself for the nation are taken for a ride by a parliamentarian whose chutzpah knows no bounds.

The series depicts contenders’ race for freebies in a village where drainage and electricity still lie in tatters. It delves deep into constituency-level violence where settling scores takes precedence over the welfare of the village.

There is a famous Bhojpuri lyric, “Naukri na mile jawani mein, tah kud parab pradhani mein” (If I don’t get a job when I am young, I will contest local election).

On the face of it, the song is impractical. One may ask, why would becoming a Mukhiya, Pradhan or village head—with a bare minimum honorarium stipend—be an option for employment? The answer to such naivety is access to crores of funds and unfiltered power to engage in corruption.

At the current juncture, people are ready to sacrifice their government jobs, friends, familial bonds, moral etiquettes, and even the security of others for a five-year shot at one such post. Such is the return on investment that virtually nothing matters in front of it.

The beauty of Season 4 of Panchayat lies in the fact that the makers have well represented how violence takes root in an intimate culture. It takes time, but when it finally unleashes, the ‘animal’ part of a social animal takes over the social aspects.