Lokniti Participation Local Governance

LOKNITI – “Lok Niti” and “Raj Niti” are terms coined from the Sanskrit by Mahatma Gandhi. Lok Niti signifies people’s politics, the people in command and direct governance by the sovereign people, as opposed to Raj Niti, the politics of the nation state or indirect rule by a centralized government leadership based on current “democratic” forms of party and representative political institutions. The concept of Lok Niti was the political basis of Gandhi’s socio-economic “Constructive Programme,” which is now known in India as Sarvodaya. An increasing number of us who are associated with the Asian NGO Coalition (ANGOC) feel that we have begun to find our bearings in the tangled terrain of “development” through commitment to the “gentle anarchism” of Mahatma Gandhi – a body of principles for both personal and social transformation through work in support of decentralized, village community oriented, rural development, guided by the ideals of satyagraha and non-violence and harmonization with both nature and tradition. Lok Niti as the journal of the Asian NGO Coalition is a very tentative beginning in the Asian NGO network.