Grass Roots Politics and 'Second Wave of Decentralisation' in Andhra Pradesh

This article considers the impact of multiple channels of village level participation from the perspective of the macro political motives and micro political dynamics. Recent fieldwork from Andhra Pradesh shows that party politics plays an important role in elections to local bodies and that a subset of rural voters, that the author calls the 'political stratum', is emerging. The article goes on to consider the importance of newly created political party structures in the state, and their role in establishing de facto horizontal and vertical linkages that have to date been insufficiently accounted for in studies of the matrix of grass roots development associations.